We live in interesting times.  The Kindle has been out a couple of years.  The Nook just started shipping a few days ago and is expected to hit the shelves Friday.  The iPad is still sixty days out.  The Sony Reader frankly doesn’t matter because they suck.  So what lies in the future?

Prices will rapidly drop.  There is only a single eBook reader I can buy today; the Kindle.  By weeks end I might be able to buy a Nook, though I suspect they will be sold out. Some time in April I might be able to get my hands on an iPad. Once several options hit the market, expect the prices to south of $200 bucks fast.

Ebooks will come down in price.  Sure, the whole Amazon thing de-listing certain publishers and Apple setting a price point higher than the typical $9.99 is all the news right now.  Trust me, all it will take is *one* of the big publishers to realize that keeping prices low while more readers hit the market is the key to sales.  Remember when a CD with only a single (and maybe a B-side track) was $3.99?  That’s the same thing happening here.  Today you would be crazy to pay that much for a single thanks to iTunes. Publishers desperately want to keep the dead tree model afloat.  I don’t blame them.  But the first to see what’s coming and embrace it is going to win big.  And if they don’t, the little guys (That would be ME!) are going to eat their lunch.

But weather I am right or wrong about that doesn’t matter much.  The dust will eventually settle. Now check out what we should be able to buy just before Christmas.

Amazon has acquired Touchco, a New York-based start-up specializing in touch-screen technology.  We all know what that means.  This, coupled with the Mirasol stories about something happening with Qualcomm’s color display and Amazon’s Kindle (with hints from Qualcomm reps), indicate we may see an additional, quite different Kindle by September-October or so, at which time the non-touchscreen models will likely go down in price.

The NY Times story by Nicky Bilton and Brad Stone reports that the staff of 6 for that start-up will merge with Lab126, Amazon’s Kindle hardware division, which has recently had ads for 40+ new technical employees)

Like the Mirasol technology, this one will be somewhat less expensive (relative to similar items of their types) for makers also.  The report says that

‘ Touchco uses a technology called interpolating force-sensitive resistance, which it puts into displays that can be completely transparent and could cost as little as $10 a square foot. The capacitive touch screens used in the iPad and iPhone are considerably more expensive. Unlike those screens, the Touchco screens can also detect an unlimited number of simultaneous touch points.

Touchco’s technology uses resistors that are sensitive to different levels of pressure. It has said its screens can distinguish between the touch of a finger and the pressure of a pen or similar pointing device. The company had designed its technology to work well with full-color LCD screens, similar to those used in the iPad and Hewlett-Packard’s coming line of tablet PCs. The technology could allow Amazon to introduce a full-color touch-screen Kindle, raising the question of whether the device’s current displays, which are made by a company called E Ink will play a role in the next round of reading devices. ‘

The caption under the photo describes a feature not mentioned in the body of the article: “Touchco’s technology is fully flexible, as pictured here, which would allow for a more robust Kindle.“

Couple that with the demo of the Marisol technology for video along with Touchco’s $10 per square foot screen technology and the future is looking to be quite interesting.

Click the picture above and go check out the video of it playing…um…video.  As a PDF Publisher digital content publisher I am fairly excited about where we are heading.

I managed to get S.C.A.R.E. Vol. 3 out yesterday before the Super Bowl.

Behind that I worked on the latest Adventurer’s Wanted poster.  I just need to change the font on the Dwarvish version of the poster as it would not embed in the PDF due to licensing restrictions.  I need to pick another font apparently.  That is a quick fix so that will be ready to go as soon as the SCARE goes off the front page.

I have to say, the Fantasy Firearms book is looking awesome.  I have some top-notch art on hand; most of it specifically commissioned but some surprisingly great stock art as well. I have several other large projects that are now moving to the front burner; Black Tokyo II, some more Traveller stuff and of course Pathfinder.  Did I mention that I’m also editing a horror movie?  All of a sudden there are not enough hours in the day!

I woke up at like 4:30am cuz some dude was out shoveling his car out from under the snow, spinning his tires on the ice and generally making way too much noise for so early in the morning.  So I called the snow line at work to see if we were open for business; no surprise it was normal operating hours.  So I hit the shower, get dressed and leave the house.  The roads were not good, but they were passable and I rolled in to work a few minutes ahead of my schedules 7:45am start time.  What do I see when I get to my desk?  Apparently there was a two hour delay that they never put on the snow message line. Grrrrr.  I anticipate a slow day at work since most people will not be in.

With the snow falling fast and furious I planted my butt in a chair and started the day working on the big Fantasy Firearms project.  It is coming together beutifully!  I got two full chapters laid out, and then send off notes to an artist for a mess of pictures I would like to round out the project.  Stuff like magic items, races and monsters.  After that it was time for a break.  When I got done with the break I started in on the S.C.A.R.E. Vol. 3 project for Traveller.  After a while I decided it was time to go shovel snow, and two back-breaking hours later I was back inside where it was warm.  (No we are not finished shoveling!)

A hot shower, dinner and some XBox (Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2) rounded out the evening.  Then I was back at the computer and I just finished putting the S.C.A.R.E. project to bed.  It’s done, the PDF is created and I’ll be posting it on Sunday during the day sometime.  Behind that I want to whip up a few more Adventurer’s Wanted Posters to go out as well.  I’ll keep plugging away at the larger Fantasy Firearms project as well.  It’s after midnight here, so I’m off to bed.

Coming “soon-ish” from Skortched Urf’ Studios -a 100+ page sourcebook for adding firearms to your campaign.  This will be our first dead-tree product.  More details soon.

So we are supposed to get a metric ton of snow this weekend, which is a good thing for me as I can plant my butt in a chair and work on some projects.  Well, I plan to make some serious headway on the Fantasy Firearms project and so I decided to organize the art I have for the project into a single folder.  In conjunction with that I decided to go look for some high quality stock art for the project to mix in with the for-hire stuff I have.

[Begin Rant]

After wading through the dozens and dozens of pages of utter crap that fills the Publisher Resources section, along with scrolling past all the 3D generated uber-babes, I did manage to find a few likely prospects.  But so many of them did not show you what you are buying it rapidly degenerated into a crap shoot.  If you have a Stock Art selection of magic items, or armor or whatever, why in the *fcuk* can’t I see a thumbnail of the image? Seriously, you want me to spend my money on artwork *THAT YOU WILL NOT SHOW ME*? Who thinks thats a good idea?  How about you show me what I am getting like Shamman’s Stock art or the Image Portfolio line or even my very own stock art offerings the Skortched Urf’ Studios Sketchbook line? But no, instead I had to waste my time sifting through the crap, checking licences and squinting at near-microscopic thumbnails.

I spent damn near three hours last night sifting stock art. Did I find some useful art?  Yes, I actually did.  But it was far harder than it should have been.

So, rather than just bitch about the current state, I figured I would offer a few suggestions…

If you sell stock art; please for the love of all that is Holy include a good preview or thumbnail!  Preferably embedded in the listing itself rather than some external file or other means that will take me away from the listing.  The RPGNow flip book is ideal, or a large image as Shamman’s stock art uses would be fine.  While your at it, it would be a good idea to include the license terms *in the sales listing* so we know what we can and can’t do with it once we purchase it.  Can I color it?  Can I modify it?  Must I include your logo inside the image? These are important considerations to a publisher, and we prefer not to be surprised after we have dropped the money.

I have no real problem with the 3D generated stock art.  I especially like it for vehicles, guns and other things with sharp edges.  But I also feel it needs to be seperated out inside the stock art category.  I don’t want to use 3D stock art in my projects, so why must I scroll through pages and pages of it to find what I am really after?  I think we need to add some sub-categories in the Publisher Resources section.  I found fonts, page templates, cover templates, illustrations and 3D art all lumped in together.  I also found some very cool images that were not stock art, but intended only for private use in games.  I’m glad the publisher was careful to mention that in the sales listing, but a seperate category other that the broad Publisher Resources is in order. I would suggest sub-categories like Full Color Stock Art, B&W Stock Art, 3D Stock Art, Fonts, Design Elements, Personal Use Stock Art (i.e. not for publishers but for your GM to use), and a catch all Other Publisher Resources to round it out.

Let’s talk about quality for a second.  Some of the art for sale is, quite frankly, so bad that I felt it came out of a middle school kids sketchbook.  Seriously, do you really think people are going to buy this:

or this…

I’m not trying to be mean, but seriously how many of these do you think have sold?  I know we all want to make a few bucks, but slapping crap from a sketchbook or your kids scribblings up on RPGNow is not going to catapult you to fame and wealth.  A little self-policing is a good thing.  I am not proposing we institute some arbitrary quality standard; but I would suggest that quality will get you further than sheer quantity when it comes to stock art.

[End Rant]

Last night I got home and settled in to work on some layout for the big Fantasy Firearms project. I know I have said it before, but I can’t reccomend enough lynda.com for training to get the most out of the Adobe suite.  I am taking advantage of styles in CS4 that let me format the text with a click or two.  You work the text once, for example I was laying out magic item entries, and once you have it the way you want it you can copy the formatting into a style.  From then on you can simply click on a style and it formats everything consistently.  The styles work on words, paragraphs, cells and entire tables.  I was sitting there with the Pathfinder main rule book in my hand checking how they did the layout for certain entries, and found I could replicate the formatting quite easily.  I got through the entire manuscript save the last fifteen pages.

To be sure, there still needs to be some art inserted, and the text has to be massaged to make if fit nicely, but the basic formatting is done.  The project is really starting to come together, and is proving a great learning experience that will make future projects better.

I’ll also be putting out some more Adventurer’s Wanted posters this week, along with a couple Traveller releases later in the month.

The iPad announcement has generated a lot of discussion in the publishing field as a whole, as well as our little dark and dusty corner of it.  As I said on a forum post I am not a PDF publisher; I am digital content publisher.  PDF is just a format.  There are and will be other formats.  All in all I am very excited about the prospects for the future.  Which brings me to the idea I just had.  I was talking about a movie idea with a co-worker, and hashed together a throw-away plot for a generic action movie to make a point.  But that got the wheels turning and the germ from that throw-away idea was mixed with another idea or two I had rattling around in my Grey Matter Junk Drawer and I was off.  Inspiration had struck and I jotted down some furious notes.  Until this week all I had was a title, a cool sounding name that I knew I wanted to turn into a project.  Well, now I had the flesh to go over the bones of the idea.  I won’t bore anyone with the details just yet, but I will drop the title I came up with a few years ago.  I thought it sounded cool and knew some day I would do something with it.

Daughters of the Arcane Blade

It’s just five words that I thought sounded neat.  Now I had a cool idea to go with the title.  I was tossing the options around in my head on how best to get this idea “out there”.  Option one was to write it as a novel.  As I would be the writer this seems the least collaborative option and probobly the easiest and cheapest way to see the project finished.  Then I thought a comic book format would be great.  I can picture some great visuals to go along with the words that give life to the story behind the title.  More collabrative since I would have to work with an artist and maybe some ink/colorists as well.  And of course, what good idea doesn’t cry out to be made as a movie!?  I could write it as a screenplay and make a movie out of it.  (Or sell the screenplay to someone with the money to make a movie out of it, whichever.) I was honestly weighing the different options (including some RPG related releases to be sure!) when it hit me…

Why pick just one?  How many movies were first books or comics?  How many comics are based on TV shows, books or movies?  Heck, even video games are spawning novels, comics and movie adaptions.  All this gelled around the term “Transmedia” I first heard during the iPad/Publishing discussions.  The story wants to be told, and some formats serve better than others for telling the story, but in the new media reality a story need not remain locked in one form. As a publisher I can’t afford to keep ideas confined into one little box.

So who knows, in a few months time you could be reading Daughters of the Arcane Blade on your Kindle, Nook, iPad or dead-tree book.  Some time after that you might find the comic book on DriveThruComics or the iBook store.  It is even possible that some day you might be sitting on your couch watching my crazy idea as a movie full of action, adventure and gun-play!  It could also be that you sit around a table and play an RPG based on my idea.  Or maybe none of that will happen.  The exciting thing is that each and every one of them are indeed possible today, and will become even more likely in the future as the barriers to entry continue to be lowered.  It truly is an exciting time to be a small PDF digital content publisher!

We finished out the month on a high note!

Aside from a banner sales month, I have heard back from a couple of freelancers and two new artists as well.

One of the Traveller projects checked in with some good things to look over, and another S.C.A.R.E. has been assigned.

I herad back from the artist I hired to add some last minute art for the S.C.A.R.E. Vol. 3 release.  Here is a preview of the Far Trader Merry Widow…

The four crew members he illustrated look great also.  Once they are cleaned up and the final artwork submitted S.C.A.R.E. Vol. 3 will hit the virtual shelves.

I also began laying out the big Fantasy Firearms project, but I’ll need to have some art done for that project as well.  Plenty to keep me busy.

More info soon.

So last night I was working on the Fantasy Firearms script which I had saved as a Google Document by chapters.  Well, Google was having some issues and would not save anything, so I copy/pasted the changes into Word and decided to take a break and do something else.  I went over to Lynda.com and wanted to bone up on some InDesign skills; especially regarding formatting text. (I’m a subscriber to their service.)

In no time I discovered a few simple things that made me realize I have pretty much been doing it wrong the whole time!  A few key-strokes and I fixed most of the formatting errors in the SCARE Vol. 3 layout.  If you will remember, the layout issues were one of the problems with SCARE Vol. 2 that cost me a star (along with some spelling to be fair) so I wanted to make an improvement.  Especially with some much larger page count projects coming up.

After that I was on to styles, which is a whole other topic.  While I didn’t get as much editing done last night as I wanted to, I have to say that I learned some important new things about the products I am using that will result in a better end product for my customers.  Sometimes training and learning isn’t as sexy or fun as doing a cool cover or coming up with a great concept, but in the end it will pay off with better production values and a more professional product.

If your using Adobe products, or a host of others that they cover, then do your self a favor and check out lynda.com; way cheaper than taking a college course.

Lots going on right now, some details…

I got back another S.C.A.R.E. script from the freelancer that did the soon-to-be-published vol. 3.  It looks good, just a couple of minor tweaks and I’ll hand it off to an artist for appropriate illustration.

I have a slew of other Traveller projects in the hands of various freelancers, waiting anxiously to hear back from them but it has only been a few weeks so I shouldn’t be too impatient.

Monday I sat down to edit the first chapter of the Fantasy Firearms script and wound up doing three chapters instead!  I added some text,tweaked a few stats, nudged here and there and was pleased with where the project is going.  I am finishing up the last two sections and its off to layout!  There was one section I read where I decided we would need more magical ammunition varieties, so last night I made notes on what types we might include.  I’ll either write them up or see if Chris Field wants to tackle it.  All in all the project is coming along well, and I hope to have a print-ready PDF created in February. If I follow that with one print project per month that will be three or four “on the shelves” in time for GenCon; which is the goal.

I have also been looking to expand the Adventurer Essentials line.  I spoke with Chris Field via email and we are working on a very cool concept that I think will be a ton of fun.  More information on that soon.  I jotted some notes down last night and will be emailing Chris about the direction of the project.

We’re winding down a huge sales month, which is quite nice.  Hopefully we can make a few more bucks this weekend and end on an even higher note.

There are plenty of projects in the pipeline for the next couple months as well; more S.C.A.R.E. releases, Adventurer’s Wanted, a Black Tokyo sequel and more!

On the Tech front the iPad was announced yesterday.  It should be for sale in 60 days, and I can already see some very interesting options for the paltform.  Others agree…

Jobs touted the iPad as a great tool for videogames, but there’s also a potential impact on old school RPG sales.  The PDF market for RPGs has been growing rapidly, and the iPad’s larger, color screen has the potential to take roleplaying from the laptop to a simpler portable device, which may accelerate the growth of the digital RPG business.  With the exception of a handful of key lines, RPGs in brick and mortar stores are a minor factor in the hobby game market already; the iPad and similar devices may offer ways to keep this form of game play more diverse and robust than would otherwise be the case.

I just purchased my ticket for Gen Con 2010!

Looking forward to it, and I plan to have a few “Dead Tree” products for sale at this years show!