Money, Meet Mouth

Back in April, I posted the following:

I’ve spent 6 years now in the electronic publishing field. I’ve learned a lot. Most of what I’ve learned, I’ve put into practice. Some things, however, I’m still too much of a coward to try full-time. For example: twice per year, in November and March, I hold one-week sales on the products that I release through Adamant Entertainment. I drop the prices of every PDF in our entire catalog to $1.00…. and here’s the thing: I make more in those two week-long sales than I do in 4 months of regular sales.

It’s something I’ve considered doing full-time — but it scares me. One, I’m worried that the phenomenal results of those sales are because of the narrow window, and that making it a constant would negate those results. Two (and this is the big one): If I’m wrong, I could end up not only killing my own income, but also devaluing the entire PDF segment of the RPG industry, killing other folks’ incomes as well. So I shy away from it….

Taking a look at what’s been going on in the latter half of 2010 — especially with the successes of self-published authors releasing their works for Kindle at impulse-purchase pricing — I decided to take the plunge. I’ve seen enough data, both from Adamant’s sales since 2004, and the data made public by other pioneers in the digital field, that I feel that it’s time to put theory into practice. You can read the announcement at Adamant’s website, but the upshot is that I’m moving the company to a flat pricing model — what I’m referring to as “app-pricing”. Everything we produce in PDF for the gaming field will be $1.00.

I’ve long held the opinion that the only positive response to unauthorized filesharing is cost and convenience — to make “piracy” redundant by making purchases painless and easy.

Either I’m right, and this will work, or I’m horribly, horribly wrong, in which case I’ll crash and burn.

Honestly, though?

I’m pretty sure I’m right.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to see if Crazy Eddie is available for promos….

Tabletopocalypse, Follow-up

Sure, people say that they want more positivity, but negative topics are apparently are far more likely to spark conversation. My Tabletopocalypse Now post has 70-odd comments here at the blog (more than I’ve ever seen for any other post), as well as extensive (and varying degrees of ridiculous/frustrating/infuriating) discussions at RPGnet, ENWorld, The RPGsite, Circvs Maximvs, RPGgeek, and dozens of blogs.

I figured that there would be some hullaballoo over my post — I said as much in the post which preceded it. I completely underestimated the level of vitriol.

My take-aways from this: Continue reading “Tabletopocalypse, Follow-up”

Mark Waid on Digital

When I attended the ICV2 Conference on Comics and Digital at the NYCC, I had the opportunity to speak briefly with Mark Waid.

Waid has made supposedly “controversial” comments regarding the future of his industry, which was construed completely wrong-headedly by a depressingly large amount of people. Sound familiar?

Anyway — He did an interview with Newsarama later on at the show, and was given an opportunity to expand upon his statements and hopefully clarify them for those that misunderstood. Click here to watch the (sadly non-embeddable) video.