Ian, your comments contain more wisdom than the whole Great Library of Jonstown.
> If people prefer paper product then print on demand services such as Lulu are another option being used by many publishers i.e. the consumer pays to have thier copy printed. Of course the terms have to be attractive. I can see the use of POD services like Lulu being viable for groups like Moon Designs. But beware, the cost of product will rise for all of us through POD because we no longer benefit from economies of scale. Cheap, printed, small press product may not be a viable option.
There are also some workarounds. I am trying to go for a mixed solution in which I use a few direct channels where possible, whereas most customers must use POD (with a slight increase in price) if they want a physical book. We'll see if it works at Tentacles, sixty days from now.
> It works, and I can see it working for rpg products the sameway, but it requires the infrastructure to make it work. You need a website that can handle user accounts, payments, distribution of PDFs etc. That is no small investment for a small company with zero employees. It's much more viable for a site like DriveThru.rpg or IPR to establish the infrastrucure to support EAP than an indvidual publisher.
This is not necessarily true. The site I use for my "corporate" web page could provide me with e-commerce infrastructure at a reasonable cost. But it is just not worth the effort because OneBookShelf and YourGamesNow also provide publishers with free (yes, free) advertising. You simply put a banner or link online for the product you wish to advertise and it appears on the header X times per day, depending on how many publishers are running promo campaigns, possibly in someone else's page. This way you can easily attract new customers.
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