Tiree wrote:I think I bandied this about a half dozen or so years ago - Kevin entrusts one of his freelancers as a 'line editor' for one of the smaller not so popular lines. See how it works out, see if the log jam goes away. Give that person full creative control and vision. Give that person 18 months to see how much gets processed and out the door.
For this to work you're really talking about a line developer. I like the idea. For it to work, the person would have to be willing to work for a small percentage of sales because paying them even minimum wage at 20 hours a week would likely be too costly. Time wise it really wouldn't be worth it. Let's do some napkin math!
Why does everything go through Kevin? It's simple $. Let's say that Freelancer X is good, and writes a 192 page sourcebook... I can't remember but I want to say the going rates for writing an official sourcebook was 1K-3K, if Palladium pays the high end of that and Freelancer X does four books a year that's 12k. Someone more capable than I (which admittedly there a million of those guys) working a 10hrs per week might be able to write 4 sourcebooks a year... But they'd have to be good. But guys like this who are that good wouldn't likely work for these rates anyhow. Or without a legit contract.
If they pay the freelancer on page count alone, like for the Rifter (which I suspect is how they do it) that'd be just short of $2k ($1,920), but we haven't subtracted space for art yet... So how much page space does art take up? I'd say somewhere between 20%-25%. So now the freelancer is left with something between $1,400-$1,600 or (x4) $4,800-$6,400... Lets just say it's $6,400 for the year...
If this guy is really proficient... He does it 10hrs per week 520 hours per year and gets $12 per hour. A decent wage in the year (cue the Conan theme music) 2000. (seventeen years ago)
But how much work is this guy doing? Because Palladium Pays per page, font size matters... Let's do more Napkin Math!
Let's say space for art is on the high side (and less writing for Freelancer X) at 25% of 192 pages... And subtract (48) that 25% Which is 144 pages. I wrote my submissions at 10 point and found that each submission (just the text space) was approximately a third less content when published... A third of 144 pages is ironically 48 and we are back at 192! Crazy! It's like I knew where this was leading when I started...
Words per page of based on my experience put word count per page between 500-600 (including formatting) Let's settle on 500 words per page... but we have to add that third (+250) to get a Palladium Page and settle on 750.
750x192 That's 144000 words multiplied by 4 576k words for the year... But for now lets stick to 144k...
Per week that's producing (/52) 2769 words (doable) not to bad... or 277 words per hour...
Wait what!? 277 words per hour! That's very unlikely. That's a lot! Even half of that 139 words is a lot of RPG writing... If we doubled the number of hours per week to 20 and reduced our hourly wage in half... ($12/hr to $6/hr) maybe... (but still doubtful)
Additionally how much is Palladium Paying per word... well if we use the same example as above and increase print space to a third longer than the average page submission this works out to a bit over 1 cent per word... We divide 576K words by our wage: $6,400 and get... $0.01111 One cent and a tenth...
I write on my blog all the time about rates of Pay in the RPG Hobby... Myself I usually write for 2-4 cents per word and I have along way to go... The question is who is Palladium Really going to get at these rates. But we already know the answer... Only folks with a real passion to write for them. They don't do it for the money and most of them are decent writers, but at the same time (like myself) they are not exactly pros either... (no offence intended)