Wednesday, October 30, 2013

The PDF Rewards With "At Cost Print on Demand" for Supporters New Trend for RPG Kickstarters

I guess I am late with this one, but have people seen this post at Tenkar’s Taven: A New Trend in RPG Kickstarters? - PDF Rewards With"At Cost Print on Demand" for Supporters. Apparently our friends of at Rite Publishing where the first to attempt this and now Amethyst - Fantasy & Technology Collide is doing the same thing. OK I have to admit I am a little confused by this.  Not by what they are suggesting but why people feel this in “innovative” or a “new trend”?

We at LPJ Design send out our print books to people via CreateSpace / Amazon. Rite Publishing is doing the same thing but adding RPGNow.com in to the equation. 

So with us it is: LPJ Design > CreateSpace / Amazon > Donor. 

With Rite Publishing it is: Rite > RPGNow > Lightning Source > Donor. 

I don’t see the need or desire for the added step because RPGNow is going to charge Rite for this service of doing the POD books for them.  I use RPGNow and a PDF distributor of product and CreateSpace as my POD distributor. It just makes better sense to me to do that. I mean if RPGNow charged me 10% to do that “service” on a $20 book that’s $2 per book. If Lightning Source cost me $4 to print a book and RPGNow just added 50% more to my production cost of the book.


I mean getting the books at cost is a “good thing” (I assume they are charging people at the $6 RPGNow add-on versus the Lightning Source $4 cost) but are any of these books going to show up on the retailer shelves, meaning can retailers buy the book at cost during this Kickstarter?  I mean it is one thing to offer this to the limited amount of donors that support your kickstarter, but it is complexly different to offer this to your retailer where the margin between the wholesale and the retail, or even to distributors, can be where you make your money. Like I said before. I am a little confused about this whole thing. Talk to you later…

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