[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by rhadin

The issues being discussed have little to do with complexity. An RPG may or may not be less complex than a novel.

RPG fans may be more accepting of a cover designed by an inexpensive cover designer who uses all block lettering and a stock picture because they already know the relevancy of the book to them. A person who is deeply into playing chess is interested in every book that talks about chess and is not concerned about the cover art. No great expense needs to be incurred to induce them to look at the book.

True to a greater extend for chess books than for RPG. Sorry, but gone are the days when a ziploc baggie and a chapbooklet with some goofy hand-drawn line art is going to be even noticed by the RPG fanboy.

Conversely, an unknown novelist who seeks to break into the mass mystery market and compete against Ruth Rendell for the same audience cannot use a cover designed by his third grade cousin with crayola. Readers will view it as amateurish and assume the content is also amateurish, rightly or wrongly.

Thus speaks a person who's never read a mystery based in and around a home kindergarten. Sorry, but there are plenty of 'crude' pieces of cover art that fit quite well with the books in question. Just as there are crude pieces of cover art that in no way reflect upon the story - and actually detract from sales, as you proposed.

Editorial, marketing, and design costs are not defined by complexity or by size, although each plays a role in the final costs. One doesn't plan a marketing budget based on whether the book is 16 pages or 600 pages.

Yep. It often depends upon what the target readership is - for cover art. For interior layout and the edited message, perfection of presentation is a primary key. One can forgive an amateurish cover, but not an amateur editing job.

And because it doesn't seem to be getting through, I will state again: no one is attacking RPG or the fact that RPG books can get away with $50 cover costs. Every market is different. What is being said is that simply because the RPG niche doesn't require you to spend more than $50 on cover art doesn't mean that every other market's cover costs are the same or can be the same.

A computer coding book may also have inexpensive cover art costs but very expensive editorial costs as each line of code is checked for accuracy. A drug book written for doctors may have relatively low cover art costs and very high editorial costs because of the accuracy required (I certainly wouldn't want the amount you spend on RPG for editing to be the standard for a book that a doctor will use to decide which medicine to prescribe to my child; I want the publisher to spend however much it costs to be sure that the book is as accurate as is possible).

A novel may have low editorial costs but high cover art and marketing costs because the author is trying to become the next JK Rowling and needs to get huge numbers of book buyers to at least look at her book. An RPG may have very low cover art and marketing costs because the game involved has a known audience of 15,000, because players have been waiting for a book that descibes the rules for 87th encounter between two primary characters, and because the book isn't intended to induce rest of the reading world to become game players.

Here I have to disagree. While the cover art may well suck me in to examine it more closely, if the story isn't well edited and if it is written in a difficult to read style with little of interest, I ain't gonna shell out the big bucks no matter how wonderful the cover art is!

RPG is neither the beginning nor the ending of the world of publishing; it is a niche in a vast world of publishing and just as a single, universal rule cannot cover every possibility imaginable in RPG, what RPG spends for editorial, production, and marketing cannot be (and is not) the benchmark against which all the world of publishing is, can, or should be measured.

No one said it was. What I think the other posters are trying to say is that an RPG is just as complex as many mainstream novels.

Derek