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I do agree with Leperflesh that you should aim for a flat project payout of some sort rather than a per-word arrangement, as it seems that what you're after isn't just someone writing up an article but actually converting a game from one system to another, which in addition to being a degree of work in and of itself isn't the sort of thing you want padded out with extra wordcount if you can avoid it.
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Jul 21, 2014 08:38
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Kai Tave posted:I do agree with Leperflesh that you should aim for a flat project payout of some sort rather than a per-word arrangement, as it seems that what you're after isn't just someone writing up an article but actually converting a game from one system to another, which in addition to being a degree of work in and of itself isn't the sort of thing you want padded out with extra wordcount if you can avoid it. The other issue is that for PF stuff (a decent chunk of the industry right now) is incredibly complex. A lot of what you're paying for with a 3.5/PF product is stat blocks, and those take a lot of time to develop. Enough that it turned me off to DMing when it was the only game in town. Unless a computerized method has been developed for it, it takes a long time to come up with those statblocks. The same could be said for every rules heavy system. I have an old acquaintance who's trying to do rules neutral adventures (no plug since I don't that's kosher here) that don't have stats in them. I think they'll do poorly since a lot of what people pay for is the mechanics of a system, but I also understand why he's not bothering with having things statted up for systems that are heavy and aren't particularly balanced (so really have no need for the heaviness)
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Jul 21, 2014 12:30
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Bucnasti posted:Not paying people, paying them late, or shorting them payments is so common in this industry that just paying someone what you agreed upon on time makes you a saint in the eyes of most freelancers. You have to understand that 90% of industry horror stories are one man bands operating at a loss not paying somebody who would not get work were there not said one man bands. This reminds me of the time Zak Smith polled his freelancer readers for how much money they made to make some point about how freelancing was a sucker's game, when in fact, he really succeeded in mostly getting people who are sufficiently unsuccessful that their rates don't qualify as significant information about their personal finances.
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Jul 21, 2014 14:20
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MalcolmSheppard posted:You have to understand that 90% of industry horror stories are one man bands operating at a loss not paying somebody who would not get work were there not said one man bands. 90% of the industry is one man bands, so that's not saying much. ravenkult fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Jul 21, 2014 |
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Jul 21, 2014 14:30
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I have a hard time believing that successful people are paying much attention to Zak S. Is it kosher to ask what the gently caress he (or pundit?) and Mearls did to Mikan on Twitter?
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Jul 21, 2014 14:32
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ravenkult posted:90% of the industry is one man bands, so that's not saying much. Unfortunately, the window where products could be split into pro, semipro and amateur tiers has passed due to partly market driven, but also kinda-intentional attacks on the middle of both the business and labour sides of the industry. I think a largely undifferentiated industry beyond the Two Big Dungeons and Dragons really isn't helping. If there were 4-5 flagships split among three or more genres I believe the industry would be much healthier, and that the benefits would extend beyond those flagships, for Reasons. Honestly, the practical litmus for Really Real Industry these days is probably as simple as the answer to this question: "Can you keep your hand out of your booth's till for all of Gencon?" Lots of companies can't.
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Jul 21, 2014 15:03
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I'm mostly out of the RPG freelancing arena because I priced myself out of it at 300$ for a cover or 200$ for full page interiors. That's how small the industry is.
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Jul 21, 2014 15:08
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ravenkult posted:I'm mostly out of the RPG freelancing arena because I priced myself out of it at 300$ for a cover or 200$ for full page interiors. That's how small the industry is.
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Jul 21, 2014 15:11
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FMguru posted:One of the traditional escape hatches for RPG writers is to move up to genre fiction writing (Mike Stackpole and Aaron Allston both did this, among others). Genre fiction pays like rear end (unless you're the next J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Myers or Suzanne Collins) so it really says something about pay rates in RPGs that writing midlist SF and fantasy and franchise novels is a big step up in terms of compensation. I do book covers now and I consistently get 300-500$ per cover.
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Jul 21, 2014 15:13
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FMguru posted:One of the traditional escape hatches for RPG writers is to move up to genre fiction writing (Mike Stackpole and Aaron Allston both did this, among others). Genre fiction pays like rear end (unless you're the next J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Myers or Suzanne Collins) so it really says something about pay rates in RPGs that writing midlist SF and fantasy and franchise novels is a big step up in terms of compensation. In many cases it's more about the steady paycheck compared to RPGs than the actual rate. This is true at virtually all levels below superstars, which is why well-known UK SF writers have written Warhammer novels.
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Jul 21, 2014 15:20
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ravenkult posted:I'm mostly out of the RPG freelancing arena because I priced myself out of it at 300$ for a cover or 200$ for full page interiors. That's how small the industry is. Heh. I paid that kind of money when I published Aeternal Legends due to an operating principle where I paid people living wages that respected their experience. AEL's cover artist Leo Lingas mostly does commercial storyboards now, while Chris Huth (interior/layout) is now Pelgrane's go-to guy. The game didn't do much for me in the end (it kinda broke even) but it did build credentials for Chris and Stew Wilson, so there's that social good at least.
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Jul 21, 2014 15:25
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FMguru posted:Genre fiction pays like rear end (unless you're the next J.K. Rowling or Stephanie Myers or Suzanne Collins) so it really says something about pay rates in RPGs that writing midlist SF and fantasy and franchise novels is a big step up in terms of compensation.
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Jul 21, 2014 15:29
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The thing in per-word's favor is that you are getting X amount of material independent of formatting. If you're asking somebody to write something about dwarves for your RPG supplement, what do you tell them? You can say "give me $300 worth of information about dwarves", "give me 15 pages about dwarves", or "give me 3000 words about dwarves" (or some combination, obviously). If you're working with them closely and/or they have a body of work that gives you appropriate expectations, I think the first one is more reasonable overall, with some guideline about how long it really should end up. If you have an unknown writer, I think you might be asking for trouble with the dollar amount sans context. I do some freelance RPG editing and proofreading, and when offers come, they always come with the word count and dollar amount of the contract, take it or leave it. I'm not trying to make a living doing it, so I can't see myself refusing one based on the compensation. It's just a better way to spend a few evenings than what I would have been doing otherwise.
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Jul 21, 2014 15:35
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E-publishing through Amazon.com and the like can be somewhat like a giant game of roulette. If you can actually get momentum going and get onto the best-seller lists for even a day you can get surprisingly good sums of money, but you have to figure out how to compete against hundreds of thousands of other authors both big and small to do the same. Plus, that momentum can easily dry up within a month or two unless you somehow get a worldwide multimedia sensation on your hands.
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Jul 21, 2014 15:39
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Kai Tave posted:I do agree with Leperflesh that you should aim for a flat project payout of some sort rather than a per-word arrangement, as it seems that what you're after isn't just someone writing up an article but actually converting a game from one system to another, which in addition to being a degree of work in and of itself isn't the sort of thing you want padded out with extra wordcount if you can avoid it. I want to address this because it really looks like a basic misunderstanding of what per-word means. Proper word contracts set out a minimum length for the author, and calculate payment based on that length ahead of time. This means that a contract tells me I need to devote 10K to weebles, and my compensation is based on that 10K. I do not get extra money for doing 15K on weeble wobbles. If I do that it's wasted work, and the editor/developer probably tells me to cut 5K. The publisher may choose to print 5K of that, but that's none of my business. I'm not paid for *published* words, but *produced* words, unless I have some kind of lovely contract I never should have signed with a company whose name appears on the periodic table of elements. If I did 15K like an idiot, the publisher *might* use it all (but probably not) and I gain *nothing* from that extra effort. Concern about padding is *mostly* nonsense (in the "I like terse technical writing, and mistake my preferences for an objective good" sense). The publisher gains nothing by contracting for more words than it needs, and the writer gains nothing for writing more than the contract specifies. You might see padding when the E/D lays out too much space for a section in the outline (which forms the basis for the wordcount in the contract). When this happens to me, I usually add bonus material because I've been around enough to be trusted to do that. That's why Void Engineers has spaceship construction rules. They weren't asked for in the outline. I just did 'em because I managed to deliver a lot of tightly packed content. Some development styles work well with this kind of back and forth, where the freelancer is really being hired because he or she is a cool dude who can deliver unexpected cool content. So if you (the publisher) don't want padding, your E/D should outline accordingly. I can't speak to lovely contracts where you only get paid for stuff that gets printed, because I don't sign lovely contracts.
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Jul 21, 2014 15:43
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I think the issue with word count is that you're selling a rules package that's intended to be consumed differently than conventional text. 20,000 words on Dwarves is meaningless in this context. But nobody is going to contact out for four dwarf classes, six dwarf relics, a dwarf pantheon, and different regional ethnic bonuses for various kingdoms.
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Jul 21, 2014 16:00
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moths posted:I think the issue with word count is that you're selling a rules package that's intended to be consumed differently than conventional text. Actually, they do both. The developer's job is to ask for X content in Y word count. If that content needs many more or less words, the developer hosed up. There are developing styles and specific freelancer relations as well. I often get outlines that are "I generally want this, do your thing," but sometimes the developer contracts out for exactly what you describe--this many classes, items and so on, to be delivered in this many words. One dev may be loose, and another may look for stricter requirements for some writers than others. These days I often get outlines telling me to put in whatever I want in general parameters because I earned that. Someone else may be given a detailed outline, In Darkening Sky, I worked with a new writer and even though the outline was loose, essentially outlined his section for him by taking a mentorship role.
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Jul 21, 2014 16:26
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That's interesting, I guess it really does come down to the publisher. Wait are you saying there's a draft of Darkening Sky just gathering dust somewhere?
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Jul 21, 2014 16:30
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I don't know why you guys are getting confused. The problem isn't with the per-word payment model, it's with the amount. Yeah, so it's more like technical writing, but if you price it accordingly it works perfectly well. Now a system conversion is different, but it's not really a writing project is it? If you don't write any of the fluff you're just converting stats.
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Jul 21, 2014 16:31
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moths posted:That's interesting, I guess it really does come down to the publisher. Dude it came out recently. http://theonyxpath.com/new-release-dark-ages-darkening-sky/
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Jul 21, 2014 16:34
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Wow, ok thanks!
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Jul 21, 2014 16:44
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ravenkult posted:I don't know why you guys are getting confused. The problem isn't with the per-word payment model, it's with the amount. Yeah, so it's more like technical writing, but if you price it accordingly it works perfectly well. Right, the amount of compensation is a big part of it. I would take issue with the argument that system conversion isn't really writing. From my perspective, development of a written product is broadly 'writing' - and specifically the sort of content I'm talking about, as opposed to pure flavor-text where you're being asked to fill a predetermined amount of space with pure text about dwarves. I also had hoped we were including more than just the traditional printed publication model, where as a game-maker I've decided in advance that my product will have 80 pages, at a certain typeface and with a certain amount of linear space devoted to graphics, etc. and therefore since I have eight races each race needs to fit onto 4 pages and therefore I need about 3500 words per race: no more than that, and not more than 200 words less than that. Electronically-published documents are much less constrained by pagelengths (although more pages does generally command a higher price, even for a PDF). And by "games" I am also including much more than traditional role-playing games core books and supplements, too. Someone who invents a ruleset is a game designer. But as soon as they start communicating that ruleset via a written format, they are also a writer. Communicating a ruleset is about more than just specific-length blocks of flavor text. The context of this discussion was a conversion ruleset for FATE; I assume a major part of that work involves translating the converted rules from the designer's mind into a document format accessible to the customer. Technical writing, and game writing, have a lot of parallels with each other. You need to communicate the programmer/designer/developer/architect's intent, using language, presentation, style, navigational schema, etc. that is well suited to the audience. Defining the audience, determining style, choosing formats and organization, providing navigation aids, compiling search/indexing keywords. Describing a set of interconnected procedures used to accomplish various tasks ("how to do combat," "how to create a character," "how to adjudicate disputes," "how to move units on the table," "how to win the game") is similar to procedural writing about software ("how to install the program," "creating and managing user accounts," "how to export a report"). Reference writing also has parallels: an appendix listing the 30 different magic spells in each of 12 different colleges of magic, providing for each spell its duration, cost to cast, effects, restrictions, and example usage is similar to an appendix describing the 300 different commands you can use on the CLI, providing for each command its syntax, options, description, and example usage. Similar in the sense of decisions about organization, language use for descriptions, coming up with examples generic enough to be of broad applicability but not so generic as to be uselessly vague, and so on. Length is but one of the many, many factors that constrain a document like this. Obviously there are always length restrictions: even if I could write 20 pages about each of the 300 commands (for example by providing a dozen detailed examples of usage, extended prose about designer's intent, parallels to other applications, etc.) that would undermine the "quick reference" utility of the appendix, burying the key information in such a way that the user's time will usually be wasted. Yes, if my book was going to be printed, we might also care about length... but the first priority is (or should be) providing maximum utility to the customer, not fitting into a pre-determined pagelength. I wish game writing was the same, even if it's still not there yet. I don't actually care if your game has a 200 page gamemaster's guide or a 20-page gamemaster's guide; what I care about as a customer is whether the gamemaster's guide provides me everything I need to master a game, in a well-organized format that is both easy to read from front to back the first time I pick it up, and easy to quickly reference a specific rule in the middle of a game. I know that the price tag of the book is going to be determined to some degree by its printed length, but within that constraint it should still be the case that achieving the objectives of the project - a well-written document that entertains me while teaching me the game - is the number one priority. And achieving that, as a writer, could take a lot more, or a lot less amount of time, depending on the subject matter and the objectives. A 20-page dense set of tables of data, in which every data point must be calculated, verified and tested, might take a lot longer than writing 20 pages of flavor text about dwarves. Or perhaps a lot less time. The compensation should have at least some relation to how much time is required, as well as some relation to the level of skill and experience required. (That is, it should be the case that highly skilled and experienced writers can command higher wages than entry-level writers.) If you don't adjust compensation based on varying required effort, you may wind up with games that have highly varying quality - with the most difficult content being of the poorest quality. I think we've seen that quite a lot, actually... games with well-written flavor, but poorly thought out or confusingly presented rules. Games Workshop is an especially infamous culprit; their games are often very fun to read, but are rife with confusing or inconsistent or contradictory rules explanations, rules buried within flavor text, rules organized in nonsensical ways, etc. Perhaps GW's game writers are paid by the word irrespective of the extra effort needed to explain rules well. All of this is in the context of an "industry standard" per-word rate, whether that's 6 cents per word, or 3, or 1. If you are starting with a reasonable bid for a project of reasonably well-defined length and difficulty (write the 4-page entry on Dwarves, including both a statblock and some flavor text) and then choosing to define that on a per-word basis (this will be about 1600 words plus a table with about 100 words in it, and I'm offering you $100 to do it, which comes out to about six cents per word), then fine. You're at least taking into account the amount of effort and the level of difficulty you are anticipating. But there's no special reason why you have to express that as six cents per word, rather than $100 fixed-contract or (most likely) something like $8 an hour on a 1099 basis (which is dogshit, it's the equivalent of less than minimum wage once you consider self-employment costs). Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 00:08
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ravenkult posted:I do book covers now and I consistently get 300-500$ per cover. Do you have a portfolio I could check out? My current art needs have already been commissioned but I'm going to need more down the road and I'd rather give my money to a goon than some random artist I find on DA. MalcolmSheppard posted:You have to understand that 90% of industry horror stories are one man bands operating at a loss not paying somebody who would not get work were there not said one man bands. It's not just one man ops that do this stuff. Back in the day Upper Deck would wait until the last day of the fiscal year to pay it's freelance artists so they could save a tiny percentage, meanwhile the artists were missing rent because they expected to get paid on time. It eventually led to any artist worth a drat refusing to work with them. Really even if you are a one man op there's no excuse for not paying people on time, you budget appropriately and don't contract for anything you can't afford to pay for.
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Jul 22, 2014 00:43
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Bucnasti posted:Do you have a portfolio I could check out? https://www.ravenkult.com Mikan can probably vouch for me, unless he hates me now!
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Jul 22, 2014 01:16
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ravenkult posted:https://www.ravenkult.com Mikan hates nothing but the time between commissions and results. You'd have to go to twitter to get the inevitable glowing review though.
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Jul 22, 2014 01:29
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moths posted:I have a hard time believing that successful people are paying much attention to Zak S. They just blame Mikan for everything bad to do with RPGs. Along with every other non-straight white person who dares to work on RPGs.
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Jul 22, 2014 02:07
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Ravenkult's work on Don't Rest Your Head/Don't Lose Your Mind is my personal all-time favorite RPG art. The man does beautiful things in greyscale.
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Jul 22, 2014 02:34
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Saeku posted:Ravenkult's work on Don't Rest Your Head/Don't Lose Your Mind is my personal all-time favorite RPG art. The man does beautiful things in greyscale. Thanks man. Just because most people probably haven't seen these, here's the French and Italian translations of DRYH that also hired me for their releases.  
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Jul 22, 2014 02:38
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Cassa posted:They just blame Mikan for everything bad to do with RPGs. Along with every other non-straight white person who dares to work on RPGs. And god help you if you aren't outraged enough when a fellow goon says something stupidly offensive.
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Jul 22, 2014 03:07
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ravenkult posted:Thanks man. Just because most people probably haven't seen these, here's the French and Italian translations of DRYH that also hired me for their releases. Wow, I am suggesting you any time the question of a book cover comes up at work.
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Jul 22, 2014 04:47
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mllaneza posted:And god help you if you aren't outraged enough when a fellow goon says something stupidly offensive. But, to be way more fair than that crowd deserves, it was a massively stupid thing Gau posted. Like with the situation as it is and all, it goes to levels of dumb we don't have words for, So I'm calling this Gau. The "joke" that Gau posted was Gau as gently caress.
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Jul 22, 2014 04:53
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Error 404 posted:But, to be way more fair than that crowd deserves, it was a massively stupid thing Gau posted. Like with the situation as it is and all, it goes to levels of dumb we don't have words for, So I'm calling this Gau. If you're going to do that you might as well invoke hpapyefl
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Jul 22, 2014 14:58
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Wait, why the gently caress is Mikan banned.
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Jul 22, 2014 15:02
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ravenkult posted:Wait, why the gently caress is Mikan banned. Mikan self-banned a while ago.
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Jul 22, 2014 15:04
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Nobody tells me nuthin' Anyway, Mikan is cool. In 10 years doing this, he's the first client to tell me ''Hey, let's put a female POC on the cover of this game about battling huge alien bugs.''
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Jul 22, 2014 15:11
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Captain Foo posted:If you're going to do that you might as well invoke hpapyefl Let's not say anything rash, now.
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Jul 22, 2014 21:16
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ravenkult posted:Wait, why the gently caress is Mikan banned. Old Doggy Bastard posted:Wow, I am suggesting you any time the question of a book cover comes up at work. A Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 23:31
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ravenkult posted:Nobody tells me nuthin' You did the last stand cover? Even aside from being inclusive as heck, that cover was just super well designed.
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Jul 22, 2014 23:43
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ravenkult posted:Nobody tells me nuthin' That has been my desktop for the last six months or so.
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Jul 23, 2014 04:32
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I still need to put up the giant poster of the print I bought.
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