Re: Can I make money by writing IF?

["Matthew Amster" <mamster@pomona.edu>]

On Thu, 30 Nov 95 14:15:44 GMT, 
Randall Stukey  <lensman@crl.com> wrote:

>Commercial IF is currently priced like the small press hardcover 
>chapbooks of short stories (very high), and probably sells to about the same 
>percentage of the IF market and said chapbooks do (very low).  IF might do 
>much better at $2-4 a pop.  I'm sure most of the commercial IF authors will 
>say that it would not be worth their time to deal with such small sums of 
>money, but many businesses do think such sales are worth their time.

On the other hand, we're not talking about point-of-sale purchases here.  
If I'm in the bookstore, I'll be more likely to plunk down $5 for a 
paperback than $10.  But if I'm going to write a check, get an envelope, 
write a little note, stamp it, seal it, find a mailbox, etc., that five 
buck difference doesn't seem like such a big deal any more.

(Amazing how e-mail changes one's perspective, isn't it?)

Even a paperback that fails commercially will sell more copies than any 
text game released today.  Economies of scale allow large publishers to 
recoup their losses on the poor sellers with the profits on the few books 
that do well.  IF authors don't have the same luxury.  I'm certainly 
willing to pay a bit extra to support the genre.  Though John Baker's $4.50 
(I think) "lunchware" fee for John's Fire Witch was refreshing and I paid 
it.  I would have paid $10.  I probably would have paid $25 for Legend, but 
don't tell Dave I said so.

Now, if you could get text games into snazzy packages and put them at the 
counter in bookstores, there might be something in that.  Hell, there 
really might:  I guarantee there are many avid readers who own computers 
but aren't on the net and either have never heard of IF or didn't know it 
was still being written.  Some would eat it up, especially "literary" IF 
like Jigsaw, Christminster, or Legend.

Matthew