Prime_Evil said:
I suspect that this is an unfortunate side-effect of a shrinking market for RPGs and a change in the way that gamers consume new material - I've got to admit that I buy far more gaming stuff in PDF format these days than I purchase in dead tree format.
It is a side effect of the market - sales of Mongoose ebooks overtook paper sales more than two years ago - but not necessarily an unfortunate one, at least for writers.
Without going into the gory details, we discussed this at length with darren (and a few other select writers), and it basically breaks down like this; in the 'old days' a writer delivered a manuscript and was paid a lump sum (variable, but think low four figures for an average RPG book).
Now, unless you are going to knock the ball out of the park with print sales every time (and you won't, even the likes of WotC saw that disappear), you have to be very careful what you print, and that means many of the books we have done recently may never have been done at all as we would have been forced to concentrate on the 'hot' titles.
So, we proposed that instead of a lump sum, said writers would receive a percentage of revenue all electronic sales. We made sure this percentage was very high (much higher than we could ever do on printed books, and much, much higher than we would pay, say, Warner Brothers for the rights to Babylon 5, so we are not talking about a small number here), so the writer gets a healthy bump right at the start, when all the core fans of the game pick up the PDF but, importantly, the writer continues earning on _every_ copy sold for _years_ to come.
To demonstrate, every month, we still sell PDFs of the original D20 Slayer's Guides we published in 2001, nearly thirteen years ago. Thirteen years from now, in 2027 (assuming the zombies do not take over by then), Darren will _still_ be earning from Sheoloth and, in total, will have received far more than we could possibly have paid him with one lump sum.
But, that is only half the trick...
Darren has not done just Sheoloth, he has worked on several Legend books and continues to do more. While sales of Sheoloth, or any other book, in 5 years time may not be huge (it might be just a handful of copies a month), he will by then, hopefully, have many titles all earning him royalties on a regular basis - perhaps enough to provide him with a decent monthly wage from those royalties _alone_.
That is why I keep riding Darren to do more books - in a way, it is for his own good
The market has changed things, and what writers miss out on now is the 'big hit,' the lump sum. However, by taking advantage of the changing technology, we can a) take a risk on producing material that might otherwise not see the light of day (and we have some pretty far out things in the works for Traveller right now!) and b) provide the humble RPG writer the chance to earn a decent monthly wage.
It makes things a bit harder to begin with (and so, perversely, is going to be tougher on existing veteran writers than those really just breaking into the field - like Darren) but it looks like it will also make things a lot more stable in the long run for both writer and publisher. And continuing to earn from a project years after it has been written is something almost unheard of in this industry!
So, on the whole, while I like physical books as much as the next man, I am embracing these changes in the market and looking at the positive side. I think it will make things better for everyone.
