You say a book of that quality would cost more money, what if that didn't bother me? If they produced another settings book with the depth and content of Seattle 2072 for ANY CITY I would gladly pay what I did for Seattle 2072. The Tir book disappointed me in the same way. These "Pamphlets", for lack of a better term, are a little less than what I was hoping for.
Okay. Let's break something down a little bit.
These "pamphlets" are generally solo projects, pitched and written by the same person. That means we have an idea for a book, we approach the publisher with it (not the other way around) and we send them a proposal of what we'd like to write, hoping they care enough to give us the space we need to write it. The publisher gambles on us, hoping that (a) our idea is good, (b) we can pull it off, and (c) eventually they'll somehow make money on it, despite (d) our pet project likely falling outside the line-as-planned (which is to say it might not seem to have much at all to do with whatever big metaplot stuff is going on, they didn't PLAN on this product being written up until we shot them the idea, etc, etc). Taking that kind of gamble, and allocating company resources to a project that the company didn't know they wanted (much less
needed), do you think they're going to gamble on giving us 20-something pages worth of budget and attention, or 200-something pages?
You may also notice just how much recycled artwork is in these, which is something of an industry sign that they're not exactly as high priority and big budget as, I dunno,
Street Legends, and is another
huge reason we can try to keep the price point down. Trust me when I also say that the freelancers get paid on an entirely different scale for e-book materials. On something this size, the artist is gobbling up more of the budget than the writer (who had the idea in the first place), and that's with
minimal new art.
Spy Games, conversely, had
eleven writers. The line dev contacted the entire freelancer pool, told us what he wanted the book to cover, and then let the whole writer pool knife-fight over who was going to write what chapter. He then gets to pick the very best proposals that he thinks will cover what he wants the book to cover. The product is something the company had planned from start to finish, and it gets made with full company support and industry-standard budgets, which can be pretty hefty. One type of book falls under the umbrella of "large product planned from the beginning of the year, which will be written with all hands on deck and full company support" where the other is "well, this freelancer pitched me an idea that didn't sound terrible, let's give him enough rope to hang himself and hope we make a profit off his harebrained scheme somehow." Then they give us what support is available, but all while working on the next
Spy Games scale product (which gets most of the attention, has most people working on it, etc).
We write these because we have an idea and the company lets us, so we cram as much awesome as we can into a very limited word count, to try and get our idea out there. You're wanting the same size and scale of performance as what a full orchestra provides, when we're basically the dude playing for change out on the corner. These type of products are basically one-man-band gigs.
So it's not a matter of "oh no, it would cost more money to make a bigger book." It's a matter of "Well, the company didn't
plan on writing a book or producing any material about Tir Tairngire or Montreal
in the first place this year, so the fact they're letting me write about it at all, even with a limited space, is the only reason the fans will get
anything on this topic."
