Re: Elite: Dangerous - and the return

[Griff]

@EV, ah, you obviously know the old joke about 'what the difference between a drummer and a drum a machine' then

[Cody]

I've heard them all, Griff - like: 'how do you make your drummer slow down? Put some sheet music in front of him!'

[drew]

Latest update: apparently there will be an official sequel to the "Dark Wheel". Presumably, Alex Ryder's search for Raxxla.

If anyone has £4500 to spare they can buy the right to write a commercial piece of fiction for the universe, including having a few planets, stations, etc. conveniently positioned. I wonder if there'll be any takers for that.

This has to be by request, I can't imagine FD having come up with this unless there was some sort of request for it. The way I read it, since you retain all rights to your work, you are basically buying a an in-game scenario that fits your work, as well as assistance to get the work published. I kind of like the concept, but maybe not as a pledge. You do get to model your own system though, not just name it. Curious if there are going to be any takers on that one.

I'd be surprised if any writers can afford it. This one certainly can't! I'd happily write one for free and gratis, just to be part of the official Elite canon, but paying £4.5k just to be 'allowed' to write for Elite, with no guarantee of sales at the other end? Not convinced.

I wonder who is writing the 'official' sequel to 'The Dark Wheel'?

Cheers,

Drew.

[Cody]

Gotta admit - if I had the cash, I'd love to see Coyote's face grinning from the cover of an Elite novella!

[drew]

£4,500 though! <Faints>

Cheers,

Drew.

[Gimi]

£4,500 though! <Faints>
Cheers,
Drew.

Maybe you could start a Kickstarter Campaign to found your £4500 pledge.

[Commander McLane]

£4,500 though! <Faints>
Cheers,
Drew.

Maybe you could start a Kickstarter Campaign to found your £4500 pledge.

[xzanfr]

Apologies and thanks, El Viejo

until I saw live in Pompeii.

was that the mad film they made of them playing in some old roman Coliseum? I'm sure they showed that on the TV a while back, it was a bit odd

Thats the one. Excellent and weird film but not much atomsphere to the gig - apparently there was a misprint on the tickets and everyone turned up 2000 years early... still served otters noses in the stadium, though

With regards to the novella, it'll be a real shame if some of the excellent fiction from oolite is overwritten by a paid for elite canon - in particular I'd be so sad to see a Rexxla having read Drew's excelent status quo and Mutabilis (I'm part way through Incursio) - cheers for your work, Drew

[Disembodied]

I'd be surprised if any writers can afford it. This one certainly can't! I'd happily write one for free and gratis, just to be part of the official Elite canon, but paying £4.5k just to be 'allowed' to write for Elite, with no guarantee of sales at the other end? Not convinced.

Yeah, that's an odd one. There can't be many professional writers, who earn enough to afford £4,500, who would want to (or need to) pay to have their fiction included in the game ... And surely there would have to be some sort of quality control?

[Geraldine]

£4,500 though! <Faints>

I know Drew, I still think you should have been the official author, that would have been one way he could have acknowledged the Elite community's efforts to keep the IP alive all these years

As for who will be the author, perhaps he will bring back David Massey

[Disembodied]

OK, I just took a proper look at that one: what they're proposing is, selling a license (for £4500) to up to ten authors to write fiction set in the game universe, subject to Frontier Developments' approval. Those works can then be published and sold commercially, and FD will make no further charges, and do a bit of promotion within and around the game.

I dunno ... I'm pretty out of touch these days with the mass market, but £4500 seems like a pretty hefty price tag even for a large publisher to pay for a brand-new license. I mean, in book market terms, we are talking about a wholly untried game here. It might be a hit, it might not be: it's not exactly the Assassin's Creed franchise, or even EVE Online. (Coincidentally, £4500 is roughly the average annual income earned by a professional writer from their writing ... obviously with J K Rowling in the mix, that means there are a lot of people who earn very very small amounts of money from writing each year, too!)

Rough costs of producing a 5000-copy print run of a 256-page paperback (approximately a 90,000 word novel) would be ... this is harder since I stopped smoking: I don't have a fag packet handy ... a conservative estimate:

Typesetting: £500 (cheap)
Copy-editing/proofreading: £200 (cheap)
Cover design: £300 (cheap)

So that's £1000, give or take, before printing. 5000 A-format paperback books will be somewhere around £2500 (maybe a bit less, if you're Hachette or Random Penguin and are running huge presses day and night in China). Add on to that the £4500 license and you've got a total of £8000, which makes a unit cost of £1.60. That's with the author getting zero advances: massively unlikely for a professional writer but let's assume that's how it goes. That's also zero for marketing, as well, but we'll follow the tried and tested publishing route of crossing our fingers and hoping for word-of-mouth. It's also zero for the time of the production editor, for the heating and lighting and office space, and so on, but we'll assume they can all be covered by a bit of busking in the lunch break.

The book sells for, say, £8.99. The trade will take between 40% (High Street, low volume) and 50%+ (wholesalers and Amazon). Call it 50% for convenience. So the publisher gets £4.49 per book. Take off warehousing and transportation (roughly 80p per copy) ... £3.69. At the very bottom end of things the author would get 10% of the net, after the book has paid back its costs. So if the book sells 2169 copies, the author stars to earn 37p on every copy sold thereafter. If it sells out the rest of the print run, the author makes a cool (well, mild) £1047 and change. Even if - because they have a 250lb agent - the author gets something like 15% of the gross after costs, that's a whole £1.35 per book, which makes £3817 and change if the entire print run sells (less what they have to pay to their 250lb agent). The publisher makes a profit of £6624 on this deal (then again, they stumped up all the money, and busked during lunch breaks to pay for the heating, lighting, office space and wages). Of course, if the book roars off the shelves and bigger print runs are demanded, well, thing start to look better - but the percentage of books which sell more than 5000 copies is pretty low.

If we go digital, we save the £2500 print costs and we don't have any transportation and warehousing. But we're much less likely to get a sales price of £8.99, and Amazon (who sell 90% of ebooks in the UK) can take up to 90% of the proceeds of any sale. But let's be optimistic and say we can charge £5 per ebook, and Amazon only take 70%, including the VAT they're not paying. That's a production cost of £5500 (£1000 production and design. plus the £4500 license: again, no author's advance, and no marketing). With Amazon being generous the publisher gets £1.50 per ebook. So we have to sell 3668 ebooks to get into profit, when the author can start earning - at best, as recommended by the Society of Authors, a 50% share of the profits, or 70p per ebook - so you'd only have to sell 20,572 ebooks in a year (after that initial 3668) to make roughly the minimum wage. Even if we can sell it at £8.99, and Amazon suffer some sort of fit and only take a 50% cut, AND it's been self-published, with all copy-editing and proofreading and cover design done by pixies (or members of the family), so the author gets an amazing £4.50 per book sold - it would still take 1,000 sales of this magic book to pay back the Kickstarter overhead.

Hmm ...

[Cody]

... this is harder since I stopped smoking: I don't have a fag packet handy ...

<lights another smoke and chuckles> Interesting numbers there though, Big D... inside knowledge is always useful.

[Griff]

...and Amazon suffer some sort of fit...

[drew]

Maybe you could start a Kickstarter Campaign to found your £4500 pledge.

That's almost worth doing just for a laugh.. and then.... hmmm...

I know Drew, I still think you should have been the official author, that would have been one way he could have acknowledged the Elite community's efforts to keep the IP alive all these years.

Thanks Geraldine, that means a lot to me.

With regards to the novella, it'll be a real shame if some of the excellent fiction from oolite is overwritten by a paid for elite canon - in particular I'd be so sad to see a Rexxla having read Drew's excelent status quo and Mutabilis (I'm part way through Incursio) - cheers for your work, Drew

Thanks xzanfr! Incursio was my favourite of the 4 parts. I must admit - I'm not sure how a writer could pen a sequel to 'The Dark Wheel' without knowing a bit more about 'when' Elite:Dangerous is set. Does it follow on directly from Elite? Is Frontier/FFE involved? If so, how do you get around the continuity problems that Selezen wrestled with for years?

<Most excellent lengthy analysis deleted> Hmm ...

Couldn't agree more!

Cheers,

Drew.

[Rese249er]

With regards to the novella, it'll be a real shame if some of the excellent fiction from oolite is overwritten by a paid for elite canon - in particular I'd be so sad to see a Rexxla having read Drew's excelent status quo and Mutabilis (I'm part way through Incursio) - cheers for your work, Drew

Thanks xzanfr! Incursio was my favourite of the 4 parts. I must admit - I'm not sure how a writer could pen a sequel to 'The Dark Wheel' without knowing a bit more about 'when' Elite:Dangerous is set. Does it follow on directly from Elite? Is Frontier/FFE involved? If so, how do you get around the continuity problems that Selezen wrestled with for years?

The way I see it, the multiverse is an infinitely big place. A little "parallel universe" handwavium covers the continuity AND Oolite canon problems quite handily, I think.