RE: [DL] Magazines (was: combined books)

[Gryphon <gryphonkin@iwon.com>]

Magazines make their money through advertising, not cover price.  If the
Deadlands Mag were strictly a "House Organ" they would not be able to sell
much advertising space (or not want to help promote competitors), and
therefore it would not be cost-effective to produce.

I don't know if the advertising would be that hard to find.  I can't imagine
PEG having THAT much trouble promoting other companies considering their
close past relationships with Chaosium, AEG, and White Wolf.  Add to that
the fact that they're "in good" enough with Steve Jackson to be working on
Gurps Deadlands and comfortable enough with the empire to be making a D20
book...

Add to that dealers, games selling web sites, fiction publishers, etc that I
think would also possibly advertise.  I might be wrong.  This is not far
from my education background but it certainly wasn't my concentration...


Granted they are
always taxing their own creative juices, but someone still needs to select,
edit, and format submissions, plus a whole bunch of other things, to get
them ready for publication.

True, but you're talking about one full time guy there with moderately
priced desktop publishing software. $20k or so if you get someone green and
talented.  They're out there.  Assuming $2 profit per mag (on a $6 cover
price plus what you can get in advertising) you've got to convince 10,000
people a year to buy the book.  Since some people will buy all 12, that
seems reachable but Goff would know better than me.  He's seen their sales
figures...


Plus, there is the added difficulty of
maintaining story line consistency...


Not too hard there either, IMHO.  You just put in your guidelines that no
freelancer can significantly alter major players.  IE, you can have the cult
of Lost Angels in your story but you can't kill Rev. Grimme.  Paramount does
it all the time with Star Trek fiction contests.  Most of the current staff
written adventure modules don't advance the major players too much so I
can't imagine people being upset if the freelance ones don't.  Most of us
don't want to change the world, we just want to have something cool to do in
the Weird West.

I wouldn't even have a problem with one article an issue about another game.
It's what Dragon does.  It may have an article or two about something else,
but it's a D&D mag.  Again, I tend to overlook the extraneous material for
$6 more than I do for $15.  The funny thing is that $6 monthly costs me more
than $15 quarterly but it's a perception thing...


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