Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

I want to talk about the notion of a book on a shelf in a game store (and relatedly, in a book store), as well as how that ties into the math of pricepoints in RPG publishing.

This is on my mind because at Evil Hat we’re getting ever closer to the release of the Dresden Files RPG.  (Yes, we’re splitting it into two books. No, I don’t want to talk about that here. I’m talking about it enough other places already.)  Our press release doesn’t talk about distribution; it says we’ll have it on sale through Indie Press Revolution (and therefore through retailers who get books from IPR), and we’ll have it on sale through our own web store.

Now, that’s not the whole picture, but it’s most of it. (We have a good relationship with UK-based distributor Esdevium, and we’ll likely continue to work that relationship for getting products over to the other side of the Atlantic.) The question, then, is why is that most of the picture? (i.e., why aren’t we diving at distributors aplenty and trying to get signed up?)

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Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

So, over at DriveThruRPG, they’ve set up a “donate $20 to Haiti” thing. That’s cool in and of itself. But that’s not where it stops. Because publishers have donated products which you get when you donate. Their total value? $1,481.31.

So that’s somewhere around a “get these products for 99% off!” deal.

You should perhaps take all of us publishers up on that. You’ll get Spirit of the Season from Evil Hat, and a bunch of other products too (several of which I did some or all of the layout on, I’m happy to say).  It’s one of those “you’re insane NOT to spend $20 on this” sort of things, even if you aren’t in the least bit humanitarian in your mindset.

There are so many products on this thing that the bundle’s attempt to alphabetically list them all craps out somewhere late in the letter C.

That’s C, for crazy.

Since the listing craps out, I thought I’d grab the full list of what I got after I made my purchase for the curious. Holy crap! Beast Hunters! Kerberos Club! Damnation Decade! Three Sixteen! It’s just ridiculous. Buy it.

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