Chaosium publication solutions

[Soccercalle]

I get that some deliveries can reach the warehouses at different times and that is not a problem if we talk about 2-3 weeks difference. But if THE SAME warehouse (seems to be Australia) always get the stuff 2-3 months later than the other something has to change in order to enhance customer satisfaction.
This can be done in two or three ways. 1) Close the outlier warehouse and have the people there order from other warehouses (Fedex or DHL from EU to Australis is 2-4 days which will better for the consumers than waiting 2-3 extra months, even if the price will be higher). Or 2) use a second printer close to that warehouse. Many big book publishers uses different printers to secure their release dates. Or 3) use option 1) but keep the warehouse. Clients near that warehouse can buy the books with more expensive shipping for the first months but will get cheaper postage if they wait.

[Oracle]

1 hour ago, Soccercalle said:

I get that some deliveries can reach the warehouses at different times and that is not a problem if we talk about 2-3 weeks difference. But if THE SAME warehouse (seems to be Australia) always get the stuff 2-3 months later than the other something has to change in order to enhance customer satisfaction.
This can be done in two or three ways. 1) Close the outlier warehouse and have the people there order from other warehouses (Fedex or DHL from EU to Australis is 2-4 days which will better for the consumers than waiting 2-3 extra months, even if the price will be higher). Or 2) use a second printer close to that warehouse. Many big book publishers uses different printers to secure their release dates. Or 3) use option 1) but keep the warehouse. Clients near that warehouse can buy the books with more expensive shipping for the first months but will get cheaper postage if they wait.

As far as I understand Chaosium is using your option 3) exactly, because if you look at Chaosium's page for the Glorantha Sourcebook, 2nd Edition, you will see, that the book is available in UK and European warehouses, but not (yet) in the Australian warehouse. (It's not available in the US warehouse also, as this has been sold out already ...)

Edited April 12 by Oracle

[metcalph]

2 hours ago, Soccercalle said:

I get that some deliveries can reach the warehouses at different times and that is not a problem if we talk about 2-3 weeks difference. But if THE SAME warehouse (seems to be Australia) always get the stuff 2-3 months later than the other something has to change in order to enhance customer satisfaction.
This can be done in two or three ways. 1) Close the outlier warehouse and have the people there order from other warehouses (Fedex or DHL from EU to Australis is 2-4 days which will better for the consumers than waiting 2-3 extra months, even if the price will be higher). 

I'm just happy at this point that Chaosium isn't taking your advice.  

[Jason Farrell]

3 hours ago, metcalph said:

I'm just happy at this point that Chaosium isn't taking your advice.  

That's extremely disingenuous considering that is one of three solutions Soccercalle wrote. 

[metcalph]

2 hours ago, Jason Farrell said:

That's extremely disingenuous considering that is one of three solutions Soccercalle wrote. 

Listing other poorly thought-out alternatives doesn't make the "Let Them Eat Cake" attitude any better.

[kalidor]

7 hours ago, Jason Farrell said:

That's extremely disingenuous considering that is one of three solutions Soccercalle wrote. 

There would not.be this problem if they return to the "pick PDF first, get the printed later" system. I think they dont care much about their runequest customer base. They think this is a petty social club with this "take the pill and swallow It" policy.

[AndreJarosch]

25 minutes ago, kalidor said:

There would not.be this problem if they return to the "pick PDF first, get the printed later" system. I think they dont care much about their runequest customer base. They think this is a petty social club with this "take the pill and swallow It" policy.

The time and effort to spend on markteting (for emails, blogposts, forum postings, other Social Media, digital flyers, etc.) would be doubbled, but the sales wouldn´t. 

The PDF first and book later concept will work for REALLY important publications, but not for any single book. 

[Jason Farrell]

23 hours ago, AndreJarosch said:

The time and effort to spend on markteting (for emails, blogposts, forum postings, other Social Media, digital flyers, etc.) would be doubbled, but the sales wouldn´t. 

The PDF first and book later concept will work for REALLY important publications, but not for any single book. 

Of course it works.  Almost every RPG company does it that way.

[PhilHibbs]

On 4/13/2024 at 9:30 AM, kalidor said:

There would not.be this problem if they return to the "pick PDF first, get the printed later" system. I think they dont care much about their runequest customer base. They think this is a petty social club with this "take the pill and swallow It" policy.

The way I understand it as an outsider is, they care about games shops even though it may be costing them to do so*. I've known them as friends for decades. I assure you that you could not be more wrong. They may be making mistakes but it is not out of malice.

* I don't know the economics of how much physical games shops contribute to the overall health of the RPG hobby market to say this with great confidence. But they could take the short term option of releasing PDF first and locking their customers in to then buying the physical book from them.

[KungFuFenris]

After being involved in many different aspects of the printing industry, I can only say that there is no way to make everyone happy.
Except livestreaming/weekly reporting on the shipping and blame everything on the whims of international trade, but even that carries with it the "why didn't we print in X country" -😕
I get why Chaosium have decided to go with a Valve Time approach for the future. Other studios are going with the pdf-preorder of a physical print, but that is going to be horrendously bad as delays will only continue to increase sales lost to disinterest or piracy. We are already reaching a point where non-western countries are not able to purchase printed books due to exchange rates.

It's a rough industry these days, and it is not getting any easier with the degradation of trade networks across the planet. The costs of shipping things to four different warehouses across four or three continents is huge for any company, and while I'd normally reccomend regionally-based printers (for instance having one Pacific-based printer for AUS and NZ) but that is not doable for a company this size.
With the way things are going these days, I am unsure if we will ever go back to any sort of normal, as we are not going to see less events affecting trade in the coming years. It also begs to question the sustainability of regular printing runs.

Edited April 15 by KungFuFenris

[Squaredeal Sten]

On 4/15/2024 at 5:09 PM, KungFuFenris said:

......
With the way things are going these days, I am unsure if we will ever go back to any sort of normal, as we are not going to see less events affecting trade in the coming years. .....

You are agreeing with some of the authors of articles in the most recent couple of issues of Foreign Affairs magazine.  So it is not a far fetched pronouncement.

A  summary of what they say is....

Absent some game changing initiative, (yes political stuff even affects our shared  fantasy worlds) :

For years intercontinental business is likely to involve more shipping problems, more trade barriers.  Just in time production will be harder to rrely on, inventories must go up, none of this is efficient.  We can whine about the lost globalist golden age all we want, but we will be less frustrated if we adjust our expectations.  

I do wonder what the cost difference is between air and ocean freight.  

And as for why don't you print in some other country, ANY printer is going to be half way around the world from someone.  So that's a non starter.

 

Edited April 17 by Squaredeal Sten
Spelling; & looked at magazine cover.

[KungFuFenris]

14 hours ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

And as fior why don't you print in some other country, ANY printer is going to be half way around the world from someone.  So that's a non starter.

I know. I was saying that splitting order would be the solution on a larger scale than this, but I know that this is not feasible in the level of production we're talking about.

[g33k]

On 4/16/2024 at 6:19 AM, KungFuFenris said:

I know. I was saying that splitting order would be the solution on a larger scale than this, but I know that this is not feasible in the level of production we're talking about.

Yes, regional printers would solve the problem... but likely aren't a viable solution.

Whole print-runs need minimum volumes to be cost-effective, and AFAIK the North American market is the ONLY one (for RuneQuest) large enough (by itself) to support such a thing; I think the UK/EU combo might have been almost big enough; but post-Brexit neither market is, by itself.

I suspect CoC has more global appeal, but don't have a good enough sense of this to know which markets are big enough.


I am not Chaosium, however.  I don't have the actual data to support any of that -- it's all supposition on my part.  Unless @MOB or @Rick Meints (or another @Chaosium person with data) speaks up to tell us what the data tells them) then we're stuck making these (at best semi-educated) guesses.

 

Edited Thursday at 06:13 PM by g33k

[PhilHibbs]

7 hours ago, g33k said:

...I think the UK/EU combo might have been almost big enough; but post-Brexit neither market is, by itself.

Whilst I love a good Brexit bash as much as anyone else, that shouldn't be relevant They are close enough to be printed in the same place, this issue is about international shipping delays.

[g33k]

21 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

Whilst I love a good Brexit bash as much as anyone else, that shouldn't be relevant They are close enough to be printed in the same place, this issue is about international shipping delays.

I don't know enough of the nitty-gritty details.
Chaosium IIRC has done at least some printing in Poland.
But I've heard lots of Brits complain both about VAT costs and govt-induced delays at the point of import.

No idea whether the situation is symmetrical... would a Brit printer suffer similar extra costs/delays going to an EU warehouse?

[PhilHibbs]

2 hours ago, g33k said:

No idea whether the situation is symmetrical... would a Brit printer suffer similar extra costs/delays going to an EU warehouse?

There might be a delay, but nothing compared to re-routing a container ship around the other side of Africa. Importing books into the UK from the EU is no more complex than importing them into the UK from China.

Edited April 17 by PhilHibbs

[g33k]

3 hours ago, PhilHibbs said:

There might be a delay, but nothing compared to re-routing a container ship around the other side of Africa. Importing books into the UK from the EU is no more complex than importing them into the UK from China.

Yes; but what's the time & VAT/cost differences for a UK buyer, between a UK printer and the one in Poland?

If Chaosium says "go" on the 1st of the month, how long before the UK-printed books are in the UK warehouse, vs. Poland-printed books... and how much is VAT going to bump price?

And then -- this'd be Chaosium-internal numbers -- what are the UK vs EU market-sizes (for Chaosium's English-language RPGs)?
If there's to be a single European print-shop, it makes sense to choose it in the larger market, and -- however regretfully -- let the smaller take their lumps.

But the key question is:  even combined, would UK+EU be a big-enough market to justify an entire Euro-centric print-run from a local printer (whichever side of Brexit that is)?  (I kinda take it for granted that NZ+Oz are not a big enough market)    I presume they(EU+UK) are NOT big enough, as Chaosiums AFAIK has only ever used a single print-house for a given product-run (economies of scale on larger print runs):  China or Poland, but not both (despite delivery advantages).

Edited April 18 by g33k

[PhilHibbs]

7 hours ago, g33k said:

Yes; but what's the time & VAT/cost differences for a UK buyer, between a UK printer and the one in Poland?

There's no VAT on books, either in the UK or in the EU.

And the delay would be trivial compared to the current situation of shipping books half way around the world.

Edited April 18 by PhilHibbs

[AndreJarosch]

On 4/18/2024 at 10:10 AM, PhilHibbs said:

There's no VAT on books, either in the UK or in the EU.

And the delay would be trivial compared to the current situation of shipping books half way around the world.

That is not correct. 
We have 7% VAT on books in germany (normal goods is 19%, but some get a discounted VAT of 7%). 

I have to pay 7% VAT for every bok that gets delivered from outside the EU (Drivethru PODs or Lulu for instance). 

[Kloster]

14 hours ago, AndreJarosch said:

That is not correct. 
We have 7% VAT on books in germany (normal goods is 19%, but some get a discounted VAT of 7%). 

I have to pay 7% VAT for every bok that gets delivered from outside the EU (Drivethru PODs or Lulu for instance). 

France's VAT rate for books is 5.5%. It is paid on all books published is France or coming from outside EU. For books coming from EU countries, it is the originating country's rate (as for all wares).