Well, the main flaw I can see in the concept is the need to keep up with demand. If something is free, everyone will want a copy and many of them may never read or use it, and therefore never see the advertising either. For such a venture to be worthwhile you have to put out a serious number of copies, and you'll be paying for that with your advertising revenues, meaning you'll either need to charge pretty high fees per ad, or have a lot of adverts (and thus find a lot of advertising clients) to cover your costs.

Distribution is likely to be a sticky one. Most distribution houses take their money as a cut of the cover price. I've never arranged for a free item to be distributed, so you'd likely be best off contacting someone directly to ask about that. I've used Key20 in the past, and always had good communication with Indie Press Revolution who might be more open to the concept. There are others though - anyone else got recommendations? You'll also have to budget for postage and warehousing fees, although given how fast free stuff flies off the shelves the latter will probably not be an issue.

Nevertheless I like the general idea, and if you can find enough clients to cover your costs I think it could be fun to do something of that nature. It's finding paying clients to advertise that is going to be the key stumbling block I think.

-Ash

You know I was talking to someone that assumed that all the ads in the back of our books were paid for. WTF? The answer is no.

I have never carried a paid ad in the back of one of my books. Two reasons: (1) the ads I carry are mutualism in action - it costs me nothing/little to carry the ad and I help out other games that I think readers of my books would be interested in, in return my ads appear in the backs of books where they might be useful to other readers, (2) there is no money for an ad budget. Seriously. If I had any more money to play with it would go on art or editing or something to add value to the content. Paid ads are a luxury that I cannot afford.

If anyone does throw money on these ads I can only feel that they are pissing their money away.

So, personally, I cannot see any indie games wanting to advertise in your books, but I could be way wrong. I would love to be proved wrong and adopt your idea if it flies.

Mainstream books are not going to want to pay for ads in our books either. Their ad money is better served by finding a more visible market, to be honest.

But that's just my gut feeling. I would be super-interested to see if you could get enough ad revenue to make it viable.

I know from the numbers needed to advertise in KOTDT that people do pay up decent money, but I feel that's because something like KOTDT has value it can offer me - visibility, legitimacy, sales (one would presume). Can ads at the back of a game book offer that in a competitive way, at a competiitve price?

That's not free to the user, of course, but it takes care of distribution and doesn't leave you out of pocket.

Alternatives off the top off my head:
- Pay for a limited print run out of your own pockets.
- Use the ransom model - see if enough folks are willing to chip in a bit to make it happen.

Tim Gray
Silver Branch Games
www.silverbranch.co.uk

OK...

The best way to distribute things for free is through pdf, in a format that matches something like Lulu. That way the consumer can choose to stay in pdf format or get a one-shot printed of the pdf.

Once you start wandering into ink-on-dead-tree printing, you have printing and distribution costs to cover if you want it to be truly free.

Can you reduce those costs? Well, you could make the distribution incidental by handing it out at cons and stores to anyone that would take it. That seems to me to be a very wasteful way of doing things and one which will result in a very poor book-to-play ratio. Beyond that, I'm unsure whether you could distribute free through established routes. You would have to do self-fulfilment and cover P&P.

So how do you cover them? Well that seems to be the kicker. You could self-fund but thats madness. You could seek a sponsor - that might work? If your game was actively promoting a particular activity or cause you could get funding? Of course, that funding would be finite and your distribution could be infinite... problem!

Advertising, IMO, doesn't work as a true sales mechanism in game books. Gamers tend to work on two very different levels when it comes to decision making. There are the very low involvement ones ('Oh new! Shiny! Must Have!) and the very high involvement ones ('I don't buy anything without playing it, reading reviews and physically touching a copy'). Ads don't seem to work on either of these levels for sales. They do however, act as great flags for the future production of books - acting as a trigger for Mr Thorough to start his process and raising expectation for Mr Shiny. The upshot of this is that I couldn't be certain of the ROI on any expenditure and that would make me nervous. The other thing to take into consideration is that most games designers are trying to control their costs and their models don't include paid advertising budgets. Whether that advertising could be absorbed into current budgets would really rely upon your rate card and naturally the market of the game you were planning and your distribution methods. The last thing anyone wants to do is to have their invested money sitting in a back-bedroom!

There is another way to look at this, which is less generous. Other gamers advertising in your game is essentially them subsidising your desire to do it for free with their money and potentially your free game could mean that they miss out on sales, doubly costing them.

Which leaves you in a quandry.

I think you could also look at other organisations that give away printed literature and how they do it? However, the only ones I know of are local authorities (massive subsidy from council tax etc.) or religions (paid for internally) or 'free' newspapers (advertising driven)

For me, a pdf with an easily fascilitated print add-on is the way forward for this, unless you have an insight from elsewhere?

Neil

Take the King's shilling at http://www.omnihedron.co.uk/dutyandhonour/

Hi all, thanks for the comments, they're mostly quite helpful. I'm really just bouncing an idea around at the moment, checking for feasibility and general thoughts, so any comments are very helpful.

Firstly, just to clarify, the game in question is already available as a free PDF, but there is a good number of gamers who are either non-electonic/online in general or "dead-tree" only. My essential goal is to get my game out to as many people as possible. I'm thinking that free PDFs is one way, dead-tree at cost is another (but I suspect that this might not avail the product to many more). The idea of getting advertising to cover is merely a third option that I'm not sure many people have considered. But I thought if anybody had, you guys would :).

The collective endeavour journal - is that a an "at cost" book from Lulu? (or ignore if that's too personal a question). I had an idea in my head that when you launched it you gave it away for free at conventions. Is this a mistaken memory? Might distribution via conventions be a way to go, thus limiting costs by limiting the number of copies needed to print?

Thoughts apreciated,

Ben

The journal is sold for money in its print form. The print price essentially covers the LULU cost to print plus a small amount to pay for a free copy of the journal to go to each contributor (I'm not sure it's reached that lofty stage yet). Any surplus monies on top of that will be put towards producing more journals further down the line, perhaps. Or other initiatives.

It did occur to me that some publishers in the US were going to do a free book for "free RPG" day. The book itself costs money to produce, and my understanding was that was going to be underwritten by the contributors. I assumed that in return for sharing the cost of this book, they would hope to gain exposure for their other "for sale" games and so on.

Ways to minimize the cost of a product, to make the costs you need to cover much lower, are always something worth investigating. A magazine style RPG produced cheaply (newsprint, cheap glossy advertising print) would require less investment. If you could get a grant from somewhere then it could fly. Or it might be seen as worth paying for by a publisher to gain more advertising than an ad in KOTDT, for example (which is several hundred dollars).

A partnership with a printer might also open up that avenue. You agree to print a big book with them and they may offer a substantially discounted rate on a magazine-style leaflet/game.

We've looked into the free distribution option for an RPG of ours. Here is what we came up with.

1) To get the ads to realistically cover the price of print and distribution and leave a small margin extra to cover the unexpected costs in such a system the book itself would have to be about 36 pages or less, be nearly half ads and we would have to print 1 million of them.

But here is the kicker. You can't just show up out of nowhere and sell ads at the price you need to sell ads for a 1 million print and distribution. You need to have a track record. So that means you can't just print a million once and be done. You have to do a million distribution once a month or every other months to extablish a track record as of being just like a regular mass market magazine, absorbing the losses of the first few issues that go out advertising lite. So to make such a business model work, we figured we would need to do 6 1 million print runs per year, alternating between 3 to 4 core game systems to promote in that fashion, then continue the enterprise year after year.

2) To sell that many high value ads consistently, you would need to assemble a network or advertising sales reps with assigned territories and likely a full time manager to coordinate it all. And, of course, these peoples salaries and commissions have to be accounted for in your overall budget.

3) Figuring out a distribution methodology to distribute upwards of 6 million games per year, for free, is a challenging endeveour upon itself and comes with substantial costs of its own.

4) Yes, we do plan to do this someday. But given it will take 3/4 of a million dollars to bankroll just to get started, its just going to have to wait a bit longer.

As an alternative, we have also put together plans for distribution to the dollar store chains. Using booklets that have only a handful of ads that can be profitably printed and sold at wholesale into the dollar store markets. The only problem here is that the largest chains like Dollar Tree and others, which would be needed to make the program a real success, all require a vendor to be EDI compatible. And yeah, that comes with some serious up front costs of its own. Either we have to invest a couple hundred grand to get basic EDI set up for ourselves or we have to find a distributor that is EDI that we can sel through, but that cuts into an already fragile profit margin.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.guildofblades.com/retailgroup.php
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com

Much appreciated.

No problem. Its something we have spent some extensive time trying to figure out how to get started. trying to figure out how to shave off more of the up front capital so we can do it sooner rather than later.

The best I've ever managed was to trim the core rules down to being a self covered 32 page booklet with 8 pages in color and the rest in black and white, to be printed on a cold web press. Less than ideal, but that got printing costs down to about $.07 per unit printed at 1 million (roughly $70K).

The problem is, its all those other costs that kill you. 1 million little booklets as such is still a semi trailer for, which to ship to us direct is about $5,500. The problem is, we don't have warehousing for a million books, nor a professional warehousing space with a nice truck dock for such a shipment to be unloaded. Which means to have it delivered would also cost us additional labor and fees fr having that truck sit idol for hours while we unloaded it. So upwards of $7000 just to take direct delivery (assuming we could find a space to stuff it all into).

But since we didn't have that space, it would be more realistic to have the printer handle the larger fulfillment directly, which would account for direct shipping about 550,000 books directly to their distribution sources. That direct fulfillment however would run about $200 for case lot of 100 books, which comes to $11,000, plus the actual cost to ship all that out (another $25K or so). With the remainder coming to us for smaller level fulfillment, running at about $4K for delivery (assuming we can martial the manpower to get it off the truck in a reasonable time frame).

So, printing $70K, direct fullfullment costs & shipping $37,000 and direct recieving of the remainder $4000. = $111,000

The problem is that to get a whole bunch of folks to distribute a free book for you also isn't cheap. Distributors and retailers will do it, but only if you can do some palm greesing (buying ads in distributor booklets, given some free copies of the non free edition core book and a POP display to retailers. Buying ad pages on convention onsite books, etc). The sum of all of this buttering of the distribution channels, on estimate, worked out to about $20,000 spent on convention ads and distributor catalog ads, $5,000 for the printing and shipping costs for distributing
2,000 core rule booklets and $7,000 for approximately 500 custom POPs printed and shipped to partner stores. So that's another $32,000.

So, $143,000 bare bones to cover basic printing and distribution. More if you have to pay for some warehousing. On a per person basis, that's pretty reasonable. A bit of $.14 to put your game system into someone's hands, with the hope that having chosen distribution venues properly, that a healthy portion are put into potentially interested persons' hands.

With a 32 page mag and 12 pages used for ads and 20 for product cover and content, that is $11,916 per page, average.
When you assume a 25% commission going to salespeople, a 10% commission going to a company or person acting acting as the campaign manager and 5% to cover operable expenses that you would cover for these people, that's 40% of your cover going to the cost of getting ads sold from issue to issue. So your $11,916 ad just got bumped to $20,000.

That assumes zero profit and assumes all ads get sold each issue and sold and no discount (which, like, never happens when you are talking about ad buys in those price ranges). So basically, $30K ads.

Ok, yeah, that seems like a scale outside the reality of small game publishing. And outside the affordable cost of small game publishers to actually be some of thos advertisers. And you are right. It was a program designed for mass distribution of a core game system to seed whole swaths of the market. But the thing is, the numbers don't get any more pretty when you scale the print run size back to be in line with what might be small enough scale that actual game companies could support the free game give away by buying ads. Because "per ad exposure' rates begin to climb through the roof as the print volume does down and all associated costs "per item distributed" from printing, shipping and distribution go drastically up.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.guildofblades.com/retailgroup.php
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com

Thanks Ryan. Those figures are very useful. I guess it'll just be an "at cost" thing though lulu, then :(.

Ben

There is always the free PDF route. With some aggressive marketing and download placements, you can hand a lot of those out. We ran a distribution program to hand out a RPG core rules for free via PDF back around 2002-2003 and we have a bit over 2 million downloads in that time period.

Unfortunately it was just a test and not a well organized program and we have zero follow up program and zero infrastructure to channel interested persons into a community for the game. So it was mostly all for naught, other than just testing the waters on free distribution.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.guildofblades.com/retailgroup.php
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com