Why buy from us rather than download from free fan sites? A lot of people have
already touched on the most obvious answer, quality. Although many fan sites
are really well done, the amount of professional quality material out there is
minimal. We also plan on leveraging on our existing customer base. Our latest
edition of our larp rules (NERO 8th Edition) has sold over 5,000 copies in less
than 6 months through direct sales only. Converting our campaign to d20 for p&p
release is a natural step.
The next question is how to turn a profit. This is by far harder than a lot of
people think. Unless 3E manages to bring back the "golden days", when rpgs were
selling like hotcakes, and 10,000 unit print runs were considered the minimum,
rather than a goal, no one will be getting rich off of d20 products. Luckily
there are a number of new technologies available as alternatives to the standard
"print & pray for sales" model. Print on demand can help drastically reduce
your up front cost, but in most cases also reduces your profit margin. I
personally feel that CDRom distribution is the way to go. Put your product
together in a well formatted eBook, burn it to CD, and you are all set. With
the right eBook software, you can even encrypt all the files so someone can't
cut material out for easy copying. CDs are really cheap to produce, and don't
take up the shelf space a book does. You can easily place cdroms in a point of
purchase display near a register without loosing much space.
Our first d20 product will be released on cdrom, using an eBook engine. In
addition, the cdrom will contain all the materials in both HTML and PDF format
so it can be used on a Mac in addition to PC. All open material will also be
duplicated as standard ascii text files, and all maps will be provided in both
jpeg and CC2 format.
John Bacon
NERO Int'l - www.nerolarp.com
Canterbury Creations - www.teknoworld.com
Note: neither web site will contain any d20 product information until NDA, d20
logo, and d20 STL are all finalized.
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For more information, please link to www.opengamingfoundation.org
