I love that old song. I reminds me of my life growing up in California. Living in Kansas I occasionally enjoy a few hours of California dreamin, remembering the sights and sounds and experience growing up in and around the Berkeley campus in the 1980s.
Telegraph avenue was a completely different world back then. Between 1980 and 1988 there remained a lingering influence from the Berkeley campus that existed in the 1970’s. People’s Park was still a place where the hippy types gathered although that generation slowly gave way over to the homeless or those who were mentally ill, people with no place to go and no resources to help them change their situation.
We had a great comic book shop on telegraph avenue and Blondie’s pizza where you could buy just one massive slice of pizza for just a little more than a buck. The comic book shop was enormous and doubled as a game store with a great selection. If you were in the know you realized that Steve Perrin, the author of Runequest was the guy standing behind the counter for a while.
Back then i was dating a beautiful asian girl and upstairs from us lived two of the main people from Chaosium, which I only discovered on accident one afternoon when I bumped into Sam carrying an arm load of Cthulhu books up the stairs to his apartment. Fencing was high on the list of fun things to do. Game nights happened almost every weekend or at least every other weekend in those days.
I remember the smell of the honeysuckle that grew everywhere around Berkeley and how great it smelled walking down the sidewalk in an evening in the fall when it was still very warm, hauling a backpack of game books over a shoulder on my way to a game.
What a long strange trip it has been.
April is turning out to be an exceptionally slow month for sales. Not only for us but for everyone. We have had all four books in the top 15 all month and we are seeing perhaps a seventy percent bottom out in sales across the board. Seventy percent guys. The only saving grace I suppose is that we really have almost no overhead at this point outside of what we are working on for up and coming books. We can certainly turn that around by releasing a new book and generating a solid 100 – 150 sales in four weeks of that new book.
Even so. This has got to be killing the guys with staff people to pay and large projects with many people working on them. It is definately putting on the back burner plans to license some rule books from favorite game systems that ask for a flat $500.00 to $750.00 payment to license a book. The way the game industry is going this month that additional fee will put a book in the red for months before they can even consider breaking even and will gobble up the majority of the actual profits you might hope to make off of a PDF book over the course of the year. Even though that rate sounds low and reasonable since the licensing company does not have to invest any work on the book or any artwork or support and on top of that they stand to make between 30% and 50% or more of your net profits for the year…little guys like me need to rethink going down that road.
There are other ways to garner interest from other publishers and we are looking into those options.
2008 promises to be a very lean year for RPG publishing across the board. The only way to overcome it is to put out a LOT of smaller projects, inexpensively to grab sufficient sales to keep your net profits up to something where the company has real operating capital and continues to grow.
Entering new e-stores will have a lot to do with that this year for us. I am also considering the purchase of our own print equipment outside of the store where i work to drive down our print copy costs a whole lot more and allow us to print and sell both black and white and full color books very cheaply.
We had plans to branch out into a fantasy product / campaign setting as well in 2009 and we may go ahead and launch that a little earlier.
Our goal was to get the company to a net profit each month of around $6,000.00 a month by the end of 2008. We are headed in that direction but if we want to keep growing and gaining ground we are going to have to start operating even smarter, leaner and faster while improving on quality.
That will present a challenge but it is one that I think we can overcome. One thing we may well have to do is trim down the sheer volume of interior artwork in some of our books from what we had planned. Or we may have to adjust our style to a more old school format with the same amount of art but less color and flash. Readers may have to be content with a certain amount of my own personal artwork in there to flesh out a few corners of the books or more maps.
April may simply be in the dumps because of tax time with a double whammy of poor economy. People have fewer and fewer dollars to spend on things like games. I would imagine that this year even the booming MMORPG industry is going to see a migration of customers cancelling those monthly fee based subscription accounts simply because they can not afford to throw twenty bucks away x 12 months of the year.
We have the module coming in April and the 2nd starship feature book in May. Hopefully with a region book right on the heels. We may double up on the region books between May and June as they tend to sell pretty well and also require more maps and technical charts than expensive interior artwork.
Once the new module is out look for a major bundle of all of our books. Everything as far as all PDF books in a new GM’s starter bundle (all five books) for something like $25.00 bucks. With the big update coming for the main rule book we may also do something revolutionary like reorganize everything we’ve done so far into one big / single book at the 6 month mark. Probably make that the main entry level book into running rocketship empires. Then do the yearly compilation books as we had planned.
We may decide to hold off on doing print versions of books until we’ve put out six months worth of pdf books and then just do one single compilation print run book combining everything from the last six months in one big volume.
Price point for that sort of large book would be pretty good as we would likely reformat to make the best possible use of space and the best possible method for organization. So all ships would be together in a ship chapter. All the maps and region information would be together in a region chapter…the module would have its own section….etc…
The goal, of course, would be to do all this while keeping the cost down and the production values up. I am reasonably sure I could put everything to together in a soft bound B&W interior version for less than $40.00 and that includes shipping in North America. If we managed to get our own color production machine we might be able to even do a color version for below $40.00.
