Support Indie RPGs

In response to this post on Reddit.

Please don’t take this as any more than a spirited devils advocate in the spirit of debate and jocularity. I’m not disagreeing with you per se or saying you’re wrong.
This isn’t a defence of that other thing but it is maybe being a little honest about what it means to be an indie. It’s not all roses and buttercups and problems won’t be solved by putting away a few dollars every week.

Services like Fiverr are pretty terrible for sourcing art…particularly because there’s a good chance that when you pay your money, you’re just getting a “prompt engineer” anyway. I had a long relationship with an artist from around 2001 and just last year he switched to using AI to do the “groundwork” and allow him to focus on the specifics of what clients wanted. Why? Because he wanted more clients. So, I found a different artist.

Art is easily the single highest cost of my books and that includes my time in the commissioning process for free. It’s much more expensive than the writing. I mean, a small book might require 10 pieces of art – with very little re-use available to you. The next book might require another 10. By your numbers that means a cost of between 750 and 3000 per book on art. (it’s usually higher because commercial licenses tend to be higher for some reason and ten is a low amount of art).

For the indie (lets say the hundreds of one-person-bands out there bringing their RPG heartbreaker to life) that art cost is paid out before the book is finished; so before the book has a chance to earn a cent. Even if you’re not printing physical copies, you’ve months of writing and editing and planning and commissioning and hoping it delivers. You hope you’ll make back the investment in art alone because for many it is something they do after a day processing Excel sheets, or stacking shelves or backbreaking outdoors work – the real work which pays the bills. They would love to create and just live on the proceeds but that’s not going to be for everyone; the industry, like most industries, can only support so many rockstars and getting that right vibe isn’t for everyone.

Sure, you can spend months on a crowdfunding plan but knowing some folk who had successful kickstarter campaigns personally, one quipped after a few beers – “failure is better than success if you don’t make it big”. His kickstarter was enough to deliver the product to backers as long as nothing went wrong. And maybe he should have absolutely flooded Facebook/Insta/Reddit with adverts (as I saw some other company do recently).

And then, to top it all, you get a sense of how much you can charge. I am well aware that I self-limit – but that’s because I abhor fame and recognition (this isn’t my therapy session, dammit). So, you build the book over a few months, engage with people for testing and readthrus. commission and pay for art, then do the layout and post the finished product. 30-50% of cover price goes to the aggregator (meanwhile Apple is being hit for charging 30%). And out of what’s left you hope to cover the art for the next book. Which means probably 1000 sales. Probably more if you engage in promotions. Meanwhile you’re already to writing the next one while fielding piracy and people who think, without reading it, the book you’ve poured passion into isn’t worth a cup of coffee. Even better when they use a public forum (like Reddit) to tell a million people their opinion based on not reading it.

And that’s if you’re just trying to break even on cash. Survival wages in my part of the world are about €25,000. I’d have to be selling literally 20 times more books to earn that. (hey…and that’s the dream, right? I’d love to be able to sit here and hallucinate wildly onto paper every day). And the art costs would go up. Actually it might be cheaper to literally hire an artist with a salary than do commissions. And selling 20X more books? That means targetting one of the bigger markets like D&D or CoC. (and I don’t want to do that). D&D would seem to the obvious one – but everyone thinks that – so being specialised into a little niche kinda works. The D&D market is 20x bigger easily….but there’s 100x more competition for those precious leisure dollars. That would mean much more time spent on promotion – the bit I don’t like.

I’m very glad my TTRPG sales are funding artists and not my life.

Nothing more demoralising than seeing the proportion of gamers who think “artists should be paid” (oh, 90%?) and the proportion of gamers who set the PWYW amount on DTRPG to “zero” (oh, probably 95%). That’s some slap-in-the-face irony right there. One of the nice things about a little credit on DTRPG is that when someone in my creative community makes a new book, I have no problems dropping $10 on it even if it’s PWYW ($4).

To give a concrete example; in the last six months I sold 145 copies of one of my PWYW books…bringing in a grand total of $26.27, of which I saw…$18.30. The art cost for that book was about $300. A sunk cost because it’s an into to a later book (the one I just dropped more cash on art for) and I figure that’s 145 people I can send an email to and tell them about the next book, right?

Piracy is absolutely rampant in the industry as well. Never mind that web site that was eventually taken down (one of my early RPGs was on there and was evidently painstakingly scanned) but Scribd too? I don’t know how that site survives. And it’s not that pirates wouldn’t have bought the product – one of them did – but they also thought it was better that others didn’t have to. Kick in the nuts there.

Just this week I spent about $1000 on art. Not enough art for the books in the pipeline but then I needed a new laptop and so I’ll find the cash a little later. That will bring the total for art spend this calendar year (first six months) to around $2000 – that includes two stock art/photography subscriptions. The sales for books in the same period brought in $1514. Now the obvious response is “make better books” (which is pretty insulting) or get better at sales (which I have no interest in doing). That does include a Promo by DTRPG which sold one of the best books at a significant discount.

So that was $2000 to support art sources, and about $1000 in fees to DTRPG.

Buit I’m also running at -500 for the year. Whoops. Maybe I suck at business.

I’m not even going to address printing. A lot more work and you make even less. And the main sites for distributors take 80% of cover price. Out of the remaining 20% you commonly have to commission the art, lay it out, print the book and ship it to them at your cost. (and this is why I’m not on IPR – not their fault…but I was royally screwed by Key20 back in the day when they sold my books, kept the money and to get any remaining stock returned, I had to pay for shipping it back). Paper is bloody heavy.

So, it’s not easy….but it is enjoyable. As long as I’m not relying on it for the mortgage or to put kids through college then it’s a creative outlet that pays an artist a chunk of cash every few months. Maybe it helps them not have to have a dreary office or shelf-stacking job or goes into their kids college fund.

That’s worth it.

Also. Buy indie RPGs. Sermon over. Welcome to my TED Talk. etc