Time to Republish Dorastor

[soltakss]

1 hour ago, Agentorange said:

EDIT I really haven't got to grips with the multi quote function have I ?

No, you haven't! 😃

I don't use Multi-Quote , for that very reason.

What I do instead is to simply select the text that I want to quote and the site gives me a helpful little Quote Selection box that I can click to quote.

That then makes a little quote of the selected text.

 

1 hour ago, Agentorange said:

At risk of being exiled to garrison duty in Dorastor, I've never understood that decision - going by the number of requests and comments both here and at DTRPG it's clear that many people love a print version of a product, surely if there's a market there and you can turn a profit why not go for it ?

The Community Content programmes are PDF because they generally sell poorly and POD is an expensive thing to do. So, expensive process with poor sales means it is not worth doing for most titles.

1 hour ago, Agentorange said:

I certainly wasn't expecting a free copy of the PDF and to be honest I don't think anybody should expect to get such a thing, , but a sort of combo deal where you get a SLIGHT discount for buying both ( but still allowing the author to turn a coin ) might encourage people to open their wallets a bit more. After all Chaosium themselves offer combo deals on some of their products at DTRPG.....

Some people have asked me whether their PDF will be discounted from the POD price when it comes out, so they fully expect the Clicks and Mortar principle of the PDF being bundled with the POD book for free. They will be disappointed.

 

[Bill the barbarian]

1 hour ago, Agentorange said:

The deciding factor for me was that there was a POD product for each of these. I've gone straight PDF for some of my shorter purchases: Monster of the month, Petty Spirits etc etc

Hope you enjoyed those!

[GMKen]

I’m one of those print-only bad guys.  So far from DriveThruRPG I’ve picked up:

-Duel at Dangerford

-Legion

-Sandheart: Tales of the Sun County Militia

-Sandheart: The Corn Dolls

-Sandheart: Traditions

-Six Seasons in Sartar

-Treasures of Glorantha Vol. 1: Dragon Pass

-Valley of Plenty

and The Last Barrow.  Waiting for Book of Doom next.

I’ve also picked up a number of titles from lulu and Chaosium’s own PoD.  It’s what got me ambitious to put together my own title to add to the collection.  My initial assumption is to publish through Jonstown Compendium at DriveThruRPG, however my end goal is a PoD version, and I’m putting it together with that in mind.  Reading through posts on this forum, though, it kind of sounds like the whole process is walking on eggshells, and the PoD could go away at any time.  Given that my intent is PoD that is a less than ideal risk.  Maybe then I should just go straight to lulu?  Also less than ideal, but I could probably start with the PoD option without having to wait for permission.

I get that some folks think PDFs are the future, but I really don’t value them as I’ve been working with computers long enough to not trust electrons.  I can take my PoDs down to the local bookstore and get a few bucks for them, but there is no aftermarket for PDFs, so I have to consider them as disposable.  Which, given the number of inaccessible hard drives from old computers in the drawer, they effectively are.

Sorry Aldryamiphiles, but I need my dead elf editions.

Edited May 30, 2021 by GMKen

[Agentorange]

40 minutes ago, soltakss said:

 

The Community Content programmes are PDF because they generally sell poorly and POD is an expensive thing to do. So, expensive process with poor sales means it is not worth doing for most titles.

 

 

I'm surprised they generally sell poorly, Overall I've been very impressed with the stuff I've bought, obviously from my subjective point of view some are better than others  but the general standard has in my opinion been pretty high.

[Agentorange]

17 minutes ago, GMKen said:

and The Last Barrow.  Waiting for Book of Doom next.

 

Sorry Aldryamiphiles, but I need my dead elf editions.

What did you reckon to The last Barrow ? the artwork looks lovely and I do like the look of the whole thing. What stuff did you buy from Lulu out of curiousity ?
 

I do think PDF's have their place, for me they excel in the shorter pieces or publications - the sort of thing where it's just not economically viable to do a print copy, yet the idea itself is a great one and deserves to be out there : Denarius the Minter, Blue Moon White Moon , Petty Spirits are all ( imo ) good examples of this 

[Oracle]

12 minutes ago, Agentorange said:

I'm surprised they generally sell poorly, Overall I've been very impressed with the stuff I've bought, obviously from my subjective point of view some are better than others  but the general standard has in my opinion been pretty high.

I think (pure guessing from my side 😉 ), generally sell poorly means published books in Community Content Programs - not just the Jonstown Compendium, but all the Community Content Programs available on DriveThruRPG - and as far as I know there are several of them.

I agree, that the quality of the published books in the Jonstown Compendium is very impressive. But that's the only Community Content Program, that I know. Even for Chaosium's other Community Content Program, The Miskatonic Repository, I have no idea, if the quality is as high as in the Jonstown Compendium, and if the number of sold book is in a similar range. Maybe we're just lucky to know one of the better Community Content Programs. Certainly the people from DriveThruRPG have a better idea, what's happening in the different Community Content Programs, and so I have to trust their evaluation.

[Lordabdul]

36 minutes ago, GMKen said:

I get that some folks think PDFs are the future

It's not that they're the future (which is a funny thing to say about a file format that has been around for 30 years). It's mostly that they're DTRPG's primary business. DTRPG could very well abandon POD in the future, or embrace it fully by automating their provisioning pipeline and offering POD automatically on all compatible titles, who knows.

The most important value of PDFs IMHO is completely unrelated to making books, to the ability to search stuff or make backup copies or whatever (even though these things are great!). Nah, it's the many cities and places where real-estate prices are going crazy, and where the the price storing a book can quickly exceed the price of the book itself. Not everybody is a 50+ year old guy living in a large house in the midwest and whose kids left to university, leaving 500+ sq ft worth of gaming space to fill with any random sourcebook. When all you have needs to fit in 3 Ikea Billy bookcases, you need to make choices and PDFs are a great way to alleviate that problem.

[Akhôrahil]

34 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

Nah, it's the many cities and places where real-estate prices are going crazy, and where the the price storing a book can quickly exceed the price of the book itself.

If I hadn’t moved to digital for most things almost a decade back, I would have had to find a larger place to live. 🙂

[Bill the barbarian]

43 minutes ago, lordabdul said:

Not everybody is a 50+ year old guy living in a large house in the midwest and whose kids left to university, leaving 500+ sq ft worth of gaming space to fill with any random sourcebook. When all you have needs to fit in 3 Ikea Billy bookcases, you need to make choices and PDFs are a great way to alleviate that problem.

You tell it lordabdul, I am a 50+ guy who has loved books for a loooooooong time. But I will only get a few books for RQ and then more than likely rely on pdfs for all of your reasons and one more. I have been an ecofreak as far back as I can recall so if I must slay Ardryami I won’t do it on a whim.

Cheers

Edited May 30, 2021 by Bill the barbarian

[Lordabdul]

(to be clear: I am definitely looking forward to when my kids leave for university and I can repurpose their rooms into gaming libraries 😄  for the time being, though, I need to be conservative)

[svensson]

1 hour ago, lordabdul said:

(to be clear: I am definitely looking forward to when my kids leave for university and I can repurpose their rooms into gaming libraries 😄  for the time being, though, I need to be conservative)

I am currently sitting in a room full of my gaming, computer, and reenacting stuff. S'NICE!

I get a happy thrill looking at my RQ and Traveller stuff out of boxes and sitting on actual real-life, no-shit SHELVES.

[Nick Brooke]

 

9 hours ago, Oracle said:

I agree, that the quality of the published books in the Jonstown Compendium is very impressive. But that's the only Community Content Program, that I know. Even for Chaosium's other Community Content Program, The Miskatonic Repository, I have no idea, if the quality is as high as in the Jonstown Compendium, and if the number of sold book is in a similar range. Maybe we're just lucky to know one of the better Community Content Programs. Certainly the people from DriveThruRPG have a better idea, what's happening in the different Community Content Programs, and so I have to trust their evaluation.

I agree with you; also, quality is fairly subjective. In case it's interesting, here's an analysis I did yesterday of medal counts for the Chaosium community content programmes compared with the DriveThruRPG averages. (Columns stack to 100%, numbers are % in the DriveThru column and actuals in all other columns).

Edited May 31, 2021 by Nick Brooke

[Nick Brooke]

There are trends among the sort of Jonstown Compendium titles that are slow sellers or don't ever make it to Copper (this analysis ignores recent releases which haven't had time to get anywhere):

• Maps * 
• Artpacks * 
• Freebies ** 
• Virtual Tabletop Tokens
• Exotic Locations (i.e. the East and the West)
• Foreign Language Titles

* none of these have yet made Copper.
** DriveThru doesn't count these towards medals.

[Nick Brooke]

Remember that "DriveThru averages" are for ALL products (inc. professional releases), not just community content.

[Nick Brooke]

9 hours ago, GMKen said:

Reading through posts on this forum, though, it kind of sounds like the whole process is walking on eggshells, and the PoD could go away at any time.  Given that my intent is PoD that is a less than ideal risk.  Maybe then I should just go straight to lulu?

I'm afraid that's not an option for Jonstown Compendium community content creators: check the agreement.

The process isn't "walking on eggshells," but three things are going on.

One is that getting print right is HARD, much harder than all the noisy armchair quarterbacks would have you believe. Here's the Quick Print Spec for masochists: you need to get everything that's applicable to your title right, or it will fail quality checks and need reworking. From my own experience, coming in under CMYK ink limits can be the Devil's work.

The second is that Chaosium has put a lot of controls in place to minimise the risk of DriveThru "pulling the plug." We are working to reduce the volume of work done by OneBookShelf's staff, both on the customer service side ("No Print & PDF deals, please") and on the print workflow ("Sell 250 PDF copies first, please"). Those rules help safeguard the POD option.

And the third is that print sales are a small fraction of PDF sales. When print margins are similar to or lower than PDF margins (which is often the case), creators have to put in what could be a lot of work, possibly redoing the layout from scratch, as well as paying for their proof-printed copies (as many times as it takes to get it right)... for not much reward.

I love getting our books out in print, but not everyone can do it, and not every product needs to be available in print.

Edited May 31, 2021 by Nick Brooke

[Agentorange]

8 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

We are working to reduce the volume of work done by OneBookShelf's staff, both on the customer service side ("No Print & PDF deals, please"

Does this mean that Chaosium will eventually be looking to phase out it's own print and PDF deals on DTRPG , for example things like Queensguard, Highway of Blood and so on. If we have the money should we be buying them whilst we still can ?

I take it we're talking about complexity of  work here as opposed to volume of work ?

 

16 minutes ago, Nick Brooke said:

creators have to put in what could be a lot of work (and paying for their proof-printed copies, as many times as it takes to get it right), for not much reward

But if a creator/author is happy to put in that work ( and presumably soak up any costs incurred ) would that not be their call to make ?

[Nick Brooke]

8 minutes ago, Agentorange said:

If a creator/author is happy to put in that work ( and presumably soak up any costs incurred ) would that not be their call to make ?

I am advising creators and customers about the effort that's required to bring a title out in print, for not much reward. I'm not telling anybody else what to do with their time and money: I spend a lot of my own time bringing our own books out in print, after all. But I don't know if that's possible or desirable for everyone else out there.

Highway of Blood is community content, not a Chaosium title. DriveThru has made it clear that if any extra admin is needed to administer weird pricing/discount schemes, that burden should be taken by the creators, not by their staff. So I don't know what's happening on that front, except that DriveThru won't be doing any extra work.

And I'm mostly speaking about the community content side of things, where creators -- with the very best intentions -- can create unnecessary work for DriveThruRPG customer service staff. Chaosium's wider relationship with DriveThru is outside my remit. If you want to buy a Chaosium title and fear for its future availability, why not buy it now? (See recent commentary re: the emptying Vault at chaosium.com)

[soltakss]

11 hours ago, Agentorange said:

I'm surprised they generally sell poorly, Overall I've been very impressed with the stuff I've bought, obviously from my subjective point of view some are better than others  but the general standard has in my opinion been pretty high.

Even Jonstown Compendium sales, which are better than average, mean that only 20% of supplements have reached the threshold that POD can be thought about. Maybe 40% are at, or near, that point.

Using Nick's excellent breakdown, the sales are:

Type	Sales	%
Gold	5	4
Electrum	20	16
Silver	30	24
Copper	37	29
None	34	27
Total	126	100

I suppose it depends what we mean by poor sales.

[Martin Dick]

23 hours ago, Godlearner said:

Ok, twist my arm, but at this pace you are never getting out of Dorastor.

 

No one ever gets out of Dorastor 😈

[PhilHibbs]

On 5/30/2021 at 11:05 AM, Akhôrahil said:

...Oddi kills Ralzakark in maybe 1630, the text says "Final Death". Which means that either final death isn't really final, or there's something odd about the Unicorn Emperor of the Monster Empire and he's not - or at least not exactly - Ralzakark.

It's the last, the final, time that he dies. He never dies again after that.

[Baron Wulfraed]

25 minutes ago, PhilHibbs said:

It's the last, the final, time that he dies. He never dies again after that.

So he turns into Celestia and is effectively immortal 🤯

[Godlearner]

2 hours ago, Martin Dick said:

No one ever gets out of Dorastor 😈

Not exactly true, lots of things get out of Dorastor. 

[Akhôrahil]

1 hour ago, Godlearner said:

lots of things get out of Dorastor. 

"Seep", "crawl", and "slither" are useful words here.

[Agentorange]

On 5/31/2021 at 9:41 AM, soltakss said:

I suppose it depends what we mean by poor sales.

I guess because most of my gaming has or is part of the d100 family of some description I tend to forget that runequest, mythras etc etc are only a small part of the overall games market......

Imagine an alternative universe where RQ etc had proved to be as  popular as D'n'D/d20 😄

Edited June 1, 2021 by Agentorange

[Godlearner]

18 minutes ago, Agentorange said:

Imagine an alternative universe where RQ etc had proved to be as  popular as D'n'D/d20

Yeah, I would not be working in my day job that's for sure.