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Thursday, September 01, 2011

WHEN IS A PRODUCT NOT A PRODUCT?

Steve Cole reports:

Some time ago, an outside designer came to us with an idea for a product. We liked it, and agreed to publish it. Recently, he conferred with us on where the product stood and how we might go about finishing it, and we sent him an answer. That answer sounded interesting and it applies to a lot of projects, great and small, and so we thought that a generic version of it might prove of interest to those who read our blog.

Few authors who have not had a product published can judge how close their manuscript is to publication, and of course there are a lot of kinds of manuscripts. Some authors know that their project will take a lot of our work (and assume that we'll drop everything to do that work) while others assume that their project is ready for publication (but they rarely are).

What sounds easy may in fact be hard and what sounds hard may in fact be easy.

Most manuscripts do not arrive without our having previously worked with the author, providing him guidance, formats, and things to fix or avoid.

Upon arrival, a supposedly finished manuscript is assigned to somebody to review, usually Steve Cole (F&E, Fed Commander), or Steven Petrick (SFB), or Jean Sexton (Prime Directive). That reviewer then surveys the material. (This involves reading it, checking a few things, and getting a good sense of the state of completion.) Sometimes, the item is minor (say, a single ship or a one-page article for Captain's Log) and the reviewer simply finishes it for publication. Sometimes, the item has problems and is sent back for fixes. Sometimes, the manuscript cannot be fixed or is not something that is publishable even if it were fixed. Sometimes, a major manuscript (say, an entire E-module) is indeed ready to "come inside the house" and be finished by us.

In such a case, the reviewer conducts a review that may take an entire day or more. The point is to determine how much work it is going to take to finish the project. This partly depends on whether the decision is made to do this as a playtest pack, an e23 product, or a "real" product (which would take more work as it has to be done to a higher standard). The reviewer often comes up with more than one option.

The reviewer will then present a plan to the Board of Directors (the Steves and Leanna). The Board reviews the product to see if it is marketable (and in what format), fits into our plans for universe development, and whether the amount of time it will take to do is justified by the potential sales.

Oftentimes, this step is badly made, and we end up deciding to publish a product with nowhere near the amount of information we should have had to make a proper decision. This has resulted in some vaporware products that have never been finished (because they proved to be far more work than they appeared to take, or were thought to have a far greater market than we thought, or because we thought that the outside designer was going to do things that he did not, in fact, actually do). In the bad old days, we announced the product at this stage (often with a price that proved mistaken based on a project size that was miscalculated). In really bad cases, we actually print parts of the unfinished product (in batches with other products) and that proves to be a mistake (as we really wish the printed elements could be changed). These days, we try very hard to force ourselves not to schedule products until we know a lot more about the work it takes to finish them.

At this point, the board reviews just how many man-hours it is thought that the project will take. If that seems reasonable (compared to the sales potential) we will review the overall work schedule and determine when those hours can be found. (Captain's Log always has the highest priority and has a fairly regular schedule. So if one of the Steves is a month from finishing his current project, that does not necessarily mean that the new project begins after that point, as time is already reserved for Captain's Log. Sometimes, other projects are already scheduled and the next open time period for the designer who will do the new product may be months or even a year in the future.) Fewer required hours means an earlier production date. Too many hours and we may re-evaluate the project and decide not to do it at all.

Under the new "find out what this is really going to take" plan the Board will define some part of the project and some portion of the estimated time. The designer will then do that part (usually 10-20 percent of the project) and compare it to the time estimate. If the project is taking less time-per-page than expected, it moves ahead. If it's taking more time, it may be re-evaluated and either delayed or dropped. This is usually a good way to figure out if the project has major flaws. (In one case, we agreed to hastily to produce a really large book based on the theory that the received manuscript was "plug and play" without actually reading the manuscript. Then, when we started reading it and doing that "plug and play" page formatting, we found out that the manuscript included major problems. The project was sent back to the designer for a major do-over, and has been proceeding slowly since then, a few pages a week, behind the scenes, as we find problems and have the outside author fix them.)

One we have a supposedly complete draft, there is the outside playtest and review phase. (There are many kinds of projects which take very different kinds of testing and reviewing, which may take days or weeks. It just depends, but projects that need serious playtesting are hard to schedule as dependable playtesters are few and busy. We may not be able to proceed with a given product even if a Steve is available because the playtesters are all busy with other things.) The reports of the playtesters, proofreaders, or reviewers may mean that the project requires a few hours of editing, or has to be done over or scrapped.

Then we can talk about Jean, who seems to think that the world will end if any project goes to press with a mis-conjugated verb or an unfortunately capitalized noun. (Worse, Jean has a full-time non-game job, plus she handles marketing, manages the BBS and Facebook, and runs the Prime Directive product line, so getting something proofread takes some tricky scheduling. Proofreading a 120-page Captain's Log can easily take her three weeks, and given the chance, she'd do that twice. (The second trip would also take three weeks and would find 1% as many mistakes as the first, so the Steves rigorously avoid letting her see anything more than once.) In some cases, Jean is shown a few pages of a project, and we decide if it's going to get Jean-A or Jean-B treatment. Jean-A proofreads every word. Jean-B proofreads a few pages from each section and gives the assigned Steve a list of consistent mistakes that need to be addressed. That, and years of intensive training and a rigorously updated capitalization guide means that 90% of the mistakes are found by Jean-B.

Only when it is a finished document will it go onto the schedule. This is a fairly new rule designed to prevent vaporware from sneaking into the schedule. A playtest book or an e23 pack gets released pretty quickly after that point. In the case of a "real product" (say, Module R19) it goes onto the release schedule for 90 or more days down the road. (This may be even further away if it requires countersheets that have to be batched with other products.)

So, when is a product not a product? Until it actually goes into a carton with a UPS label. THEN, it IS a product!