Travis Miller at Grumpy Wizard had an interesting post called The Best Thing LotFP did for RPG's. In the post he talks about how James Raggi of Lamentations of the Flame Princess fame changed things. I'll let Travis tell why:
He pays an advance and then a share of the profit to the designer. The designer retains copyright for the product and may choose to end the license when the term of service is over. This last bit is very significant and almost no other publisher offers that.
Most importantly he assumes almost all of the risk involved in the product. He pays for art, layout, editing, printing and shipment to the distributor. All of that before the first book is sold. If you haven’t seen LotFPs books, they are some of the highest production quality in the business.
In short he does what most publishers do but gives the creator a lot more in return.
Why? Wouldn't it be far more profitable to profiteer off the writers? In Raggi's words:
So anyway, this has good and bad effects. Good, because after years of running my metal zine and talking to musicians who didn't have the rights to their own work and were making pretty much no money while their record label was, when I got into RPGs I wasn't going to do the same thing. Even if that means certain titles going bye-bye because their creators weren't sticking around.
So he saw how it sucked and had integrity to not pull that same shit on others even when he was small time and could easily justify it as the way the system worked. Raggi gets a lot of grief online because of the shock aesthetic of LotFP artwork, and because he took a goofy picture with Jordan Peterson, and because he mostly sided with his most successful writer who was unpleasant online and accused of horrible things by his girlfriend.
I've always been a bit neutral towards Raggi, but now looking at the way he does business when he didn't have to, without bragging about it as far as I can tell, makes me like the guy. I wish him success and hope LotFP survives.
No comments:
Post a Comment