First of all: I'm sorry that my postings got you attacked by management when they thought you were the leak somehow. I kind of thought they would be smarter than that about figuring out how the leaking worked, but counter-intel is apparently not something they are good at.
Wesley Street wrote:Frank mentioned that Topps has been screwed out of royalties. Is the licensing agreement between CGL and Topps based on percentages or is it flat rate? It seems to me that Topps would (or should) be aware of what CGL owed the corporation based on units sold (of which I would think Topps would have information on). Do license-holders typically rely on the licensee to determine how much is owed on a license fee? Does Topps not independently audit those who create products with its brands to make certain it's getting its cut... rather than simply relying on the licensee's bookkeeping? Obviously I'm not a forensic accountant but all of this just strikes me as a little weird and overly trusting for a business arrangement.
Well first of all: you self report your income to the
IRS, why wouldn't you self report your income to Topps? The whole
point of subcontracting is so that you
don't have to micromanage the individual sales in the property. Topps can request to see the books and such, and they can do some basic digging to see that books exist in translated form that they haven't seen a dime for - but they don't have a representative counting books as they go out. Why would they? How
could they?
Secondly, the initial licensing fee is actually a set of "pre-royalties". Literally a pile of money that you hand over in
anticipation of selling materials and owing a piece of change on each one. So if you get the license and it's all vaporware and you never succeed in getting a book out the door - Topps has still made money. If you do really well and sell a lot of product, then you start having to pay more money to Topps. And that's the part that CGL has not been doing.
So for example, when a foreign language translation book is sold by Pegasus in German or by any of the other corporations that do French or Japanese translations, there are royalties due. There are royalties due to Catalyst, and there are royalties due to Topps. But Pegasus just sends a check to Catalyst and trusts that it will all work out. And then Catalyst is supposed to send a check for half that money up the chain to Topps. But... they don't. This behavior is unfortunately not new. FASA used to pocket all the foreign royalties, Michael Stackpole complained bitterly about having copies of foreign translations of books that he had written that he had never seen a dime in royalties for back when he quit writing Battletech books. And that behavior, criminal as it is, hasn't changed with the new management. Evidently it was seen as a form of stealing you could get away with, and deliberately extended.
Wesley wrote:If there's a silver lining to CGL collapsing and Shadowrun going on hiatus until it finds a new home its that it would allow a new license holder to revamp how SR products are created. Even with all of the accusations of non-payment by creators and people sticking around for "the love of the game" when sanity and reason would determine they should quit, the process of creation by committee itself is pretty jacked. I don't know if it started with FanPro but I don't remember FASA assigning 8-10 writers on a single book. I understand the thought process that leads one to believe that more writers on a project would mean a project gets completed faster... but it sure hasn't held much water over the past six years as new releases have been so incredibly infrequent. First and second edition SR, there were, what, two to three credited writers on a production? Nigel Findley wrote Aztlan on his own. But after third edition SR turned into a collaborative nightmare. Speaking as someone who has had to work with committees in his paying job, they're impossible.
8-10 authors is probably a bad idea. I think the ideal number is five. First of all, because 5 is the span of control that people are allowed in the chain of command during an emergency. There is very good data that a single commander can herd 5 cats and not 6. But secondly because parallel writing has advantages that are not completely negated by the too many cooks problem.
A Freelance Writer generally produces 10k words a week. They
can produce twice that, but you can't count on it. And that means that if you give one person a whole 150k word book, they'll be back to you in 4 months. That's great and all, but it means that you aren't going to be looking at a whole until deep in next quarter. If you split it five ways, you can have something to look at and fight about in a month. And that's what you want. The fact is that you want something to sell every month or two. You don't want five things to print all at once half a year from now.
The other thing of course is that the writers would rather get a paycheck every month than a bigger paycheck twice a year. They have like, rent and shit. If you're paying 5 cents a word (and you should be), that 150k book is going to be worth $7,500(before royalties, which you should also be providing). That's really not very much, but the important thing is that if you're asking your writer to hold out for half a year before they see it, there is a very good chance that they'll have to bail on the project before it's done - and then everyone gets nothing. Much better to dangle $1,500 each in front of five different writers for the month and get things done.
Basically, you should never ask anyone in your organization to attempt to organize more than they are physically capable of doing. You shouldn't ask one person to control more than five resources, because they can't. You shouldn't ask for any writer or artist to make predictions more than a month in advance, because they can't do that.
This means that if your book can't be finished by five people working for a month on writing it, that you shouldn't write it. I know that sounds harsh, but remember that you can jolly well write two books. You can bring out another book next month, and you will. The upper limit, therefore, is 200,000 words. This means that the SR4 core book or the 4th edition Player's Handbook is an acceptable book to write, but Geist: The Sineating is a book that should be split up or abandoned.
If you want to bring out more books than that, you're welcome to. You just have a B-Team. A B-Team that is also 5 writers and also does a book a month. You can put part-timers on the B-Team and have them crank out smaller books.
But yeah, one of the reasons that Runner's Companion is so shitty and took so long to make is because it seriously has ten authors. That's ridiculous. For goodness sakes, the damn thing is only 135,000 words, it could have had five writers and a single developer and been written in a month and been higher quality. But remember: Synibarr has one author and took like 12 years to write, that's not really a valid direction either.
-Username17