Electronic Publishers, Listen Up

I was an early adopter of for-pay electronic publishing. I was used to it - after all, there had been netbooks floating around Usenet's RPG groups for years before anyone thought to charge for RPGs. Then there was a push to get old TSR products out on PDF, and White Wolf jumped into it, and RPGNow, and the d20 boom, now here we are today and a truly remarkable number of electronic RPG publishers still seem to have no clue what the hell they are doing.

So here are some of my pet peeves and happy smiles for electronic RPGs:

Don't Just Scan Your Print Product

I can't emphasize enough how disappointing it is to see an electronic version of a game that is just the RPG put through a scanner. Even today there are plenty of games being published where you can't even cut and paste text! These products clog up your printer if you want to print any of it, they often have fuzzy text where the scanner didn't scan perfectly, and they are incredibly large in file size.

If you have a legacy product that you really can't do anything with BUT scan, see "Price It Right" below. You're not really offering an electronic RPG, what you're offering is access to an older product that collectors or other interested people might want to take a look at.

Use Bookmarks

Gang, a lot of what I'll say is "it's nice if..." but this is not one of them. This is an industry standard. This is the bare minimum. If your product is more than 10 pages long, use bookmarks to aid the reader in quickly getting to the part of the eBook that you want them to get to. Name the bookmarks properly and clearly. (By the way, this is a good way to be sure that the headings you selected for your book are good - would they make sense as a bookmark?)

Do Not Cripple Your Product

I'm still seeing products sold which could be cut-and-paste enabled, but which are not. This is even worse than just scanning a print product, because instead of just being lazy, you're actively being malicious. I don't buy any gaming material, either paper or electronic, just for me to read in the safety and comfort of my own mind. I buy it to play with. If your game gets me psyched up, I want to copy off page 4 and pass it around to the players: "Hey gang, here's some rules for this thing, aren't they neat?" I want to write in margins and make my own cheat sheets and reference materials. Putting up a big wall around your product gains you absolutely nothing - people stealing your product will still steal it - and it keeps your legit customers from using your product to its fullest potential. Do not ever disable copying-and-pasting or anything like it, not ever, not ever, not ever.

Price It Right

So maybe your electronic product is not the greatest thing out there. Maybe the bookmarks are unhelpful things like "Chapter 34" or "Chap34" (yes, I have seen this). Maybe it's too short, or maybe the market is glutted with Third Edition feat PDFs. The great thing about electronic publishing (and the scary thing too) is that many customers will drop $1-$4 on a product that doesn't have the same amount of polish or content. I will always remember with great happiness the half-d20, half-homebrew sky pirates setting I bought off RPGNow during the d20 boom. It was clearly someone's campaign notes, haphazardly typed up in Microsoft Word, exported to a PDF automatically, with art scanned from someone's Trapper Keeper and incomprehensible organization and completely unexpected around every corner. I bought it because it was two bucks and I got every penny's worth! I was a satisfied customer for that product not because it was a brilliant product that led to endless supplements - but because for $2, a hefty brainstorming tool, even a very haphazard one, is a good purchase. (This has some broader implications for electronic RPG publishers as a whole, but it's beyond the scope of today's rant.)

So (for example), if you have a legacy product you want to get out to the long-time fans of the game, but you don't have the capability (financial, temporal or technical) to actually make it a fully featured electronic publication, just price it cheaply and call it an "archival version" or something. Don't let those inflated eBay prices fool you! Your game is not worth that much.

Use Electronicness

So many electronic publishers don't take any advantage of the format that they work in. Does it support hyperlinks? Can I click on a jargon term and automatically be taken to a glossary to remind me of what it means? Are there layers which show statistics from different systems (or different sorts of narratives, or other presentations) depending on which one I want? Did you package a separate character sheet file at the end so I can easily forward it to an interested friend? How about an electronic catalog of your products with a $1-off coupon for the Next Thing you want me to try? You have so many advantages as an electronic publisher that a print publisher just flat doesn't. You can do so many things they can't in terms of presentation. Do you have a website? Can I click on your company's name in the credits and be taken there? Why not?

The news from White Wolf that they may be leaning more on electronic publishing is probably indicative of how things are going to go in the hobby for a while. They have done an overall quite competent job with their electronic publishing, both with the long-overdue Ready Made Characters series, and the recent Changeling and Exalted products. It's time to see who the new innovators are going to be!