Pillow talk

Over the last few weeks I have found new fire to start a new product line. I am making pillows.

For a couple of years now, I've had boxes of Karlstad sofa covers from Ikea sitting around my office. They were on sale for like, $1 each, and I bought a couple on spec. I assumed I would make monsters from them at some point, but the fabric is sort of upholstery-grade, tricky business on the 6-12 inch scale I usually work in.

I made a round back pillow out of a t-shirt for a show a few weeks back, and it set my mind to thinking about pillows. Then I went to Shanghai to visit a friend, and saw some cool pillow/monsters with a certain shape. I sketched it in my notebook and brought the idea home.

After modifications and trials with fabric and various shapes, I hit upon this design, which I'm pretty happy with. We've had a prototype on our sofa for a few weeks now, and we both really enjoy it. It's not just weird looking, it's comfortable. I'm leaning on it now as I write this.

The production units are going up on Etsy as I get them done and photographed. Check 'em out while they last!

I also have vague plans to try to advertise this batch around crafty places the Web. That's new territory for me, but last time I put up a bunch of stuff on Etsy, nothing moved for 3 months. I also barely told anyone it was there, so I have to consider that I could be partly responsible.

Bynamite idea!

This New York Times link about a start-up that proposes to pay users for their personal information might be hidden by tomorrow, so I'm cherry-picking quotes here:

“Our view is that it’s not about privacy protection but about giving users control over this valuable resource — their information,” Mr. Yoon said.

...

Every search on Google, Mr. Acquisti notes, is implicitly such a transaction, involving a person “selling” personal information and “buying” search results. But people do not think about, or are unaware of, the notion that typed search requests help determine the ads that Google displays and what its ad network knows about them.

Bynamite, Mr. Acquisti said, is “simply trying to make these kinds of transactions explicit, more transparent to the user."

...

In essence, the company has a libertarian, free-market ethos. If consumers have more power and control, it says, personal information should flow more efficiently to the benefit of both consumers and advertisers, who will be able to more accurately aim their ads.

...

IF Bynamite gains momentum, Mr. Yoon predicts that individuals will be able to use their portfolios of interests as virtual currency. He calls the idea a “consumer’s preference wallet.

I've said several times that Facebook can have, resell, and use my personal info for the low, low price of $20. Let's make it $25 because I'm a good capitalist.

That number should be way higher, because Zuckerberg knows they're making way more than $25 off each user. But I like to play nice, and thanks to scarcity rules, I don't have a lot of bargaining power. So 25 bucks for my name, email address, and marketable interests. I've never heard or read on the whole wide Internet anyone else making that kind of claim, and I'm surprised about it.

I normally acquiesce to charges of curmudgeonly behavior. I'm not proud of it, but sometimes it's accurate. But this quirk doesn't belong in that category. This is one of those rare instances where I'm right and everyone else is wrong for some reason.

You should expect a cut of the money when someone uses a resource you provide. I doubt this will be a pure, beautiful, cash-based transaction that I want. But it shows me I'm not completely alone in my thinking.

The new free lunch

Yesterday at my favorite burrito chain, Qdoba, I was musing to M about whether a completely ad-run restaurant could work. I'm paying $6 for a burrito. I don't know much about restaurant margins... they're thin I hear... but how expensive is it to make that burrito? Ingredients, hired help, rent, blah blah... what are we talking, an amortized three bucks each? Let's say $3.

This particular Qdoba is located near a bunch of expensive universities. Haverford and St. Joe's kids are in there all the time; Penn isn't too far away as the crow flies. That is juicy marketing target -- young AND moneyed.

If you could guarantee delivery of rich college eyeballs, how much would a well-targeted advertiser pay? Would they pay $3 per impression? Would five advertisers pay $.60 each?

What if you made your customer fill out a survey for their free food too? Wouldn't some marketing firm love to have that steady stream of data? They'll pay more than $3 a pop to get these peoples' opinions in other venues, right?

Then sell space on some tasteful wall posters, sell the tray liner space... as long as you don't get greedy and sell every ceiling tile, you could make this work.

The food would have to be good. You couldn't ever let food quality drop. But otherwise, this seems like it would make at least as much profit as a regular burrito joint. There must be some reason why this hasn't been tried yet, right?

Then, that very same day, I see this: Panera: Pay What You Can Afford.

“Take what you need, leave your fair share,” says a sign at the entrance of the Saint Louis Bread Company Cares Café. Patrons who can’t pay are asked to volunteer their time.

The café, which reopened Sunday as a nonprofit, has cashiers who provide receipts with suggested prices and direct customers to the store’s five donation boxes. The menu is the same, except for the day-old baked goods brought in from sister stores in the area.

“I’m trying to find out what human nature is all about,” Ron Shaich, who stepped down as Panera’s CEO last week but remains as chairman, told USA Today. “My hope is that we can eventually do this in every community where there’s a Panera.”

Not quite the same thing, but maybe one better.

John Mackey on corporations as do-gooders

Part 54 zillion in a series of musings about capitaltruism, an excerpt from a New Yorker article about John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods:

[Mackey] "...This is a paradigm that has polarized our country and led to bad thinking. It’s holding the nation’s progress back. It’s as if there were a wall. And on one side of the wall is this belief that not-for-profits and government exist for public service, and that they’re fundamentally altruistic, that they have a deeper purpose, and they’re doing good in the world, and they have pure motives. On the other side of the wall are corporations. And they’re just selfish and greedy. They have no purpose other than to make money. They’re a bunch of psychopaths. And I’d like to tear that wall down. Human beings are obviously self-interested. We do look after ourselves, but we’re capable of love, empathy, and compassion, and I don’t see that business is any different.”

He went on, “We’re trying to do good. And we’re trying to make money. The more money we make, the more good we can do.” By this, he had in mind not the traditional philanthropic argument that more money earned equals more to give away but, rather, that a good company—that is, his company—which sells good things and treats its employees, shareholders, customers, and suppliers well, can spread goodness simply by thriving.

This was a variation on what he calls “conscious capitalism,” which some people, smelling an oxymoron, or worse, snicker at. His idea is that business should have a higher purpose—that, just as doctors heal and teachers educate, businesspeople should be after something besides money. It may be an easier argument for a grocer to make; he feeds people, and if he feeds them properly he heals and educates them, too. But it borders on humbug when you apply it to, say, Wall Street. Consciousness, as it relates to capitalism, is in the eyes not so much of the beholder as of the capitalist.

via Kottke.
Read the whole article at your leisure.

Art Shop 2009 Post-Mortem

Art Shop is over, and I did pretty well! I'm about to go into a long review, mainly for my own benefit, so feel free to drop out any time this gets boring.

I have only two data points: last year and this year. So I'm not sure how meaningful my conclusions are. But I'm trying to draw some anyway.

The overarching lesson this year is from my neighbor Liz, who was selling smart-looking hand-knitted sweaters. The lesson: "Business is fickle." You do your homework, and you hedge your bets, and then you show up and hope. You don't know when it's going to go well or go badly. You go anyway.

More specific observations:

• This year's commercial breakthrough was diversification. I had a few normal monsters (fewer than last year), a bunch of pattern monsters, some tetris magnet sets, and random stuff I glued googly eyes onto. This provided a nice price spread from $40 down to $1 for the Things With Eyes. (I also sold coasters for my sister-in-law, Alison).

• The ratio of "Cool!" to "Sold!" is about 10:1.

• I didn't bring some things I wanted to. I wanted to make hats, but I never did the R&D to be able to churn out a bunch, and I didn't want to show up with only one or two. I also had meant to make pillows out of t-shirts, but the dog ate my homework there (literally), and I was already staying up late finishing monsters and freelance as it was. So I let it go. It's probably just as well -- the table was full enough. But I coulda sold the headlice out of hats, I think.

• Got lots of compliments, and someone said to me, "Everyone is talking about your stuff!" Meredith pointed out that it must feel good to hear people say nice things about my work. And it should. I've tried to figure out why it doesn't.
  
  My guess is that I have a subcutaneous cynicism that distrusts inert talk. Telling me you like my work is swell, but like it with your wallet, and I'm more inclined to believe you.
  
  I mean, regardless of origin or intent, a compliment is a compliment, and kindness is not so abundant that I'm willing to wave it away. But there's still a stark line in my heart between "talk" and "walk."
  
  Cynicism is low on my list of favorite character traits. But it's often coupled with a constructive shrewdness. I haven't discerned how to gerrymander my feelings to properly segregate "good judgment" and "bad faith." But at least I'm happy I've discovered it's important to do that.

• Everybody DOES love monsters, but everybody also loves utility. Based on some half-verbalized semi-criticisms, I got the impression that many people think stuffed monsters are only for children. Items that look fun and cool are ok for children, but not adults. Had I ingrained some sort of usefulness into the product (here's where a hat would have come in handy) I would have had more admirers and customers.

• I can't tell whether low-pressure sales is better for business in dollar terms, but I can tell I feel icky about applying pressure. I only want to sell to people who already want to buy. I get no joy from persuasion.
  

• Some of last years' monsters didn't sell, and I brought them home thinking that they must have been defective in some way. They were unbeloved, and therefore I had failed. I took them back this year anyway, to fill out the ranks. To my surprise, they sold, to people who seemed happy to have them.
  
  So the new conclusion is that some products hit certain people a certain way, and you don't know who or when. There might be some genuine stinkers in the bunch, and you hope to weed those out as soon as possible. But sometimes a creation's buyer just hasn't come along yet.

• Last year I sold a bunch of stuff on Friday, and Saturday was dead. Low point: Some woman spent most of an hour letting her daughter amuse herself at my booth while she talked, and then bought nada. However, my goal had been to make enough to cover my new sewing machine, and I did that, so mission accomplished.
  
  This year, I did only so-so on Friday, and going into Saturday I did a lot of hand-wringing about how bad I feared business would be, especially after a quiet first hour. I heard people say "Friday is more social; Saturday is the day more people buy." But that hadn't been my experience.
  
  Turns out, people were right. Saturday mysteriously picked up around 1:00, and I did decently thereafter. When I tallied up sales, I made a significantly larger amount of money this year compared to last year.

• I dropped my prices a little on magnets and big monsters on Saturday after disappointing Friday night sales. Both sold better on Saturday. I don't know whether it was because of the price drop or the motivated Saturday shoppers. For monsters anyway, my hunch is $40 is a breaking point for a lot of people. They'll bite at $35, but $40 is too much.

• When I say I did "decently", we're still not talking a lot of money. I probably did a little better than break even on the hobby this year. Which is cool with me. I'm interested to turn this into more of an income stream, but a self-funding hobby is sufficient gratification.

• An artsy consignment shop downtown wants to sell my monsters. Sweet! I'll probably have more to say about that in a couple weeks.
  

• I've set a goal to attend at least one more art/craft show in 2010 as a vendor. I need more data points.

If you came out to Art Shop this year, whether or not you bought a monster, then my sincere thanks. If you DID buy something, then I hope it brings you joy and amusement. See all y'all next year.

Interesting times for D und D

Last week, Goodman Games announced that they will start selling 3rd edition D&D stuff again. I am so far out of the loop these days I need binoculars to make out that there even is a loop anymore. But even from here I can see the sparks this thing is throwing off.

Goodman Games basically exists because of the Open Gaming License (OGL), which let outside publishers freely make D&D-compatible game products. It started with their weirdest product, Broncosaurus Rex, combining dinosaurs, science-fiction, the wild west, and the Civil War into one wonderful mashup that screamed, "Now I can publish my secret home campaign for reals!"

Things quickly got more commercial, and Mr. Goodman has made a nice little company out of the whole deal.

Goodman Games was maybe the first and definitely the loudest independent publisher to jump on the official 4e bandwagon. They proclaimed they were all in before the paperwork was done explaining exactly what "all in" meant.

But when the paperwork did come down, it said that official 4e publishers had to not produce any 3e stuff, and couldn't use the official "3e compatible" logo anymore (seen at right). Which meant that anything with the logo printed on it either had to get sold quick, junked, or covered with a sticker.

For most publishers, this meant, "sold quick, and junk the leftovers."

I don't know anybody's sales numbers for 4th edition-compatible products, although Mr. Goodman himself flashed around some comments earlier this year pronouncing the sales were good enough considering the market (my words, not his). However, I humbly submit that if 4e sales were all that great, Goodman Games wouldn't be reprinting old material.

If you thought sales of recent product were sufficient, if you thought they were going to be strong, you wouldn't go back to offering old product. You would invest in more new stuff. Yet one of the most successful independent publishers, who was ready to burn his boats a couple years ago, just refitted and relaunched the fleet. A fleet that potentially competes with his latest offerings.

From a symbolic standpoint, this is kind of a slap for 4e. From a reading-between-the-lines standpoint, this means that nobody except Wizards is making good money on it. And I wouldn't bet on Wizards, frankly. In fact, professionally speaking, I haven't.

Affiliated

I'm an Amazon affiliate now. When I mention various purchasable media here, I'll be including links to buy the thing on Amazon.

To many bloggers, this is a Duh-level decision. But I have always quietly deemed QT an ad-free zone. This blog was about writing down things I think, and would serve no other master. So I had to consider the decision to commercialize it via any third party. (Pushing my own stuff is fair game.)

I decided to do it based on a few factors. Amazon links are:

• unobtrusive
• substantively informational in addition to commercial
• testing grounds for my bid to become Internet Famous

I have to imagine pretty hard to see how this could become a problem. But just in case it does, I declare now that I will try to sell out as little as possible, and to be up front about it when I do.

Now go! Go and click on yesterday's board game links, and from there, commence all your Christmas shopping at Amazon in one purchase, without closing your browser window, within 24 hours of first click-through.

One trick at a time

I don't like repeating. That's one reason why I fear I'll never make much money off monsters -- once I've made one, I don't want to make another one like it. I'll never be an Ugly Doll maker, because Ugly Dolls, while wonderful, are basic, repetitive. I want to keep trying new things.

Here's a picture of some pattern monsters I've been making. (Most of them still need mouths.) Unlike my regular monsters, I have a pattern, I cut it out, I sew all the pieces together. This was supposed to make monsters faster so I could charge less, and theoretically make it up on volume.

Two competing conclusions come from this:

1) They all have the same basic shape, but they come out looking different anyway, so the differentness is good.
2) They same-basic-shapeness is still sort of boring, so I wind up trying to do different things to keep myself interested, which takes longer, which is bad.

Ultimately, they are faster than one-at-a-time monsters. If I focus, I can bang them out. I'm pleased that I natively prefer craftsmanship to commerce, but seriously brain, let's value commerce a little more highly, ok?

Adult anxiety dream

You know that one dream where you show up for the final exam, and realize you haven't gone to class all semester and you're freaked out?

I had one of those a couple days ago, only with Art Shop. I dreamed I was setting up my booth, and I had almost nothing to sell.

As of now, at t-minus one month I've got:

• 7 big monsters done, 2 without faces.
• 2 mini monsters mostly done, with another 1 in process.
• 0 hats done, with 1 in process.
• 0 tetris magnet sets done, but all of them in process.
• 1 pillow done, 1 in process, raw materials for 2 more.
• probably 6 or 7 googly-eyed items done, with an unknown number coming. Depends on how many interesting objects I find in the trash in the next month.
  

The goal this year is to diversify offerings, both in product and price spread. Informal polling reveals that hats will likely be the big seller.

I'm not sure what conclusions I'll be able to draw. Realistically, I'm on schedule to have enough stuff done. I'm usually only comfortable though if I'm ahead of schedule. Tonight: magnets!

Monster hats

A few weeks ago, as a prototype, I made a monster hat. It eats your head.

In a seemingly unrelated incident, we went to Linvilla Orchards last week (I should be getting ad revenue from these people) and Meredith wore it around. Here is a picture of Meredith wearing the hat, holding an adorable child we picked at the farm.



A dude working there saw Meredith, and admired the hat. M said, "My husband made it."

Dude said his head was too big for most hats, and I said, "That's no problem, I can make you one."

Here is the hat I'm about to send to him.


In the past, I've said that I was more interested in the making than the selling of stuff. That's still true. But this year I've become more interested in the selling bit. How does one get one's product assembled and sold in these United States of America, I wonder?

I'm going to look into that some more. I never wanted to be a businessman; I wanted to be a creative. I'm becoming more willing to entertain the idea of mixing them though.

Smart, rich pt 2

Yesterday I started talking about how being smart and $3 still only gets you a latte.

I was having this conversation with my friend Steve on Monday out at Linvilla Orchards, a 300-acre farm where a third or so of those acres are dedicated to something like a harvest-time amusement park. All over the place, somebody at Linvilla has been exercising business canny.*

Now Steve is an intelligent guy. What you call a classic "idea man." A musician and actor, with a different set of networking contacts and personal inclinations, he could do well in advertising. As we discussed good ideas (or more accurately, as Steve doled out good ideas and I agreed with them), I came upon my own: funnel cakes.

Nobody doesn't love funnel cakes. But you only ever see them at special events: fairs and carnivals and such. Why don't funnel cakes make it into everyday life? Why don't restaurants sell them as dessert options? Why don't food trucks that already have built-in fryers sell these on Philadelphia street corners?

I don't know. I don't even know how to know. And all modesty aside, I'm a pretty smart guy. I should be able to figure this out. And then sell a crapload of funnel cakes.

Some people seem to have business canny easily, but that doesn't mean it can't be learned. The question for me is not even my usual Step One question, "Do you want it?" but maybe the Step 1.1 question: "What are you willing to give up to get it?"

This is, I think, the difference between business canny and your average smart person. The business canny person has sacrificed a lot to get that way. If BC guy was ever curious about tapirs, but couldn't see how to make money on them, tapirs got left. A smart person curious about tapirs gets a zoology degree and makes $35k shoveling tapir dung.

There must be some way to walk a middle line there, to meld curiosity with capitalism. The classic question, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is a misunderstanding of what smarts is good at. But it's not a bad question.

*My favorite application was a row of apple slingshots. All the apples that the orchard couldn't sell to eat, they sold for you to shoot at scarecrows with industrial strength slingshots. Turning garbage into money is fascinating to me.

If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?

We think intelligent people are kings in modern America. Even nerds in high school don't have it quite as bad as they used to, because everyone recognizes that nerds can grow up to become filthy rich. In America, even the classic "jocks" understand the brute strength available to the rich.

Interesting thing about making money though -- you don't need to be smart. Smart might even be a hindrance. A business canniness exists independent of intelligence, the kind that makes used car sellers wealthy and college professors lower-middle class.

(Business canny is related to, but separate from business savvy. Savvy is a practical understanding of business. Canny is a knack for working the angles. Both are different from being "smart.")

Here's a New York Times editorial from Calvin Trillin on the topic, entitled Wall Street Smarts.

“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” ...

I reflected on my own college class, of roughly the same era. The top student had been appointed a federal appeals court judge — earning, by Wall Street standards, tip money. A lot of the people with similarly impressive academic records became professors. I could picture the future titans of Wall Street dozing in the back rows of some gut course like Geology 101, popularly known as Rocks for Jocks.

I've spent a lifetime being smart, and that's only gotten me partway to where I want to be. I'm going to talk about this some more tomorrow.

Monopoly City

I give Monopoly a lot of crap, but that's only because it deserves it. Hasbro is a game company that, on a corporate level, decided to make quality in games a second-tier consideration. To use an analogy, they built hotels on St. James Place and Tennessee Avenue -- not the "best" properties in the game, but the ones you land on most often.

Hasbro has milked Monopoly like the prize cow it is. Everybody with an IP has licensed the game (which is really just lawyer insurance because you can't copyright or patent a game mechanic). And every few years, they produce a new clutch of games with the word "Monopoly" on the front, and I assume those sell well enough to make it worth doing.

This year Hasbro produced Monopoly City. On boardgamegeek.com the reviews boil down to "It's not that different. If you didn't like Monopoly already, you won't like this one either."

BUT! There's a free Web game to promote it, Monopolycitystreets.com. Great idea Hasbro! It's got a good gimmick, in that you're buying real-world city streets courtesy of Google Maps. It's fun to look at your neighborhood and buy your street and build tall buildings on it.

It's still a crappy game though. There's a little strategy, but not a ton. Like board-game Monopoly, it's a game about wheeling and dealing, because the cheap stuff you start with won't get you to the top. You'll need to save up money and buy other players' more profitable streets, because the best stuff is already taken. Except why would a player sell their best stuff?

The only reason I can think of is that the player got bored or distracted and dropped out. Player interaction is extremely limited, so you can't negotiate well. The nominal endgame (Be the richest real estate magnate in the world!) is sort of boring. Only the highly motivated will work on it. Find a half dozen of those people (who I'm pretty sure they're already playing) and the top of the game will stagnate.

The good thing though, is that you can see on the blog that the people running the game are taking this seriously. There's room for improvement too. Right now, it's a really nice skeleton of a game, and they could make it more. If tended properly, this could become the Hasbro's own social networking platform. That's worth keeping an eye on.

Regardless of my callous criticisms, it's fun for a while. In case you want to get into it, you can read tips and FAQs at the fan site: monopolycitystreetshq.org.

Also, if you're related to me in Philadelphia, I already own your street. OH IT'S ON.

Pixar, stickin' it to the Man!

I wrote the skeleton of this post a few months ago, and forgot to post it. During Blogaday though, nothing goes to waste.

How is Pixar stickin' it to the Man?

By not caring about the Man. That is the very best way the Man gets stuck:

Perhaps Wall Street would not care so much if Pixar seemed to care a little more. The co-director of “Up,” Pete Docter — who also directed “Monsters Inc.” — said in a recent question and answer session with reporters that the film’s commercial prospects never crossed his mind. “We make these films for ourselves,” he said. “We’re kind of selfish that way.”

John Lasseter, a co-founder of Pixar and now Disney’s chief creative officer, routinely says in interviews that marketability is not a factor in decisions about what projects to pursue. Instead of ideas that feel contemporary, he aims for stories that are rooted in the ages.

“Quality is the best business plan” is one of Mr. Lasseter’s favorite lines.

I don't know what my takeaway from this is, but I like remembering and posting things about creative ventures that inspire me. And really, who doesn't Pixar inspire?

Work at Netflix

Great slideshow about Netflix company culture. I've never cared about the inner workings of Netflix before, but suddenly I want to work there just to know what the inside of that box feels like.

D&D TV?

Hasbro teams up with the Discovery Channel to have its own TV network.

The consumer protector in me cringes at the thought of having a toy and game company broadcasting from its own media outlet. (I'm less bothered about separation of church and state than I am separation of editorial and advertisement in modern life.)

But everything else in me thinks this is such. a great. idea.

I hope it works!

WotC pres speaks on PDFs

Greg Leeds, president of WotC, started doing some PR work, giving an interview at EnWorld.org over the the PDF brouhaha. According to bios I found on the Web, he's worked at Hasbro since 2001 in a couple of capacities -- as General Manager of the boys toys group, and some time later head of Hasbro's international marketing -- and was general manager at Samsonite before that. Look it up if you care.

Leeds took over at Wizards a smidge over a year ago, and started by killing WotC's vaunted, but woefully-implemented social networking site, Gleemax. Then he laid a bunch of people off. As I understand, some of them had it coming, and some were simply expensive expendables. Cleaning house is not the worst way for a new, corporate-appointed CEO to start, especially when the house was in such disarray. But it tends not to endear one.

His background is in neither publishing, nor games. True, Hasbro and Wizards both produce "games", but think of that in the same sense that humans and lamprey eels are both in the same Phylum. It doesn't mean we have anything to say to each other at parties.

So Mr. Leeds appears to be an experienced, not-incompetent marketing manger, cast into an entirely new industry. He's been on the job for a year, which, in my experience, is enough time to understand what it is that you don't know about what you're doing now. So that's who we're dealing with.

The interview is a by-the-numbers kind of thing. "Piracy is a substantial concern... We need to have a strong retail base...." Very little here that you couldn't have said if you knew who you needed to protect and who you needed to placate.

Couple of points of interest:

We do not have any plans to resume the sale of PDFs, but are actively exploring other options for the digital distribution of our content....
Along with the rest of the publishing industry, Wizards is also looking into new means of digital distribution. For our novels, we have recently introduced titles to Kindle and to Sony’s E-Reader and will continue to add titles to those offerings over the coming months.

PDFs are effed, but Kindle is in. If I'm reading him right, Leeds seems to think that other peoples' bandwagons will prevent piracy the iTunes way. By locking books into certain partner hardware, maybe they can slow piracy. Of course, they're already offering their books through their own system.

Its EULA says:

You understand that Wizards or its representatives may monitor all communications made by or received by you while using the Feature. You consent to the extraction of hardware system profile data and any data related to operation of the Feature.

Which means they will try to trace piracy of users through their Feature. I dunno... I call snoopware a Bug.

Exerting control like this seems likely to reduce piracy. Somewhat. It will definitely reduce sales. The installed base of people who can read is much larger than the base of people who own Kindles. Is the market not niche enough for WotC yet? Did they need a way to cut it finer?

If this does work, Wizards is in for an ugly 3 to 5 years while their hoped-for customer base follows them through the necessary hoops to make piracy somewhat more difficult. Seems like that's asking a lot, though.

Another quote:

...we conservatively estimate the ratio of illicit downloads to legally purchased copies was 10:1.

Listen, I can unconservatively estimate that by halting PDF sales, you have moved that ratio to 10:0. Great work, fellas. It's Miller time.

This doesn't sound like anything that will kill D&D, which has way more hit points than anyone would have estimated in 1980. But it does sound like a hindrance to WotC's customers -- not a deal-breaker, just one more discouragement that Wizards can ill afford right now. I suppose they could make the argument that not doing this could kill the company just as fast. I doubt it, but since we're all making it up as we go, no one's got the data to prove it. It's just a matter of who's most convincing at the top of the organization.

I have wanted to avoid comparing the current ownership to TSR in the mid '90s. I still believe they're more professional and more competent. They might have their heads in the same sand though.

WotC probably doesn't care what you think about PDF sales

I got an email the other night that basically every card-carrying D&D geek got, that said "Wizards of the Coast is out of the PDF-selling business in t-minus 12 hours." There has been predictable and understandable Internet furor over that.

A WotC rep showed up at enworld.org and left a post of which I will quote the relevant bits for you so you don't have to follow the link:

...due to recent findings of illegal copying and online distribution (piracy) of our products, Wizards of the Coast has decided to cease the sales of online PDFs. We are exploring other options for digitial distribution of our content and as soon as we have any more information I'll get it to you.

Other on-the-ball PDF retailers have taken clever advantage of the free publicity to point out that they're still happy to sell you their PDFs, and now offering special ha-ha-WotC sale prices good for the next few days. (They don't call them that. I called them that.)

This all reminds me of a post I tried to write about six months ago, which got long and recursive, and I never finished thinking through. Now, it seems inevitable that Wizards would give me another opportunity to unlimber these ideas.

The applicable one here being that someone at Wizards of the Coast -- not the whole company by any means, but someone -- is working furiously to rebottle the Internet genie. Furiously. This person has no idea how to behave when the business of selling electrons turns out to have different, and largely uncharted difficulties compared to selling atoms. And no idea what to do when the customer becomes a participant in the product.

No one does. No corporation has a clear idea of how to make money shifting electrons if they are not fortunate enough to have a near-monopoly. Individuals can do it, but large companies, even large companies full of Internet-savvy employees like Amazon and Google, don't know how to do this.

Clever people like Cory Doctorow and Kevin Kelly have come up with some interesting ideas about it. But they're making best guesses. (Although I highly recommend Kelly's list of Eight Generatives Better Than Free, especially if you are a publisher considering ceasing PDF sales.)

I would like to be indignant, and come to a trenchant conclusion, but I don't have one. (At least not a good one.) I'm guessing that what Wizards is doing makes sense from a certain legally-defensible standpoint. It's hard to know which of the many, many threats a business faces will strike a crippling blow. You try to make your list, and prepare for the biggest ones, and get to as many as you can while you can.

And so, seemingly, lower on the list than they've gotten to is the threat of falling out of touch with customers.

Here's maybe the one original idea I've got on this topic: They believe they're in touch with the customers they want to be in touch with. And they believe those customers are not that into PDFs. And they might be right.

Hasbro, owner of Wizards of the Coast, is a toymaker. They are used to thinking that their entire customer base turns over every few years. Maintaining an audience is never on their radar, because by the time you are 5 years old, you do not care about Mr. Potato Head any more. They have to sell Mr. Potato Head to a brand new crop of 2-year-olds.

Therefore, I might need to conclude that the people in charge are not interested in selling games to me any more. They want to sell Dungeons & Dragons to 12-year-olds. This does not mean that D&D is not suitable for 37-year-olds. It is just that the company is more interested in 12-year-old dollars.

Even if I'm right, since I don't have a look at their numbers, I can't tell whether that's a good business strategy. I think selling D&D is a different beast than selling Mr. Potato Head, and therefore, the process and goals must be different. But I can't tell. I can tell that lately, they're not creating game products I'm very interested in, which anecdotally at least, supports my theory.

If I'm right though, the card-carrying D&D geeks on Slashdot and enworld complaining about WotC's behavior is the equivalent of the dog complaining that the cat food tastes bad.

You can eat it if you want, but it's not for you, silly dog.

2008: A fantastic year

Most years of this decade, I've come to a grim December and thought, "Man, that was a hard year. Hope the next one's got something better."

2008 broke my streak. 2008 has been a fantastic year. A lot of it is thanks to Meredith, who helps ground me by listening and taking me seriously. Highlights:

• Worked at the same place all year, at a job I basically like, without a long under-employed break -- an extra bump considering how lousy the year was for everyone's business.
• Started a hobby from scratch, and made some walking around money in the process.
• Restarted writing RPG material, and it was fun instead of nerve-wracking.
• Depression came, but did not stay this year.
• I'm energized rather than intimidated by the need to learn and stretch.

It is a fine time to be Jeff Quick. Thanks for reading, y'all.

Lunchtime

Craigslist does not make as much money as it could. Like, $475M less than it could, sez the Wall Street Journal.

This article is from a couple of weeks ago, but it took me some time to put together what I had to say.

In Mr. Buckmaster's view, newspapers would be better off being a little more Craigslist-like: Go private, eschew Wall Street's demands for continually "goosing profitability" and give your readers what they want. Much trouble in the world comes, in Mr. Buckmaster's view, from losing sight of that essential goal.

After we've retired back to the living room for coffee, Mr. Buckmaster allows that the world is perhaps not quite that simple. When asked whether there's a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: "It's unrealistic to say, but -- imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?"

Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. "Now, there's something wrong in the reasoning there," he admits. "You can't run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company" -- more points for understatement. "But still, it's a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible." As an end-user, I suppose I do, too. But there are no free lunches, even if Craigslist -- and the meal Mr. Buckmaster and Ms. Best provided for me -- sometimes seem to come close.

The article says Craigslist employs about 21 people, and makes $25M a year. It's safe to assume that money isn't split evenly among all the employees, but I bet nobody's doing badly either.

The idea that you look to be helpful, and make plenty of money (the Buckmasters live in a nice house, after all) but not as much as you could, is very like what I was talking about when I said we make the economy, the economy does not make us.

You don't take money just because you can. You take a generous amount and leave the rest, because there's just no good reason to have more.

Here's the new scheme: Rather than concentrate the money in a vicious oligarchy, a business takes a fair amount and leaves the rest for other businesses who are also taking a fair amount and leaving the rest. This increases the overall pool of viable businesses, which generates more work for more people, and lower costs on the goods and services that already exist (due both to suppliers taking less than they could, and increased demand).

It wouldn't even be communism. Capitalism would thrive because there would be less punishment for failure. You could recover from a business failure in a fraction of the time it takes currently. It seems counter-intuitive to capitalism as we know it that this would work, but it easily could.

The reason it won't is that a significant number of us won't buy into it. We don't even ALL have to buy into it. Some miserable number of us can still be greedy bastards. Maybe even a miserable majority can continue. As long as a significant minority are willing to run this way, we'll see the rewards.

There might not be any free lunches. But expensive lunches are entirely optional.