Sandy's Soapbox
After all, as a project manager and marketing person, it makes no sense that I'm doing layout. But our finance guy can't do it, because he's busy operating the printing press. Our CEO can't do it because he has to come up with the marketing insert for the PAX program book. Earlier columns of mine have covered how you need a mixed-skills team and well-managed time to be a successful publisher. Past that, you also need skills overlap and, frankly, suicidal hubris that enables any of us to tackle any task.
Oddly enough, it's actually trivial to be a publisher. It's that 'successful' part that requires work. Even in this day of fulfillment houses and cheap freelance labor, being in a startup company will suck up 20% more time than you have to throw at it.
In theory, a publisher today can outsource just about every task. Your products are sold by your fulfilment house, advertised with whatever their marketing wing set up, all printed with a POD outfit that took the files your freelance layout person created. The content is whatever those freelance authors sent to your freelance editor, based on an idea culled from Google's zeitgeist. "All" the publisher does is project management.
However, to a large degree, what people buy is the editorial stance. The companies that sell well do so because they have a reputation for quality products of a certain type. In other fields, this is their brand, but don't run off thinking branding is just a marketing term. In publishing, brand heavily comes down to what the line editors do.
If you need to choose between carbonated beverages, their brand is often as strong as any particular taste. Brands hold intangibles-- attitudes, moods, keys to memories of when and where you first experienced the product, invocations of nostalgia or images of edgy futures. And once you choose a soda you like, the company has a recurrent customer.
With publishing, each product is new, not just a bottling of last week's items, so the brand is evolving. Writers and artists vary across books, but the line editor is the constant that brings it all to fruition. With no shortage of talented writers (a deplorable state of affairs that keeps the pay for writing tragically low), then, what distinguishes publishing companies is three simple things.
A successful company will have: a) a vision of how their products are unique in the marketplace and thus enticing to gamers, b) an understanding of how their products fit into the established standard such that retailers will risk buying them, and c) buckets of money for good marketing to get the word out.
A standard debate is that one can either make products the existing market wants, then yell about it to get noticed. Or, one can create new products then convince the existing market that they do indeed want it... again through good marketing. Most 'great ideas' that people suggest to me tend to be the latter masquerading as the former. For example:
"No one has created a pulp sci-fi pirates game! It'll practically sell itself!" This assumes there is a huge audience well primed to receive such a game positively, that such a genre is an untapped but pre-existing niche.
Alas, the idea of untapped but pre-existing niches is a bit of a paradox. In gaming, if a niche exists, someone has tried to sell it. They may have done a piss-poor job of it, but an awesome number of great ideas have been tried.
What tends to distinguish winners from losers is not just quality of execution, but also whether they accurately realized the effort required from the start. Assuming that an audience for a product is out there, ready to buy as soon as they see your item, is pretty much an approach doomed to failure.
If they don't know if they want your product, you have to convince them of its joy. If they do want what your product stands for, you still have to convince them that you can deliver on what you promise.
So for pulp sci-fi pirates, first you have to figure out who will buy it. You have to reach them through advertising and promotions. You have to convince them that your take on pulp sci-fi pirates is legit and worthy. Also, on a second front, you have to convince distributors and retailers that this audience of customers is not fictional and that you can bring them into stores to find and buy your product.
And all of this assumes there's a significant audience for this. If there isn't, you have to add in a layer where you convince people who like conventional fantasy RPGing to also like pulp sci-fi pirates. So you have an added burden-- you have to create your audience, then deliver to them and get them into shops to close the deal.
So anyone who thinks that publishing means putting out a book is pretty much dead wrong. The book is perhaps the last part of the process. First comes the vision, then the strategy for achieving the vision, the tactics for executing the strategy, the resources to carry out the tactics, and finally the propaganda war to convince distributors and retailers that you can make money for them in the process.
Our policy is to not announce products until they are ready. It is best to have the product ready before pushing it-- not just because distributors require 90 day's lead time, but because even 90 days is actually a short window if you are engaging in a proper marketing campaign.
Convention season often provides pressure to rush releases. Once we decided that either 'Roleplaying with Kids' or our first RPG Theory book needs to be out by GenCon and PAX, for example, we're committed even if neither book is ready. The answer turns into, 'make it ready'.
So we have perhaps 30 days to convince distributors that there are people with kids who want to buy gaming books, or people who like RPG Theory and enjoy reading. We have to decide how to stagger our 6 followup releases to best make money for retailers. We, in short, have a lot of hard work during a summer where any sane person would be hanging out at the pool reading.
And might I add, if you are looking for something to read, why not try a pleasing book on RPG Theory from Technomancer Press... that isn't out yet?
Damn. Publishing is hard.
Until next month,
Sandy
sandy@rpg.net
