I hope this type of thing doesnt bore people, but the “how do we make successful businesses” part of the rpg industry interests me as much as the design and game side. I only get to keep reading and playing cool shit as long as people are making cool shit. So today? Napkin math. https://twitter.com/Pandatheist/status/1266086552393994241

Lets say I did do this thing. I want to be a publisher, and do it full time. To be comfortable where I live I need to make somewhere between 30-40k. We’ll say 30k to talk minimum viable business.

Next question is what percentage of the money do I keep doing the usual publisher job. Handling printing, distribution, marketing. Matching artists and writers and layout and editors. Numbers Ive heard on what make sense range from 10%-50% given distribution of risk and scale.

For simple napkin math and starting from maximum $ in hands of creators lets say I want to make 10% for my part. So to make 30k at 10% the business needs to make at least 300k profit. A lot of money in rpg land, but doable.

That leaves 270k for creators which, unless its an obscene number of projects and creators leaves plenty for other people to make a living wage too. So. 300k. How do we make that happen?

Its tough to just plan for success, but certain business models are better for it than others. One option is to use high margin successes to fund more risky projects. Use a fancy dice project to fund an indie game. A 5e adventure path to fund an arthouse adventure.

Looking at kickstarter trends you can certainly see average success and guess at margins.

Another thing to think about is the physical size of projects. If you keep text length down you can effectively pay more per word/layout page/art piece.

If you write a 50 page book that due to good layout and design and quality writing does what it normally takes 200 pages to do you can effectively pay 4 times as much. Which theoretically also gives writers more time to do more projects which means more money.

That 4 times isnt really quite true of course. What youre paying less for in writing youre paying more for in editing and layout. But whatever the actual percentage you are being more efficient. And stacking up efficiencies matters in paying people a living wage.

Adding to that is planning your formats. My personal theory is you ignore the middle band and focus on zines and luxury books. With zines your costs are incredibly low. You can experiment on the cheap. Test new ideas.

With luxury books the margins are high and the cost per book is expected to be high. You can charge $60-80 for a book and as long as the quality stays high people have no complaints. You can charge $100-300 if youve found the right market. Theyre buying beautiful art objects.

Getting into the weeds here, but my point is this. I think there is a viable business model that hasnt been tried with rpgs that can make it happen. Itll require some experimenting and work and a lot of trust but I think its worth pursuing. More ahead as I think through this.