Transparency Agenda #56: Paizo vs 3PP Part 2

Transparency Agenda #55: Paizo vs 3PP Part 1

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…

Adding value by going from Free to Pay What You Want…

I think a lot of people like free and take things that are free JUST because they are free.  Things that people have no interest in really, don’t care about and would never find useful once they hear they are free, they are taken by the handfuls. It does not matter if it was free poison we were giving away. Free to many mean "take more than you will need, even if you don't need me". But does free mean value or better put does free equal valuable?

A few years ago I was speaking with Christian Gossett fromThe Red Star comic book fame and he said to me, “Never give anything away for free. People don’t value it at free.” And I have to admit, in “some” cases that is true.  I have given away over ten thousand copies of free products at LPJ Design from Buff Sheet to Daily Spell Sheet to Chase Sheet to many others. Usually we get about a 0.10% of those who downloaded it thanked us for the free product or even take a second out to review it. Why? I think when they get it for free to them there is no real “value” attached to the product. But the second we add a price to it, even with it being Pay what you want we create what Chris Anderson, author of Free: How Today's Smartest Businesses Profit byGiving Something for Nothing calls “friction”, a resistance to the “deal” or sale.

So I started to think how could I maximize both points of view of Free with Pay What You Want? And I think I have come up with something that makes me happy from a customer and business prospective.  From now on when LPJ Design releases a new product that we consider giving away for free, we will make that product available for free for 7 days. After the initial 7 day release, we will convert that product to a Pay What You Want rate. The initial 7 days will determine who is our core fans base and is this product interesting. The following Pay What You Want period will determine is this product interesting AND is there value in this product. 

I have already tried this our recently with several LPJ Design Free products that are now Pay What You Want, to discover there have been a drop on the free downloads, but there have been people who paid us for what we were giving away for free because they found value in it. Best of all, people who paid what they wanted to really determined the real value of the product and that is VERY important to me. Talk to you later… 

Transparency Agenda #026: How Print-On-Demand can help your PDF build..

Transparency Agenda #017: What kind of trouble can I get myself into...

Transparency Agenda #010: More topics to think about!

Driving Along and Talking about LPJ Design

Has kickstarter created the “Privatiation of retailing for customers”?

The biggest issue of late about kickstarter has been the issue of Kickstarter “taking the cream off the top of the sale” business model.  But what if Kickstarter has caused the “ Privatization of retailing for customers”?  Privatization as defined by Wikipedia is the process of transferring ownership of a business, enterprise, agency, public service or public property from the public sector (a government) to the private sector, either to a business that operate for a profit or to a non-profit organization. What many have been accusing Kickstarter of is doing something similar to that. Kickstarter is taking the “ownership of the sale” from the retailer and placing it in the hands of the manufacturer.  This places the manufacturer in the sale role as the retailer, which of course upsets the retailer. Who owns the customers, if a product can never/will never be sold in a retailer location and only from the manufacturer directly?

Many retailers have complained with manufacturers becoming retailers (but many retailers don’t seem to have this same complaint with Apple doing this) but with the recent release of Marvel Comic new Marvel InfiniteComic line, I have to wonder what might be the future of retailers in the comic space which of course would come to the gaming space.  If Marvel has decided that the “infinite canvas” is the future of their products, where does that leave the retailer?  While I think of the whole infinite comic look reminds me a little too much of the late 1960s Marvel Comic cartoon where they use the artwork and simulated motion to make it “animated”, many feel this is the way of the future. What is old is new again. The Infinite comics give you the “perception” of movement but without those costly animators.

Now here is something that will sound even crazier, but what if Marvel Comic started doing retail stores? Now many retailers are laughing right now saying it would never happen. But what if Marvel copied the Best Buy / GeekSquad business model? Marvel open stores inside of other retailer store locations. Maybe 500 sq.ft to a maximum of 1,000 sq.ft is this locations size. These stores only focus on selling the “best” of the new comics and graphic novels only. Marvel gets to sell in stores; the store get comic fan base as customers; Marvel make a better percentage selling direct to customers; The store gets a percentage of the sales from Marvel. And where does this leave the current retail model? Video game companies have been doing something like this for years in GameStop. Why could this not work in coming and gaming stores? Maybe Marvel stores in Disney stores?

The part that really makes this whole think interesting to me is that Kickstarter and the other various online crowd funding copy cats are the real power in all of this. They use the “Hostage” or “Patron” business model and updated it for the 21^st century. So if you have a good idea, can make a good video, have a large enough “tribe” of followers, and can amplify you messages “loud enough” then you can success at this over and OVER again. While many of these Kickstarter do have retailer rewards, I have heard responses from retailer saying they would not support Kickstarter projects (see my post on February 6, 21013 labeled “Angry retailer tells me how he feelsabout Kickstarter, Paizo, Free RPG Day and his customers…”).  It looks like Kickstarter, retailers, and manufactures are headed to a showdown that somebody is going to win and somebody is going to lose it all. So what do you think? What do you think about the “ Privatization of retailing for customers”? Talk to you later…

POD Printing and the RPG Business

We don't make bits you play with, we build worlds you play in...

When we first came out supporting Pathfinder, we started doing the same things we did when working on 3.5 OGL. We made small / short PDFs that focused on feats or spells or magic items or whatever.  These things are great to get people interested in you as a company while at the same time generating some quick cash. This is one of the tactics that I used to grow very large, very quickly in the PDF world.  It’s a solid business strategy and it works well. Except that you only have “bits” of something.  Just little bits and pieces of something. Now it is not a bad thing, but it is just a small bits of something, often not connected in anyway. 

When doing NeoExodus for Pathfinder is started with this same plan in mind, make small bits and then build the world.  But it the middle of discussing what people would want to see in the the setting I decided that doing small PDF for NeoExodus may not do as well due to the story we are trying to build with the setting. So we decided to change up ore business focus a little bit.  We made the monsters for the setting short small PDFs (5 of less pages), while the other source material like adventures and sourcebooks would be medium sized (at least 12 pages) sized PDFs.  Making this change made doing NeoExodus a little more risky, but in the longer term for the setting it would be the best business move. 

Right now, with the excitement of Pathfinder picking up, there are more and more 3PP coming into the arena with them focusing on smallPDFs to gain interest in their company.  In this day and age I would not even waste time like that.  If you are a small start up 3PP, I would focus on medium sized PDF and give small short PDF away for free at RPGNow / DriveThruRPG / One Book Shelf, but NOT at Paizo.  The reason for this is on RPGNow / DriveThruRPG / One Book Shelf you get direct access to the email address to people who give free products away to. While on Paizo you don’t get that. Getting the ability to potentially connect with a future customer is AMAZINGLY powerful and should be exploited.  Better yet giving it away from free reduces the risk to the purchaser and if they like it makes it easier for them to be customers in the future.  So when you get to the size of LPJ Design with over 500 products, you can make worlds that people play in, being long term customers and not worry about fighting over the scraps of the bits that people can play with. Only dogs worry about scraps.  Talk to you later…

Marketing and selling strategies I like Mass Effect Pre-Ordering

Here is something that might surprise you to know, I don’t have a video game system to play video games on. I don’t even have any games on my home personal computer. Not Skyrim. No KOTOR. No Splinter Cell. Nothing. But anyone who knows me that I spend A LOT of time watching video game trailers. I LOVE game trailers and the business strategies that companies use to get you interested in their products. One of my favorite video game series to watch is Mass Effect. They know how to make a trailer. Something else they know how to make is a cross over marketing strategy for two products for example The Mass Effect / Dragon Age cross over marketing:



Better yet, I love when the do the Pre-order special with Gamestop like these:








So after looking at all these video I am thinking, why aren’t RPG companies doing pre-order specials like these? Just something to think about. Talk to you later…

LPJ Design Business Judo: Doing the Clockworker right for NeoExodus

 A few weeks ago, we at LPJ Design were also discussing about adding a steampunk influenced class to the NeoExodus setting since the Arman Protectorate with their golems and warmachines seemed having it only logical.  While in the middle of our discussion, Headless Hyrda Games came up with the product the Clockworker.  This was a class they were looking to use in their Mor Aldenn setting to add the genre of steampunk to their setting.  This was perfect for us.  This would give us a chance to see what the Pathfinder fanbase wanted to so, compare some good ideas based on what they did and what worked and what didn’t. Initially it got some 4 and 5 star reviews that got me very interested, but then there were some comments on the Paizoboard that got me little worried about this actual quality of the product.  But then the one name in reviews that I always trust, Thilo Graf, commented on the product giving it a 2 star review. 

Now I have been on the receiving end of Thilo Graf 2 starreview many times (hard but honest and fair reviewing) so that was enough to interest me to purchase the product.  Now while there were issues, I did find enough quality material to see where the designer was going and what they wanted to do.  So based on the work that was done, the reviews and commentary, I decided that we would use the Clockworker as our guide to create our "steampunk" influenced class.  

While I like steampunk as a genre and concept, I never really though it made sense in a magic based setting.  So instead of focusing the “steampunk” quality of it, I wanted to focus on the engineering and scientific methodology of the technology as the magical element.  I was inspired by the Marvel comic series S.H.I.E.L.D. which focuses on the great scientific minds in Earth's history including Galileo Galilei, Leonardo Da Vinci and Nikola Tesla as the basis for the story, in turn as a basis for this new class. And with the quote from Authur C. Clark, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I knew this would be great for the creation our new base class, the Machinesmith.

Best of all with using the Clockworker’s OGL material as the basis of the Machinesmith class I could avoid a few of the missteps that were discovered during it first draft that Headless Hydra Games release.  Sometimes it’s better to be second.  Talk to you later…

Would you pay more for a magazine if it didn’t have ads it it?

Just reading an article today, RPG Magazines – Essential orOutdated? and it got me thinking, would I pay more for a magazine that offered no ads, but more content versus and standard magazine with basic content and ads?  I am a subscriber to many magazines including Inc and I have noticed that the ad content has been slowly creeping up in number.  So I have to wonder to offset the cost of color printing, which can be high, would I pay more for better content.  Now in my head, I say YES, but would I really pay for it?  People complain when they have to pay 1 cent more for things, so I could guess this might have some weird backlash. Are you willing to pay more for good content? Better yet, are you willing to pay less for OK content?  What do you think?  Talk to you later… 

NeoExodus: A House Divided Campaign Setting is completed!

After nearly a year worth of work, NeoExodus: A House Divided Campaign Setting is complete.

It sounds so simple when you hear it like that.  It doesn't tell you all the late night skype calls between myself and JP Chapleau on what we wanted to see in this book. It doesn't tell you what we didn't think was necessary, at least not yet,  for releasing this product.  It doesn't show the disagreements that we had and even a few issues that we just didn't want to deal with.  But this book is a culmination of great work from a lot of impressive writers (Neal Bailey, Thomas Baumbach, Joshua Cole, Richard Farrese, Lee Hammock and Owen K.C. Stephens) who listened to a crazy idea that I had, help expand it to what you see right now.  I am so glad these people were willing to take a chance with me and create something you don't normally see in fantasy RPG campaign settings.  Doing NeoExodus has been my greatest accomplishment in the field of RPGs and I only hope to expand this "little world" so more people may become involved with it.  Thank you all for supporting us.

Expect to see the NeoExodus: A House Divided Campaign Setting PDF version available for sale by this weekend, and maybe even earlier, at RPGNow.com or Paizo.com. You can still pre-order the NeoExodus: A House Divided Campaign Setting print version book directly at Paizo.com that we expect to see on the retail shelves by February 2012.  Thanks to everyone who helped me make my dreams come true.  Talk to you later...

What Drives Brand Sociability? [INFOGRAPHIC] from Mashable

If you are looking to understand what it takes to build a brand, you might want to check this out.  Enjoy and Talk to you later...

7 Disruptive Innovations That Turned Their Markets Upside Down [INFOGRAPHIC] from Mashable

NeoExodus: A House Divided is completed

Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box Preview

Just in case if you might have missed this. Enjoy!

I wonder why Pathfinder reviewer Megan Robertson hasn't reviewed LPJ Design products in a while...

What do you think it could be.  I have sent her all our our latest Pathfinder materials, but the last time she reviewed anything from us was February 27 of this year.  Maybe we did something wrong and she is mad at us? I don't think so.  Maybe she wants to wait until she gets the NeoExodus: A House Divided Campaign Book (coming out soon) to review that? I hope so.  So if anyone knows, including Megan, just let us know and we will provide you with what every you might need or want from LPJ Design.  Just let us know.  Talk to you later...