The Greed Factor

School is over (I now have a Bachelor of Science in Christian Ministry) and I've been looking at some of my various writing projects to decide where to pick things back up.

There's The Gramarye 2.0, of course. It's a magic system design guide, using the original Gramarye rules as a worked example and base to start from. I've got a lot of it written, but I've got quite a bit more to go. It's going to stay on the back burner for awhile longer, though, because I want to work on some setting material first.

The first setting is an unusual superhero setting, inspired in part by Strikeforce Morituri, but with a rather different twist on the "fatal flaw" bits. If I make it a mini-setting magazine article, it'll get about 8,000 words. (The length of "[[http://www.fudgefactor.org/2004/04/department-13.html|Department 13]]". But like D13, it could be expanded quite a bit, either with supplementary articles, or by making the core article longer.

The other is a much bigger setting... can't really do it justice in just 8,000 words. If I wrote it for Fudge Factor, it'd definitely be a multi-part article. This one is inspired by many things... it's a space opera born out of my love of Star Wars, Babylon 5, and lots and lots of fiction. For years my wife and I have toyed off and on with developing a sci-fi setting, but we couldn't figure out what the "hook" would be... what would make this setting interesting enough to stand out? I think I've got something, and it's rather simple, but I think it will work.

Now here's where I hit my real dilemma. Fudge Factor needs more articles. And I could certainly write up any of this stuff into several articles for FF, from stand-alone mini-settings to serialized maxi-settings. But what's frustrating me is that I believe I could write this stuff for money. If D13 had been a Pyramid Online article, I could have made over $250 in cash, or $500 in SJ Games product. (And I could finally get Munchkin and all those card games I keep saying are too expensive. It's kind of hard to give away something that you realize you could have made more than pizza money on.)

Since the beginning of the idea for expanding The Gramarye, my intent has always been to publish it as a PDF for money. And now that selling PDF's is easier than ever with RPGNow and the like, the barrier to entry is almost non-existent. And now I've got some other ideas that I think will sell at least moderately well... enough to make it worth the trouble, at least. I don't expect to get rich or support anybody with an RPG writing income, but it'd be nice to get some extra money and the recognition of having my work purchased by the discerning public.

So here I am, begging members of [[http://fudge.phoenyx.net/|Fudge List]] to write something for Fudge Factor because we're low on articles, and at the same time thinking that my ideas are "too good" for FF and that I ought to be selling them. I wish FF could pay its authors... then I could write for FF and get paid at the same time.

I may work it both ways. I published 8,000 words of D13 in FF. But I could easily write another 8,000 words and more. So maybe I'd write about 20,000 to 40,000 words total... around 30 to 60 pages, and publish it as a PDF with art and a professional look. I could do the same with the other stuff... write a "teaser" article, complete but sketchy like D13, and then write an expanded treatment to sell. The article could serve as advertising... but it could also serve to satisfy readers' appetites and cut into sales of the PDF.

What do you think? Would you pay $3 to $12 for a 30-60 page PDF book based on a ten page article that you liked? As a specific example, would you pay $7 for a 40-page Department 13 with art, which is four times longer than the article? How much would you pay?