benlehman

Sadly, this is not limited to RPGs, though it's clearly pretty bad there.

My European friends all have to -- get this -- pay to have their dissertations published. Now when I say "have to," I mean that it's a graduation requirement. And they do not get royalties, even in the unlikely event that the book sells well. And the publisher charges a lot of money for the book, even though he has already been paid for it by the author.

My book contract entails that I make an amazingly small amount per copy of my book, something on the order of 75 cents. This for a book that costs around $100. My expectation is that in about 10 years or so, enough copies will have sold that I will have broken even on -- get this -- the postage of sending two complete copies of a 350-page manuscript to the Netherlands.

And what do I get for this? The pleasure of seeing my name and work in print.

Now, honestly, in academia people actually do care about publication, so it does matter and is worth a lot. I'm very happy about it. But the reality is that this is an exploitative model.

I agree that the RPG business is considerably worse, but it's pretty bad all over.