Two of my favorite
Dragon and
Dungeon contributors, Dave Noonan and Jesse Decker, recently started a fascinating series of Dungeons & Dragons design and development journals on the official D&D site.
This week's installment surveys important nonfiction resources for crafting D&D material as suggested by the readers of the site. Lots of interesting suggestions the further you go down the list, but the "part 1" in the title makes me hope that we'll be seeing more obscure suggestions than "The Power of Myth" or "The Prince" as the series progresses.
The format of Jesse and Dave's article reminded me of a book I briefly browsed yesterday in a trashy Portland bookstore. The title was something like "Mondo-Outrageous Questions: Answers Inside!!!!!11!!1!", so of course I had to pick it up. The first question I noticed in my random sample seemed relatively straightforward and obvious: "Why does the rest of the world hate America?"
Instead of getting to the meat of things, the book provided a sampling of witless "common man" opinions that read like viewer mail on the O'Reilly Factor. More to the point, they read like tightly edited message board posts, which I strongly suspect they were.
I immediately skipped past these truisms, guesses, and disagreements with the premise of the question to get to the summation by the book's authors, which is what I had come for in the first place. The fact that I often had to flip a couple of pages while doing so made me think: "So I'm supposed to pay money for this? It's probably still sitting out online somewhere."
In short, it felt like a ripoff, and it was a ripoff. I put the book back on the shelf.
The same editorial approach that worked for this week's free internet D&D design column doesn't work in the printed medium. When there is a monetary exchange involved, people expect a little more effort for their cash, and they are right to do so.
One of the constant struggles of my day job is to ensure that the magazines I edit remain relevant and worthwhile in an era choked with free online content. The answer lies in the difference between something you read online and something you read that you had to pay for.
In order to earn the customer's dollar, the editor must give him something the Internet can't, or at least doesn't accomplish very often. In our case, it's got to be something people don't just read and enjoy, but something they want to keep. That's extremely rare in the magazine world, but in our case I dare say the majority of our regular readers keep their Dragons and Dungeons alongside their other gaming material. Not many other magazines have the same status. National Geographic, certainly. Perhaps Popular Mechanics? And then there's stuff like Playboy.
But most people don't keep Cosmopolitan or Time or Sports Illustrated or Entertainment Weekly or Harpers or Atlantic Monthly or whatever.
But they do keep their Dragons and their Dungeons. Pinpointing why they do so is the key to understanding what makes the magazines tick, and how to make them financially successful.
