None of my clients, thankfully, have ever done this to me, but there is at least one PDF publisher I know and whose blog I used to read who openly and repeatedly ADVOCATES doing this to artists (which is why I don't read his blog any longer).

A little over a week ago, while Jen was getting out of bed, the frame on the bed snapped. It had a shoddy-ass welding job, so I'm actually surprised it lasted this long.

Anyways, I called and had it replaced under warranty (with one day left, HAH! Awesome). Waited the necessary week for replacement parts to arrive, sleeping on the couch in the meanwhile. A friend with a truck helped me haul the old parts in and bring the new parts home.

But at the store, I find out they ordered the wrong parts. Footboard and rails instead of headboard and rails. "Oops, I typed the wrong order code," she says. The gods smiled, however, as they found they had the same headboard on display and gave me that one.

Yay, I thought, now I can sleep in our bed again. Yet when I went to put it together, and despite asking specifically, twice, of two separate employees, if all the bolts and such were in the box and being told "Definitely!"...

...No bolts. No nuts. No washers.

Perfectly good frame (and with much better weld on this) with no way to actually put it together BECAUSE THERE'S NO @0$$#*& BOLTS!

I shake my tiny fist at you, capricious spirits, for making me sleep on my couch again! And at customer service people who aren't doing their jobs.

This is (at least) one more uncomfortable night on the couch. Growl. I'm almost ready to just say "fuck it" and jury-rig it together with sticks and bungee cords.

I'll call tomorrow afternoon and hopefully they will have the bolts, etc. and not have to order them.

Even though I have an RPG and a supplement in the works, and others of both on the back-burner, I find I am slowly transitioning myself away from the tabletop gaming scene.

It honestly just isn't giving me what I want (recognition, community, help; ie: like-minded compatriots), and hasn't for quite some time. I knew it wasn't, and I've tried to change things so it did, but no luck, it just hasn't and isn't happening.

Much like going professional in my illustration career, I just can't seem to break in to it. So I'd rather quit now and avoid the whole "burning out on it for five years" which is what happened to me with illustration. Get some distance, find my footing and decide if I'm into it any longer and in what way.

I do plan on finishing the two pieces I have, but then I am most likely done with it for a while. Instead, I'll be switching over to concentrate on fiction writing. I've already started making some inroads there, meeting people, signing up for forums, joining critique groups.

I'm hoping that given one doesn't need people locally to engage in its practice or build a solid community, unlike gaming or game design, I can avoid the problems and issues that come with trying to be a gamer and designer in the middle of nowhere.

We'll see if it goes any better than anything else I've done (or rather tried to do) in my life.

But let's face it, some of us are "Motley Crue", and some of us are "Anvil", and after three spectacular failures that "should not" have happened over the last decade-and-a-half (if things actually worked the way our culture believes they work), and a mental breakdown earlier this year, I just don't have the energy any longer to be the latter.

(If you don't get the reference, look it up.)

Has it been so long since I published a PDF that it is now common practice to charge around $.20 per product page in a PDF instead of around $.10? Because I'm looking at Derelict Starships from TableTop Adventures, and their "discount" price is $12 for a 65-page PDF (claiming $20 at "regular" price, but RPGNow vendors famously display "discount" prices--that never change--as a marketing tactic).

That product should be around $7, not nearly double that. So...seriously? Should I be charging $5 for Lotus Magic instead of $3? And $9 for L&R instead of $4.50? Anyone know what's up, or is TTA just overcharging for their PDFs?

So...shipping prices.

Seriously? Holy crap.

I just want ONE item, and I have to go looking for other items to add to make it WORTHWHILE to buy the one item given the cost of shipping. In one case, shipping was almost equal to the price of the item itself (a $10 book). In the other, it was 30% of the price!

Ridiculous.

Yesterday, to quiet my depression and feeling of just floating through life without accomplishing anything, and given the limited success of Wild Hunt Studios as an RPG publisher, I have decided to change direction as a business and cash in on something I'm hoping will be much more lucrative and provide much better exposure.

This morning, I contacted some friends and acquaintances I thought might be interested in the idea I had, who were either very experienced in the business or who had specialized, highly under-appreciated skills useful to the new direction I was considering. After a long, thought-provoking, and eye-opening discussion we came up with what we think will be a winning business plan for my new direction we feel caters to a currently highly under-represented market in a way no one else is.

In light of this, my partners and I have decided to transition the name of the Studio, though we will be keeping the same recognizable logo of two running dogs with one slight change to bring it more in-line with our new direction, and our future product line-up will be changing substantially.

We will be selling high quality photography combining well-loved, popular subjects with one of the best selling products of all time. So, are you ready to see the future of the Studio? Heck, COULD anyone have been ready for this?

( ...click here to see the new direction of the Studio..! )

Our feeling is that we can reach a wider audience with these products and increase our profits and brand exposure with the public. Expect the website to start making its transition and start providing new content over the next few days, and make sure you take part in our first poll so you can have input into the nature of the first of the new products we plan to provide!

You know what really makes me beat my head against a wall?

When a publisher releases a free PDF version of a game to test interest in sales, and then complains about the fact that thousands of people downloaded the PDF, but only dozens actually bought the book, then go on to argue that the giveaway clearly deprived them of profits they would have otherwise had.

The above "lost sales" idea is often, though not exclusively, an observation/statement made by clueless newbs to the publishing game, but hobby-industry names aren't beyond using it to make similarly foolish claims (I am reminded of an on-going argument some years ago I had with an individual at, as I recall, Hogshead Publishing over his claim that because they had released one of their core books for free on-line and then seen no significant increase in sales despite thousands-and-thousands of downloads, they had lost significant sales).

Big eyes, cue whine: "I released my product for free to see if it would drive up sales. And people downloaded 2451 copies, but the book hasn't sold anywhere near that! Obviously, if I hadn't released it for free, I would have made thousands of sales that I've now lost!"

The glaring illogic underlying the nonsense of this claim is the foundational assumption that "everyone who downloaded the book would have bought it". Or even "a significant number of those who downloaded the book would have bought it".

This is about as rational an idea as filming stacks of your book in a store, counting every time someone picks up your book to look at it and then freaking out when your sales numbers don't match the number of people who looked at your book! (OMG! PEOPLE BROWSING AT BOOKSTORES ARE DEPRIVING ME OF PROFITS!!)

But unless you're a raging idiot, you wouldn't expect everyone who picks up your book in the store (or, heck, even who checks it out from a library!) and browses through it to then purchase a copy. And in the vast majority of cases, just as with browsing titles at the bookstore, the downloader finds the material of no interest, or at least not enough interest to purchase right then.

(Which further assumes the downloader even gets around to actually looking at the PDF, instead of either deleting it or forgetting about it entirely!)

The issue is this: downloads are not products.

A downloaded product is at best the equivalent of someone picking up your book and flipping through it to see if they find it interesting...which it may not even be the equivalent of. People will often and regularly download things just to download them. They won't use them, read them, share them, or anything else. They will download it and packrat the file.

Heck, I can't tell you the number of PDFs I've downloaded off the net that momentarily piqued my interest--hundreds over the the years--that I never even glanced at after download, and now sit forgotten and unread on my hard drive. I am not at all unique or uncommon in this behavior.

THESE ARE NOT LOST SALES.

The "lost sales" viewpoint and argument arise from a failure to understand the nature of on-line transactions and virtual realities, and why one can not treat a download as the equivalent of a real copy of an item in a bookstore.

First, while you can tell who "picked up" the book with a download, you can't also tell who "put down" the book--thus the problem with hand-wringing over supposed lost sales is that it assumes as a premise everyone who "picked up" (ie: downloaded) the book never put it down (ie: deleted it afterwards or never bothered to actually look at it).

Electronic downloads are also subtly different from physical sales in that there is no shelf and no physical product and are transferred from a repository location to a viewer's location, rather than the reverse of having individuals travel to the location of that material. Which is describing how: the internet is like bookstore that comes to the customer.

So an electronic file someone has downloaded can not be treated as though it were a physical book sitting on a shelf somewhere in someone's home that they are getting some kind of use out of, that you've thus lost something in the transaction. It can at best be thought of as a product sitting on a shelf in an instantaneously-traveling personalized bookstore, use-unpurchased.

People download things on-line to take a quick look at them, because that's how the on-line world works: information is transferred between machines, rather than a person arriving at the location of the information to be perused. But just as in the old method of introducing people to products: in the vast majority of cases find they aren't interested in what they see.

At best downloads can be treated and function as though the book had been picked up and put back down; but given that people will regularly download things just to download them, download numbers are meaningless in a traditional sense of measuring actual interest and potential sell-through of goods.

So thousands of people downloaded a free copy of your PDF and yet your sales are only a couple dozen or less? OMG!

Here's what really happened: some folks with unclear motivations moved some electrons around some wires. You have now lost...what? Cost of materials? A sale? Validation of the skill and value of your work? All those people would have bought your book otherwise and now have a free version of it you aren't getting anything for?

Nope. You have lost absolutely nothing. Not unless you count people browsing your book at the store as a lost sale. Not unless you count everyone who fails to buy your product after seeing an ad for it as a lost sale: "They saw my ad and didn't pay me for my book! I'm LOSING SALES!"

And that's it right there: downloads are not sales or product giveaways. They're a form of modern advertising. And if you know anything about advertising, you know adverts do not have a significant sales-conversion rate: we're talking fractions of percentages per advertisement.

You're living in a new world, kids. You need to understand it.

(PS: let's not talk run off and start talking about the above as though it is excusing or minimizing PDF "piracy", because while PDF piracy is related to the above concepts, such a discussion also requires understanding the complexities of the above situation. First focus on wrapping one's head around the idea that downloads are not measurements of interest or sales potentials in either direction and the nature of electronic media and how they are not at all like physical media (even when we want to treat them as the same).)

It's the Crazy Belated August Birthday Post GenCon Autumn Madness ORX sale! Yay! Ever wanted to try ORX but, you know, you weren't sure about spending the $10 on the PDF?

Well, now's your chance to grab the PDF for $3 off! Just head on over to Indie Press Revolution and get your copy of the PDF for $3 off during the month of September.

Or, you can buy the PDF+Print combo and grab the PDF free! Yep, free PDF with the book until the end of September (and you even get the book for 39-cents less! Crazy!).

And, hey, tell your friends, loved ones, co-workers, and random strangers on the street. We won't mind!

Guy (tundra_no_caps) recently went over the retail plan IPR provides to its members. I'm not much for math normally--I tend to avoid it at all costs--but his numbers started me thinking about how the retailer discount was affecting my overall profits and general success from a monetary, rather than sales standpoint and how long it would take to get me back in the black with ORX.

( ...boring the shit out of everyone but math geeks and people who care... )