Monte Cook’s Dungeonaday.com Covert Master Plan to take over…

Well maybe not. But I have been looking at Dungeonaday.com and SubHub.com (the service they use to deliver their subscription service) and I realized something. You could use this for creating magazines. And I don’t just mean basic online versions of magazines, I mean actual bookshelf magazines. The process works like this, five days a week you release 1,000 word articles on topic (for this sample we will be doing OGL material). You charge $8 a month for this. Over the weekend you collect the week’s worth of material and lay it out using InDesign or whatever and convert into a PDF. Based on 5K you should have at least 10 pages worth of material. The following Monday you place the PDF up for subscribes for free then sell it at RPGNow.com for $2.50.

At the end of the month you collect all the PDFs together, which should be about 40 pages worth. Now you approach OGL publishers and you tell them you will give them one free 1 page ad if they submit 1,000 words for next month’s magazine. You accept 24 pages worth of ads you now have a 64 page magazine. A 64 page 8.5 x 11 book will cost $7.10 which you will mark up to $9.99 and make $2.89 per each copy you sell. Best of all since you use Lulu.com they are free for you to print. Basically you have sold the same content in three different ways and earned income form each of them.

Now let’s look at actual money numbers:

If you get a writer to work on this at a rate 1.5 cents per word (Not great, but good if you have never been published or you need some extra cash this month), this comes to $300. You purchase two Shaman StockArt stock art packages for $16. Then you need to find a layout person who works good, fast and cheap. You offer him $50 plus 5% of the PDF sales and everyone should be happy. So all in all this should cost you roughly $375 right out of the pocket. You break down total sales percentages as so:

• RPGNow.com: 50% or 125 PDFs ($2.50 – $0.12 for the Layout Person – 0.88 for RPGNow.com = $1.50 each PDF sold)
• Subscriptions: 35% or 16 Subscriptions ($8 each Monthly Sub sold)
• Lulu.com: 15% or 19 books ($2.89 each book sold)

Now this seems like a lot to sell until you remember a few things:

1. The RPGNow amount of 125 is spread of four PDFs not just one. (Remember these are the weekly ones that are being sold.)
2. MOST IMPORTANTLY: The second issue that you do will FREE and not cost you anything!!! The advertisers provide you with the content from the next month. 24,000 words worth of content. You just repeat the 1K word for 1 Page offer again and keep on going and the rest is pure profit.

If you use SubHub to host the subscriptions that is an extra $97 you need to generate from this or use Yahoo for free. Now with the numbers I gave you, there are ways to cut cost and corners (You could do all the writing ala Monte or get volunteers for cheap or free to pad their writing resume; You could do the layout yourself like I would) but as you see it is possible to make money at this if you do a little creative thinking. Think about it. Talk to you later…