RPG writing is a weird middle space between technical writing and fiction. There's the field of create non-fiction, where the writer inserts themselves into the narrative. In contrast, I see RPG writing as "non-literary fiction", because we create technical manuals and biographies about places and stories that don't exist. "There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them" (Jules Dassin). There's A-list writers and B-list writers. I'm C-list. This is my story of my non-RPG writing career.

Since before 2012, I had been blogging about my DIY Space work for a time, for pizza money (around 10K readers/month and getting maybe $10-20/month for it). I then tried to find a publisher for my first book, aka 'The Book'. My intent was a brilliant 'Three Cups of Tea" about the entire movement that would instantly become a best-seller. I secured an awesome agent and he told me (accurately and frankly) that creative non-fiction was a hard sell unless I already had a platform beyond the 2K readers of my existing work. So we pitched O'Reilly Press/Make Media. At the time I had raw blog posts but not a full book, and wrote a full book proposal for them.

They were launching their ebooks, and so they suggested us as an early adopter. Their sell was (from memory, apologies if I'm off by a few %) "printed books got an advance and 10% or so royalties, eBooks+POD got no advance and 20% royalties!" Which was... a bad sell. Put another way, if your agent starts advocated self-publishing (which leads to no money for the agent), the publishing model is a mess (did I mention my agent was awesome?).

We negotiated up a higher % (since eBooks+POD have lower up-front costs) in return for me test-using their web tools for my book (instead of submitting a book in .doc for them to put into their system). Also, to make the book a DIY "how to" instead of inserting my self/path into the story. Also to split it into 4 smaller books instead of 1 book.

How did this work out for me? 4 smaller book(lets?) released since 2012, generally a royalty check averaging $100/month for that time (multiply $100 x 12 months x 6 years and that'd be my estimate on it), They also provided me opps to speak at MakerFaires and generally build my platform. And most significantly for me— I applied for a professorship at a local small college and got it on part of having 2 of the 4 books already in press, so career-wise and platform-building, it was a plus. Then — randomly!— last year they asked if they could offer my books as part of a Maker HumbleBundle... and a little later I got a check for $8K just from that one event.

During that time, I did SME work (subject matter expert) for grants and white papers for corporations doing space stuff; in general a whitepaper that might be ready by about a dozen insiders and the work pays crazy-great, maybe $10K for 1 month's work— but I was lucky to get 2-3 of these gigs per year. Thus my rule of inversion— the larger your audience, the less your pay. Blogs reached 10K+ and paid pizza money; books and articles reach 2K+ and pay a month's rent; white papers reach a dozen and provide real money. But the books nabbed my my current salaried job. Your mileage may vary. I hope this helps as one path within the confusing narrative of the current publishing world!

Cheers, Sandy