Gamer Lifestyle

Johnn Four recently quoted something he read in a RPG forum: if you want to make a small fortune with roleplaying games, start with a large one. Pretty funny. But thankfully, it’s not quite true.

Brian Owens, the manager at Dungeon Mastering, organized a free webcast event. He interviews me about breaking into the RPG industry.
Visit this article on DungeonMastering.com for all the details: Playing RPG’s for a living?

Always an interesting read from a Gamer Lifestyle perspective is Matt Sprange’s annual state of the union address about Mongoose and the RPG industry:
State of the Mongoose Address

This is a response I wrote to a Dungeon Mastering reader who was wondering how to get noticed in the RPG industry.
How do you compete with free?

Here’s the thing about working in the gaming and creative writing fields: people do it for free.  With a little effort, WOTC could get free content for almost all [...]

I’m looking at two game world products on RPGNow. Both talk about nations, history, races, locations, NPCs, flora and fauna, etc. Both are titled “World of XYZ” where XYZ is the name of the setting. There are many other game worlds available at RPGNow. These are just two.
Now put yourself in the designers’ shoes. They [...]

Many up and coming publishers, designers, and writers aim to release a print product immediately. This is a mistake. They should release a PDF, ebook, or digital version first. Here’s why.
Very low retail penetration vs. the world online
Unless you already have distributor relationships and retailers know your products sell well, you won’t break into retail. [...]

One of the leading PDF marketplaces for roleplaying games is going to offer print-on-demand versions of ebooks they sell.
http://www.flamesrising.com/drivethrurpg-pod-news/ via @CriticalHits on twitter
They are rolling this project over time so it might not be available to all publishers anytime soon.
What does this mean for my epublishing projects?
In the short term: nothing. Do business with an [...]

Whenever you start a project, you should decide on how much time you want to spend on it. You should NOT look at the project and try to figure out how much time it will take to complete it.
Let’s say you want to write an RPG book. What happens if you have a great idea [...]

Zach has another great post about PDFs as lead-in products. It’s primarily feedback for print publishers, but good reading for all RPG content creators.
http://www.rpgblog2.com/2009/08/pdfs-as-lead-in-product.html

Our coaching program opens today. It includes a 5 months course about developing, publishing and marketing your own RPG products.
We suggest you read our free book if you haven’t done so yet – it will give you a very good idea of what we do and if it’s right for you:
Signup for the Gamer Lifestyle [...]