People enjoyed the last post I did, so let's talk about a different topic today: The costs that go into a book.

One of the most common questions I get is why I don't put more effort into high quality artwork or get professional layout done.

There are three reasons really, but let's look at the first one: The cost.

The numbers Mason, what do they mean?

Art is expensive. If you can get interior art for 30-40 dollars you are doing quite well and the costs only go up from there, depending on complexity. Let us say you want an illustration every 4 pages (which is sparse by most publishers standards) and are paying 50 dollars per illustration. 

Renegade Scout is 200 pages or so, so we need 50 drawings. That's 2500 dollars out of pocket. And to be clear, this is assuming you get a pretty decent deal on the art and with a more sparsely illustrated book than the industry tends to. The art budget for Five Parsecs From Home (a book almost everyone praised the visuals of) was about 8000 dollars. 

But let us say we are aiming for that: 

We are going to get a drawing every 4 pages and then we'll get a nice piece of cover art, so 3000 dollars in total. 

Next up, we need professional editing and layout. Most editors charge per word and from some posts on rpg.net, in the RPG industry 3-4 cents per word is typical ("real" book editors charge more btw). 

Renegade Scout is about 62000 words. At 4 cents per word thats about another 2500 dollars, so our costs are now at 5500 dollars. 

I am not done however. Editing covers our text and depending on the editor can be simple proofing or include editing for content. But we also need the book laid out to be nice and beautiful. Lets say we get someone to do it for 4 dollars per page. Its a 200 page book, so another 800 dollars gets added. 

At this point we have a nice, glossy and professional looking PDF and we are out 6300 dollars. 

Important

At this point I should note that these rates (editing, layout, illustration) are all below, and sometimes FAR below, what those people would earn in the "real" publishing industry. Tabletop gaming just doesn't have the circulation to pay those rates. They are however rates I have been able to verify either personally or through discussions online. You can luck into a "friendship" rate of course, but my examples should be taken as a bottom level. 

Keep calm and type on

So what do I make from selling a copy of Renegade Scout? Well, it sells for 19.99 and I get 70% of that. So 13 USD and some change. Lets just say 13 since some copies are sold for a reduced amount during sales. 

How many have I sold? Just shy of 900 copies. That makes the book "Gold" on Wargame Vault, a level of sales that less than 5% of all items published on Wargame Vault reach.

In other words, I made about 11700 dollars on Renegade Scout in 6 years or about 2k a year. (Directly. Publishing the book also allowed me to sell supplements for it and brought more attention to other items I had done). Until we can do a new edition, odds are that the sales will continue trailing off so while RS will keep selling, it won't be doing any big numbers by now.

So our glossy book budget would eat half of what I can expect to make on this book. Bear in mind that this was a book with a pretty popular idea, released by someone with some name recognition and a fan base. As I noted, on Wargame Vault, 95% of books sell less than this level. 

Get the gains

But the point of the glossy book is that it will sell better, right? By spending that money, I could sell 5 times as many books and make far more money.

We can examine a pretty clear use case. Five Parsecs From Home. I sold about 3300 copies when it was an indie game and we have sold somewhere above 10.000 through Modiphius. So about triple the sales.

So that looks pretty rosy. Instead of 11k, I could make 35k on a game like Renegade Scout. Subtract our costs and we are looking at 28k or so.

But here are a few things to bear in mind: 

Five Parsecs was lavishly illustrated and laid out and cost a lot more than the examples I have given here. The artwork alone was 8000 dollars. I don't know what the costs for layout and editing were, but they are almost certainly much above the above figure.  It also had a number of advantages: It released at a point when interest in solo gaming was exploding, with an established audience and it was released with the full reach of Modiphius's distribution and customer base. We also hit at a time when "warband" gaming was getting big, but had not yet exploded. In other words, this is very much the best case scenario. 

If we are bit more cautious and say we can double the sales figures (a number people often tell me online), I am taking home about 22000 dollars in 6 years, with an upfront cost of about 6300 dollars. In the end, I come down to about 15-16k. An increase overall certainly, but not the dramatic increase that I am often assured by folks. More importantly, the 6300 dollars is all out of pocket before a single sale has been made.

You will notice that when you look at publishers like Toofatlardies that do quite well (Chain of Command having had multiple thousand copies printed) the books look very nice, but they tend to use miniatures photography instead of artwork, thus dramatically cutting the cost.

Concluding the conclusion conclusively

Now all of this is not to say it boils down this simply. Not everything might be equal investment wise. Perhaps a nice colour cover can increase sales by 25% on its own, whereas interior art may only increase it by 10%.

So if blowing 500 bucks on a great cover might earn me another 250 copies of Renegade Scout sold that might make it well worth it. 

There are also opportunity costs involved. Every person you add to a project means another point of failure and a cost in time dealing with them all. I will talk about that in a future post. 

I hope this meandering post sheds a bit of light on things. None of this means we won't experiment with things in the future, I just wanted to ground the discussion a bit more in actual numbers.

It's pretty rare for people to talk about how many copies they sell. I suspect that since tabletop games often sell fairly small numbers of copies, people might feel embarrassed. 

I've been around long enough to have had a lot of results, so lets share a couple:

FiveCore skirmish (3rd edition) has sold 1234 copies with another 1164 when we were in the bundle of holding. 

Thats pretty good in the indie sphere. Platinum seller on Wargame Vault, which less than 2% of titles achieve. 

Ballad of the longbow has sold 88 copies. Thats about what I expected for that game. 

And for comparison, Five Parsecs has sold over 10k copies in the current edition and sold about 3300 copies in the indie 2nd edition. 

So what's the upper limit in the "cheap looks and indie production" sphere? Well, I suppose 1k to 3k copies is about it for me, for now. Hopefully we will blow past that in the future. 

What is typical? That is difficult to say. Around 65% of products on Wargame Vault do not sell enough to reach Copper status (which I believe is 50 copies or so). RPGs do a bit better with 60% failing to hit that mark. 

In other words, the majority of items don't really sell anything significant. Of course this may be skewed by the fact that some items are not marketed to be sellers, but made available because the creator wanted to do so or they are so incredibly niche that they just don't really stand a commercial chance. 

What about itch.io?

I left Itch out because I don't use it currently. I have seen some writers say they get a decent amount of revenue from it and others say that it really doesn't account for much. I suspect it may depend on individual circumstances. 

How do you make money as a game writer? We've talked a bit about this in the past but today I wanted to talk about the three ways I get paid. Sorry, this isn't going to be that specific in terms of amounts. I make around the average wage in the state I live in (depending on what site you use to find that). 

First there is direct sales of PDFs. This is still all through Wargame Vault / Drivethru RPG and pays royalty per sale. You get a slight increase and a few other benefits if you are exclusive through them, as opposed to selling elsewhere.

I have not seen the benefit to scattering my efforts across additional platforms at this time, though I may in the future. 

This amount obviously fluctuates depending on releases, running a sale etc. Over time this does drop off if nothing is coming out, but most of the "long tail" is here as even a game that "isn't selling" any more will still get the occasional buy.

(If you want to make money writing, you need to establish a back catalogue by the way). 

We do fairly well on there, but for course sales figures can vary tremendously. Some items Ive done never cracked a couple hundred sales and some have accumulated in the low thousands. 

Second there is Patreon. I create stuff for Patreon and people get to take a look at it. This can be done in a number of ways and it is hard to estimate what is typical for game creators. This can be a bit of a hassle because it has its own obligations and you have to pay attention to it. On the other hand, it also allows doing some oddball things that you can't do elsewhere. Patreon I think works well for a bit of an exclusive club vibe, where people can get a look at things ahead of time. 

Patreon income is fairly static for me.

Lastly there is the overlords. I write things for them and they pay me in money. Really a rather convenient arrangement if you think about it. 

Not much to say here I suppose. This amount can vary but our contract sets out conditions for things. 

Are there other potential income streams I could pursue? There are. We are looking into doing some merch stuff, there's the long awaited POD options, there's branching out to more publishers particularly on the historical side and probably a bunch of stuff I can't even think of.

Some creators try to branch out into other media such as podcasts or Youtube. That probably is not in the cards for me but never say never. 

I hope this ramble helps clarify a bit of how you can earn a full time job creating games. Feel free to ask questions. 

The 1.15 update adds a new scenario to the rules and clarifies bad going a little bit.

I am working on ideas for the first expansion for History Dad, but I am trying to decide which way to go.

The original plan was to focus on a theme, such as a specific unit, campaign or battle and then do some material to fit that such as scenarios, a couple of unique units and so forth.

However I am wondering if maybe it would be better to just do a spread of different things in the expansion instead. (So perhaps there's a bit of Eastern Front and a bit of Normandy and so on). 

The former is more thematic of course and may get people interested in a new topic, but then, it may also discourage people who are not interested in that. With the latter option we can cover a wider range of stuff, but the risk of course is that it will be more thinly spread out.

A middle ground may be to have a smaller theme in the expansion (f.x. a section on Polish vehicles) and then accompany that with a variety of scenarios. 

Decisions decisions.

Jason has been busy at work updating LaserStorm to a 2nd edition, similar to the work he did on Clash on the Fringe revised edition. That means not only adding new features like solo tools and air units, but also a full colour rulebook with diagrams and lavish miniatures photography. 

If you are not familiar with LaserStorm, it is a set of combat rules for 6mm (as well as related scales) science fiction ground combat, allowing huge armies to be put on the table. Included are build systems (two of them in fact), a scenario generator, map based campaign rules and a host of ready to play units that can be used as is. 

The rules are available at https://www.wargamevault.com/product/476399/LaserStorm-2nd-edition 

One of the projects I have been working on, and which is closing a releasable state, is "Gothic Horror Skirmish". 

This is just a working title and I am not sure what the actual title will be.

You can probably guess what the topic is, though I should clarify that it will be more Edwardian than Victorian (though the weapon selections can work fine for 1880s/1890s settings too). The aim is a pre WW1 vibe with squads consisting of your pick of adventurers, soldiers, criminals and various classic horror monsters.

This will be primarily a squad versus squad game with a collection of scenarios. There will be rules for solo mechanics, but this is not a campaign or adventure type game, at least not at first. Rather this is the sort of thing for people who enjoy building and painting up squads of cool figures. You can still do that solo, but it is also going to be well suited for playing with a friend or in a small club setting where you might already have a bunch of figures sitting around that can be used. 

The plan is for the initial release to feature 6 character types, 8 monster types, 3 types of magic and 6 scenarios. 

I am not sure of the expected page count yet, but the plan is for the game to be on the slimmer side. Not everything has to be a massive tome after all. 

Over time the game will be expanded with more material. The thinking is small (and cheap) expansion packs with new creatures, spells and scenarios so you can have something new to play with every couple of months. 

I did an interview with Ash from Guerilla Miniature Games and you can check it out here:

and https://youtu.be/eW9DCu2KKY8?si=8VyOZBo0Mu7Boy-4 

We discussed a number of topics relating to creating games and working as a writer.

Post number 2:

Today I am gonna chat a bit about building an army works. 

The historical option

First and foremost you can of course just pick some units that fits your scenario, We have also included 4 historical overviews of what late-war infantry platoons looked like and those are usable basically straight out of the gate. 

The standard game size is the "reinforced platoon" which usually means 3 sections or squads of infantry and a few items in support like a tank, an armoured car or a couple of heavy weapons. Tabletop gamers like to get a few toys on the table after all.

This is also a pretty good size of game to collect and paint for. A force of say 35 infantry, a machine gun team, a tank and an armoured car is not gonna set you back a fortune to buy and you can get them done over a weekend (in 15mm anyways). 

Another advantage here is that if you already have troops done up for games like Arc of Fire, Rate of Fire, Bolt Action or Chain of Command you can just use your armies right as they are. 

(Some folks may have armies based on team bases with 2-4 figures per base. I will add something to the book to address that, but for now you will have to improvise a bit here). 

General army building

If you want some guidelines for building a generic force, we include a sort of "catch all platoon build" system. 

This is pretty simple and is intended for pick-up games and for cases where you may not have accurate platoon information available but would still like to get a game going. Basically you build a platoon of 3 or 4 combat units, then take up to 2 units of support. For example if you agree to play a tank heavy game, your platoon might be 3 tanks and then you bring along 2 squads of infantry in support. 

For large games, 3 or 4 platoons of the same type (infantry or tank) count as a company allowing 1 additional support unit per platoon.

Once again, this sort of approach is really intended more for quick games or when you just are coming up short on what a Hungarian reserve infantry division should be organised like. 

The points system

Whenever you discuss points systems, people tend to get funny about it. However including it means people can use it or not, whereas leaving it out means I am making that choice for you. Part of my approach with History Dad was exactly to let you make the decision. 

The points system is pretty straight forward: Pick the quality and morale rating for a unit, add any special conditions like engineers or a forward observer, add the cost of any weapons that are not just pistols or bolt action rifles and voila, you are done. A standard soldier with a rifle comes out to 10 points. The absolute worst soldier possible (Green quality, Morale 6+) is a pretty paltry 3 points while the most hardened (Veteran, 2+ Morale) sits at 18 points. 

Vehicles use a simple formula to determine their points cost. The vehicle profiles in the book all have their costs pre-calculated for you but I wanted to give people the formula so you can modify the provided vehicles or make your own. 

The pre-built British platoon comes to 433 points. If I add in a Sherman I'd be at 643 points. 

Two light off-map guns (3" mortars f.x.) is another 160 points bringing us to 803 points. A good aiming point to start will be somewhere between 500 and 1000 points. This of course does depend on what style of game you want. You might agree to use only infantry and armoured cars for example or you may flip things around and mostly play as a tank game. 

Rolling dice

If all of this is not your cup of tea, I also included options to roll up both random platoons and random support units. These tools are provided for you to do with what you want. If you play solo, you might build your own platoon but randomly generate the opposition. Or you may take a random support unit with you each mission.

In a pick up game, you may start with an infantry platoon each and randomly decide on the support or you might even roll up your own forces at the start of a campaign. Of course random units are not likely to be even. Its entirely possible you get heavy tanks and I don't get any such thing. Use this as a springboard to make an interesting scenario. You can always start with the random force and then give a small number of points or unit slots to "tidy things up". 

It is a little too early for any battle reports to exist yet, so I wanted to give people a quick walkthrough of the core mechanics of how the turn sequence works, how units work, how to shoot at infantry and how to shoot at tanks.

A future post will talk about armies and how they are built.

This is just an overview, think of it like the crash course you might get before playing the game at a convention.

Turn sequence:

The turn sequence is how each game turn is organised. Basically it tells us who goes when. In a normal game you roll a die: 1-3 the Axis player goes first, 4-6 the Allied player goes first. The player selected by the roll picks a leader to activate. If it is a squad leader or tank leader, they activate their unit. So their squad or vehicle can take actions normally. 

If it is an officer, they can activate two units within 8" and line of sight. Senior NCO's can activate a single unit within 4". 

So for example when it is my turn to go, I may pick my platoon leader and then two of the infantry squads in the platoon. Once each of those units have moved and fired, the other player goes. When they have gone, play reverts to me and I might pick a tank on the other side of the table and so forth.

Having leaders in place and near their troops means more flexibility in activating, representing the officer or senior sergeant shouting at the grunts to get moving. Each unit goes once per turn. 

What can a unit do?

When a unit is selected to act, it can move OR fire if it is Green quality (the lowest grade). These units are not really capable of "fire and move" tactics so it is one or the other. If you have a lot of Green units try to have some squads provide covering fire while other squads advance. 

Experienced quality units can move and then fire, while Veterans can move before or after firing. 

There are a bunch of other options like trying to find concealed enemies, engineering etc. but we are keeping it basic here.

Shooting at the other guys

Being a wargame we will usually want to shoot at the opposing army. 

Veteran infantry can split their fire over two targets, Experienced and Green troops must pick a single target (and remember Greens don't shoot if they moved). 

Combat is intentionally pretty straight forward. Each weapon grants a number of firepower dice. These are added up with the hit roll depending on the position of the target. You need 4+ to hit in the open and 6's in cover. Infantry are a bit better at attacking targets in cover if they are within 6" (where they hit on a 5+) to account for grenades and so forth. 

The key "clever bit" is that hit resolution is delayed. Let's say I score 6 hits when I fire on some Germans. I mark 6 hits on the German squad. Once the Germans are activated next, we then roll 6 dice to see how many of those hits were casualties (fifty/fifty odds here) and remove the number of figures who got hit. This means neither of us know what is exactly happening right then. If I have a great turn of shooting and put 10 hits on you, I can probably worry less about that unit now since on average they will have taken 5 losses. But they may have only lost 1 or 2 or the entire squad may be gone. I can keep pouring fire into them or I can switch targets and hope it doesn't come back to haunt me. 

Morale is in the form of suppression checks: If you shoot at a unit and score any hits, they may be suppressed. They get a D6 roll against their morale score to avoid this, otherwise when they activate next they receive half the firepower dice and are limited in their ability to move freely. Suppression lasts until they have activated next, so if you are advancing on a position, you have to keep hitting them with fire. Units with very good morale scores are difficult to suppress, so keep hitting them. 

Officers can assist units nearby in recovering. It can be quite helpful to station a senior NCO next to a machine gun team for example to keep them firing. 

Shooting at tanks

Alright that was the crunchies, what about tanks?

Tanks receive a number of shots based on the crew in the turret. A proper 3 person turret (gunner, loader, commander) can fire twice per turn when halted and once on the move (firing from a short halt really) while a 2 person turret (where the commander has to load) you only get one shot and must be halted. This really stings when playing for example early T34. 

Assuming we hit the target, I roll two dice at the same time. One is for Luck and is either unlucky (on a 1) or lucky (on a 6). Unlucky shots always bounce off and lucky ones get 1.5 times the penetration. The second is a hit location roll. We just use a single table for ease here with hits assigned to the hull, turret or tracks. 

There is not a separate penetration roll (though an option is included if you prefer this). By default we compare the gun rating to the armour value which tells you if the hit was minor, major or massive and then you roll on the appropriate damage table for the effect.

Lets say my Sherman scored a hit on a Panzer IV hull. The gun rating of 10 exceeds the hull armour of 8, so I get a major penetration. A D6 roll on the damage table results in a 4: Silent.

The tank is seemingly dead, but on their next activation, they have a fifty/fifty chance of returning to action or actually being dead. As with infantry neither of us will know just yet. 

Other results can include immobilisation, burning or a catastrophic ammunition explosion. 

That's mostly it!

I hope that gives you a feel for the basics of combat. I have intentionally kept the infantry combat quite simple to make it easy to memorise, as well as being pretty tangible (making it easy to convert scenarios or real life information into the game). 

Tank combat is a little more detailed because tank fans would be disappointed if you didn't have chances of knocking out the tracks or scoring a lucky hit. Having slightly more detailed tank rules means that the game can also be "flipped" so the core of your force is a tank platoon with some infantry in support.