73 Days to PaizoCon: Making banner stands for PaizoCon 2012

74 days until Paizo...

Today I put together our PVC banner stand and I am planning on doing a a 2 ft x 5 ft banner for the stand.  I got the idea from the How to make Webcomics on page 163. For less that $4, I now have a light wieght and sturdy banner stand.  The 2 ft x 5 ft vinyl banner is going to cost me $40 from Clubflyers.com.   Best of all, I have one for a lot less than the typical $80 and more that you would pay for a pull up one.  Now I have to make a t-shirt stand too.  Home Depot and PVC pipe here I come.  Talk to you later...

Countdown to NeoExodus: 44 Days...

When I original conceived of NeoExodus, I planned for it to be flush with many transmedia connections including comic books, art books, short stories and novels.  The first attempt can in the creation of Grand Theft Exodus, a webcomic based on the NeoExodus setting.  While, due to several issues including several unreliable artists, the Grand Theft Exodus concept never really got off the ground I did learn a lot for the experience (Thanks again to all the great advice from the guys at Webcomics.com and Webcomics Weekly).  So I put the concept of it in the background, but I kept thinking about bring it back. Someday. Maybe sooner than you think.   Talk to you later...

Why aren't you using Pulley and Big Cartel for your store for your website?

OK a while back (like a few months back) I heard on Webcomics Weekly during an interview with Scottie Young that he was using Pulley and Big Cartel to sell products from his website.  Since I’ve been in the PDF publishing business for a while I have heard of LOTS of services that act as a web store for you to sell your products online. None of them really appealed to me for various reasons but while listening to this interview, it answered almost all the issues I had had with other companies’ web store programs. 

One of the main issues that I had in the past were the percentage rates. On RPGNow I pay them 35% of the sale and on Paizo I pay them 25%.  When I first got into this business I was paying 20% at RPGnow, so you can understand that I might be a little upset with 75% increase in the cost to do business at RPGNow over and decade. Since I am always on the lookout to save money and keep that money in my pocket, I always check out any good money saving ideas I hear. So like any highly intelligent and highly educated business person, when I heard about Pulley and Big Cartel I rushed right over there, Right? Hell no, I didn’t do that. That would have been smart. The reason why I didn’t? I don’t know. Most likely I was distracted by something else “shiny” and “new” (That happens a lot in the world of business) and forgot about Pulley and Big Cartel.

Fast forward to this last weekend while working on the new website design from LPJ Design, I kept thinking about what links I was going to add to the web store and out of the blue, I remembered about Pulley and Big Cartel.  I decided now was a good time to check them out and that made a complete difference. Pulley and Big Cartel do exactly what I want my web store to do: make it easy for me to sell my products online as either print-on-demand, PDF or both.  Pulley and Big Cartel work great separately and work even better together. I am amazed how much I like them both. Best of all, they give me the ability to make very specialized products that I can sell at a low to reasonable price and still make a good profit on them and the money side is handled by Paypal.  There is a lot of WIN in these two sites. On top of all that goodness, you can check the both out for free (Pulley gives you 14 days to try it out for free then you have to pay. Their lowest monthly rate is $6; Big Cartel gives you the ability to try it free indefinitely, if you have five products or less). Just something to think about when you are trying to put together your web store.  Talk to you later…

Kris and Scott's Scott and Kris Show

Nothing really to talk about...except Facebook, Webcomics Weekly...

This has been a busy week on the personal life so I have not had a lot to say or focus on with this blog. But, I will do a little self pimping and ask you to join the Louis Porter Jr. Design Facebook page so you can learn some othering hat we don't put up here at our blog.  For example, yesterday I had a online development session with JP Chapleau of a new feat, Craft Magic Candle [Item Creation] and a new magic item, Magic Candles.  We had comments from Gary Ray of Black Diamond Games who go to give us input what he though.  All of these done in real time.  We will be doing more of that, so don't miss out. Also do yourself a favor and check out Webcomics.com and  Webcomics Weekly and listen to their (semi) weekly podcast of what is going on wiht the webcomic world, which has a lot of ideas that can be (and I have) used in the RPG PDF world.  Just some stuff to be helpful.  Talk to you later...

Maybe you missed this: Diamond Distributors Offers In-Store Digital Sales

Ok here is a little new report that came out on Wednesday, Diamond Distributors Offers In-Store Digital Sales, that I hope a lot of you saw.  If you didn't take a second and go read it it is kind of important to the future of electronic distribution of comics and even RPG material.  Now after you read that, go over to Webcomics Weekely and check out episode #76 podcast on this same subject.  As I have been talking about this topic for nearly 6 years, it is nice to know that someone has finally build a system where digital products can be sold at a retail location.  While I hope it would have been One Book Shelf to jump all over this one, it looks like the big gun of Diamond Distribution (also owner of Alliance Game Distributor) has taken the lead on this.  While thise my not be profitable for everyone in the comic and RPG industry, there are a few that will do very well with this change.  Basically this is a variation of the Bit and Mortar program done right for the 21st century.   Go to the retailer and he will take car of you, with actual and now virtual products and the money pie for products get slit even further.  But the funny part is, NO ONE (in the RPG industry at least) IS TALKING ABOUT THIS!!!! This could be as big a change to the RPG industry as RPGNow was. Selling digital content to retailers, if done right, could be good for both sides.  Let's see what happens.  Talk to you later...

Advice at getting the job you want...

The Crossover - Moving from RPGs to Comics…

Anyone who reads this blog knows I am a HUGE fan of comics and the comic industry. I think the comic industry is the “other side” of the coin when you think of niche products or services. While it is a niche industry, comics have evolved to tap into the animation, video games and Hollywood movie industry. RPGs should and could do this same thing, on average don’t. The really sad part is that RPG publishers are built perfect for the video game industry (RPG publishers build game setting and build encounters/adventures as the status quo to make a successful line) to come to us and license our ideas. If people could play Tomb of Horrors as a video game how many people would become fans of it? My guess, A LOT!!!! While getting to the video game market is the successful end goal, the first easy step to move in that direction is comic books or even a better choice, webcomics.
After reading How to make Webcomics, I made an initial attempt to do a webcomic based on my fantasy setting, NeoExodus: A House Divided with Grand Theft Exodus. While Grand Theft Exodus didn’t do as I expected, I did see how it could be used to help grow my RPG business and create a whole new business where I could use the webcomic artwork in my RPG products. A webcomic can save you money over the long run, but it does have high start up cost. And that is the thing that will kill most RPG publishers, due to money being always tight as a RPG publisher. A full comic page will on average cost you about $100 buck a page (Look at the Atland or The Guns of Shadow Valley webcomic from an example of what I mean). So you release one page a week it will cost you $5,200 a year. You just need to generate $15 a day to pay for this artwork over a year. When you place your site up for the webcomic you will use Project Wonderful to help generate money for you to offset the cost. Now you have access to new customers is a different business medium (Transmedia anyone?) while at the same time introducing those people to your other related products, like a RPG.

Find a way to develop and create a crossover and you find a way to make more money for you, Green Ronin’s DC Adventures is a great example of a crossover product for DC Comics. Best of all someone had to pay DC Comics for the license. I am going back to doing Grand Theft Exodus sometime in the future. I just have to make sure it works well to grow my business. Just something to think about. Talk to you later…

Facebook Storefonts?!?!?! ... Did you know about this?

Just another reason why you should subscribe to Webcomics.com, but did you know about Facebook Storefonts? I am going to tell you about them here? NO.  Like I said, just another reason to subscribe to Webcomics.com  Talk to you later...

The financial mathematic of making a profitable RPG product for FREE…

So a few weeks ago I spoke about Monte Cook’ DungeonADay.com site and How to do it if it was free.  So I  have been crunching the actual numbers and this is what I have come up with to do my own version of DungeonADay.com with a little spin on it:

Writing focus & Writing Cost: Unlike DungeonADay.com which is a daily updated traffic site, we are looking to do updates to this website twice a week (Monday & Thursday) or three times a week (Monday, Wednesday & Friday).  Also unlike, DungeonADay.com we are using the Adventure Path structure as our focus and basis for this new website.  We plan for our Adventure Paths to last only for 13 weeks. Each day that we do and update will be an encounter that links into the larger story the website is telling. We are planning for each of the encounter updates to be 1,500 words in length with a one cent a word rate.  So that comes to either $30 or $45 a week for this project.  Figure it out for the full 13 weeks and you get a total price of either $390 or $585

The web hosting: SubHub is exactly what I would be looking for.  After joining DungeonADay.com and looking around it for all the great stuff it has inside for gaming fans (and there is a lot of great stuff inside) I think this will fit me nicely.  The price breakdown that SubHub provides is somewhat reasonable at $97 a month.  $97 a month comes out to $22.55 per week for a 13 week total of $293.15.

Artwork: Stock art which I have TONS of it so no issue there.

Cartography: After experimenting with my Fantasyscape line I decided that I will be handling that myself so I save cost on that.

So the total to do this little project for 13 weeks would be $683.15 (for twice a week) or $878.15 (for three times a week). 

Now, the BIG difference between this site and DungeonADay.com is that we are giving this site and content away COMPLETELY FOR FREE.  If I am doing this for free, how will this site make any money?  Now it is time to think like our friends at Webcomics.com and what I have read in How To Make Webcomics. 

First off, I have to know what is the minimum amount of money I need to generate per day to make this whole idea profitable.  So for twice a week version we will need to make $7.51 a day; while the three time a week version we will need to make $9.65 a day.  When you break it down like that it does not really seem like a lot of money.  How will I be making that money?  Let’s see…

Advertising: There will be ads from Project Wonderful where I will do a two skyscraper ads (160 x600 pixels) that will cost $1.50 a day to advertise on each ($3 total); one letterbox ad (728 x 90 pixels) that will cost $2 a day; six half banner ads (234 x 60 pixels) that will cost $0.50 a day to advertise on each ($3 total)

RPGNow Affiliate Store: I have an affiliate store that was created by RPGNow.com and I am able to sell my products (and other RPG companies products).  RPGNow.com gives me 10% of whatever I sales that I generate at that site. So if I wanted to make $4 a day from the affiliate site I would need to sell $40 worth of product a day.  With all the traffic I would be generating from the interest in this site, I do think that would be an issue. 

And with those two little things I could generate a whopping $12 a day which would come out over 13 weeks to be $1,092.  Subtract the $683.15 (for twice a week) or $878.15 (for three times a week) and you get $408.85 (twice a week) or $213.85 (three times a week). Proving this could be a profitable venture. 

Now here is the fun part that many of you have not even thought of yet.  I could collect all the content we have written (39K words for twice a week or 59K words for three times a week) and make a PDF version and sell it at RPGNow.com for $7 or $9 each.  Better yet, I can go Print on Demand with Lulu.com and sell them for $18.99 or $21.99 each. Since we covered the cost of the site with the advertising and affiliate store, all the rest is PURE PROFIT!!!!  Once again, all of it is PURE PROFIT!!!!!  Who would have thought you could make all that money giving stuff away for free?  Looks like I have some work to do.  Talk to you later…

Save money when printing Transcontinental after you join Webcomics.com

This one is simple, join Webcomics.com and you will get a 10% discount on orders from Transcontinental.  This one is simple, $30 to get TONS of great info to help your business AND and extra 10% off printing.  Talk to you later...

How much money would it take to make a Dugeonaday.com free?

Continuing on with my Free Dungeonaday.com theme, I wanted to break down what it would cost to do something like this for a month. So let’s get started, first off webspace.  

Let’s assume you have a website already built and let us say you are paying $20 month (I know this is high but we are just estimating here so just go with it). Let say you are going to have this run for at least three months so the total is $60. For this little experiment, we are going to ASSUME that you will do all the HTML coding on the website too.

Next, how many days will we update? I think a Monday through Friday schedule is reasonable so we are going to estimate 22 updates per month (Math Breakdown: 5 times a week times 4.3 weeks in a month =  21.5 and round up).  Now we move on to per day word count.  Well if it is too long no one will read it online, if to short it will not cover the encounter properly, plus the real issue is stat blocks can eat up a lot of text.  Let me handle the stat block issue first with the use of the use of the online Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Reference Document. Since we are on the web we can tell what monster they are fight and link the stats of them to Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Reference Document. Problem solved and no increase in word count needed. I estimate 500 to 700 words per encounter will cover what we need daily. For the month we will need 11,000 to 15,400 words. Since we are keeping this budget tight let set writing to 1 cent a word for a total of $100 to $154 per month. Let expand that for three months and now we get $300 to $453. Let’s just say $460 for three months and be safe. Now the total price is up to $520. 

Next, artwork. This one is easy, STOCK ART!!!! Hit up RPGNow.com and get a few collections of stock art.  I would not spend more than $50 for stock art.  That should get you several different ones and be more than enough (Let me suggest LPJ Design's Image Portfolio of stock art if you need somewhere to start).  So now that brings your total to $570.

Also with artwork, you might need maps for the dungeon your visitors are exploring.  That one can be handled with a pen and some graph paper.  If you don’t think you can handle this because you can’t draw straight line, get a ruler. Writing, art, website, stat blocks and maps.  That looks like you have covered everything important that you will need in the first three months for a grand total of $570 or $190 a month. At a cost of spending only $190 a month you could have your own Dungeonaday.com  type website. 

Now this sounds like a great idea to do, but then you realize doing this website would break my Number #1 business rule: DON’T LOSE MONEY!!!!

So what do you do to not lose money? You find a way to turn this site into one that makes money for you.  A lot of you are saying and thinking the easy way, “Then why don’t I just have subscriptions?” You could and you would have to direct compete with some in the market who already dominates that space. Think of it as trying to sell your own MP3 player in a market which Mac and the iPod already control.  How successful do you think you will be?

But if you are free, at least you can get the people to come by and check you out.  There is no “friction” to stop them from examining your site to see if they like it. This could be your important selling point.  Imagine this as your marketing: It’s just like Dungeonaday.com, BUT FREE! How do you depend against free?  Now how do you make money having a free site?  Just follow the webcomic model:  Everything on the site is for sell.  You sell ad space on the site (See Kobold Magazine for this). You direct sell items and products to customers that can get anywhere (exclusive versions of products). You give away digital wallpaper with donations to the site (Girls with Slingshots does this VERY well).  Be inventive!  Think of it this way, are you going to let $190 ($6.23 a day) is keeping you from being a RPG Publishing Superstar?  So get to work.  Talk to you later... 

What if Monte Cook's Dungeonaday.com was Free?

When I first heard about how Monte Cook created his Dungeonaday.com website I thought it was a great money making idea.  For Monte he would be able to create great exclusive daily content for those that were subscribers.  It was a great way for Monte to build a unique fanbase for his writing.  Best of all for Monte it created some regular monthly cashflow for his business.  Everything about it was a "Win - Win".  I liked the idea so much that I wanted to to something like it for my business.  I thought about what I would do, how I would build it, how I would develop it, how much I would charge subscribers, and all the stuff like that.  I kept going over and over this whole idea and two things kept popping up as issues:

1. The price to charge subscribers and 
2. How much money could the site really generate. 

Question #1 was directly dependent on question #2 and ice versa. So after all the thinking back and forth, I thought what if I did the exactly same thing as Monte Cook, but instead of charging subscribers we gave it away for free and generate money like the webcomics business model?

Webcomics.com (originally for free) now charges for the premium content they create on their site. Basically all the information that they were giving away for free originally could be found in their book, How to create Webcomics. When they were giving away the content for free many people kept asking those same questions OVER and OVER.  When the content was premium, the message of what they did and how they did it charged.  It became more specific. It was community building. It was tribe building. When it was free, it was quick entertainment that people could take or leave at no cost to themselves.  Now with their subscription wall of $30 (I must say this was the best $30 I have spend to acquire some great business ideas and knowledge) they can't just give you the same old stuff you could read in any book, you paid for premium content, they have to give it to you. Like Dungeonaday.com.

The content at Dungeonaday.com and Webcomics.com is an 8 to 9 on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the best and 1 being the worst, of course) and people are paying for that level of quality.  But when it is free, you have to find a way to make up for the cost of creating 8 to 9 level  of content with out being able to depend on subscribers.  And how is that done?  The way I see are reducing the physical format (Both Dungeonaday.com and Webcomics.com are in digital only formats), level of quality of the item (Webcomics in general normally four panel or one page daily comic strips, while standard comic books are monthly 23 pages in length) and getting advertisers to generate the monies that the subscribers normally would.  So if Dungeoneaday.com went to a free model, would the quality go down to save time and money? Or could the large number of new people coming to the site to see what new thing was released be enough to generate income in the way of advertising to offset the cost of doing it? There are people who do it Brad Guiger with Evil Inc., Dave Kellett wit Sheldon, Kris Straub with Starslip and Scott Kurtz with PvP and have done it for years.  The only question you have to ask is could you do it with RPGs? I think I might have to find the answer to this question.  Talk to you later...

Half Pixel and Webcomics get it – Alliances and Partnerships are how you survive and grow

While looking at the morning Webcomic.com blog post, It hit me how smart the guys at Webcomic.com and Half Pixel are. They work as a unit promoting webcomics while at the same time promoting themselves and what they do. They do a “somewhat” weekly podcast about the industry and business of webcomics and best of all, they put out a book of how you can do it yourself. They have proved that alliances and partnerships are a strong business “weapon” that can be used by anyone; including you and me. I have a few partnerships with other PDF RPG companies who sell my products that look like products in the other companies gaming line. Why? It is a great way for them to make money (I pay them 15% of the sale to do it), they get to expand their product line without having to do anything, and lastly it is good for the industry as a whole by supporting each other. One song, many voices.

This ties in to directly what I am doing with the Creative Imprint Agency. Teaming up with other RPG PDF companies to help is all is a good thing. Just take a look at RPGNow.com and think about how many of the people listed there you could team up with and proved a whole new range of products. RPG Objects did it for years with Modern Dispatch. Just something for you to think about. Talk to you later…

What would take to kill Dungeons and Dragons?

Is Dungeons & Dragons dying?  Sales for 4E and all RPG are down.  Retailers are worried. Distrubutors are worried.  Even manufacturers are worried.  Video games are attacking RPGs on every front and even more people are worried. With all this worrying going around, I have to wonder, what would it take to "kill" Dungeons & Dragons?  Or better yet, is Dungeons & Dragons "killable" and if it is what would replace it?  What would it take for Dungeons & Dragons to "survive and thrive"?

These are the same questions that the comic book industry is battling with every day also with their content being given away for free to torrents websites.  The Webcomics.com guys have seen the future and are adapting well to it. A few RPG companies have seen this future and are doing things to adapt also.  Have you seen your future in RPGs and what are you doing to save it?  Talk to you later...

Webcomics Weekly LIVE! at Emerald City Comic Con 2010

Webcomics Weekly LIVE! at Emerald City Comic Con 2010 from Brad Guigar on Vimeo.

I am Killing RPG Stores…

After everything that Marcus King has said, I was inspired by Scott Kurtz, to respond in this manner:

Talk to you later...

Webcomics.com: Worth its weight in gold...

After much going back and forth in my head, I finally signed up for Webcomics.com which cost me $30 for the year. This site is run by the four guys who wrote, How to make Webcomics.  I have talked of this book in the past, and talked about their podcast, Webcomics Weekly, and I am always impressed with these guys and what they do business-wise.  Many of their ideas and concepts can cross over to PDF RPG Publishing and make you money.  Having been only on the site for less than 5 minutes, I have already come up with an idea that easily pays back the $30 I spent for the membership and a new T-Shirt vendor where I can get shirt done in runs as small as one piece for as little as $4.82 for a double sided one color T-Shirt.  I like when I make a good investment.  So just in case you don't know, you might want to check out Webcomics.com and pick up How to make Webcomics.  Worth their weight in gold...