The Death Cookie

I give a big thumbs up to the plan. From what I've been able to gleen off from the rpg.net forums, producing quality smaller products on a regular basis (almost like a periodical or magazine) is one way pdf publishers have experienced some success.

The basic model seems to be that a pdf product will experience its best sales almost immediately after release, then tapering off to a lower level (which is often maintained for a very long time). The good news is that there are upticks as new products are released (and new customers presumably discover older products). Keeping a steady flow of quality products is the way to sustain sales. The tricky part is making sure the smaller products are decent and up to your standards, because I'm pretty sure that producing crap, even for just a buck or two, would cut off sales of the older products.

I do have one suggestion, and you can take it for what it's worth. I would appreciate it if these smaller products could be formated in the digest style of the original Quik Paks. First off, I made some of these smaller booklets for my daughters for Christmas, and I was amazed at how inexpensive it was to do at my local Copymax (just a couple of bucks for a 28 page booklet, stapled, plus a cardstock cover). I realize it probably wouldn't be too much more to do with a full size, and your layout options are extremely limited, but the digest size just makes me nostalgic. Plus, it would bump up your page count, which I'm sure some pdf customers look for when deciding to make a purchase (the Forge folks are already somewhat notorious for doing smaller size formatting to increase their page counts).

What you're saying about how sales work matches what we've seen very closely. At $1 or $2, we don't make that much off the short books (even though there's no printing cost, we still have to pay the artist and split the take with the author), but the extra sales we get on other products makes them worthwhile.

Also, in our case, releasing a product a month should keep people from having to wonder "are they still in business," since we sometimes have months or even years between larger releases.

Thanks for the suggestion, but we'll probably stick to the full size page layout because we do plan to release most of them in print form eventually and we don't want to have to do layout again. It can be time consuming, especially when the files are "wherever I put them when we did the original book," and given our limited number of layout people, they're going to busy enough as it is. I would think you could apply the same theory to standard size by making the copies on 11x17 paper if you really wanted to do them out booklet style (we usually just use binders for the printouts).