Random observations on LA Comic Con ‘23 in particular to follow in my next post. First, I will note that at just about every show that I have done, someone asks me, “Did you write all of this?” Well, yes. Yes, I did. “Wow! That’s so cool!” Or similar expressions of amazement.
It happens a lot, but it still takes me aback a little. First of all, I consider each Places by the Way and Found by the Way module to be two sides of the same coin. Once the spine of the module is built, it’s not hard to fill in the details so that one is native to D&D 5E and the other is native to Pathfinder. It involves expressing mechanics like skill checks differently, revamping stat blocks and maybe swapping in new creatures; but that is nowhere near as much work as writing a different module from scratch. I have always considered that it allows me to get two separate books out of the same idea — I can double the SKUs for, at most, 1.5x the work. A bit of a cheat, from where I’m standing, but if it persuades some Pathfinder GMs to buy them because they won’t have to convert from 5E themselves (or because I flatter them by writing Pathfinder-native material), it’s totally worth it.
Also, self-publishing and creating yourself into a brand is much more of a thing than it used to be, even more so in RPG publishing than in the literary market. There’s more that I can say on this topic, and at some point I plan to unravel my thoughts on it in a dedicated post or series of posts long enough to justify putting them behind a paywall. When I decided to launch Ramen Sandwich Press, it seemed more like a survival strategy than an extraordinary achievement. Given the state of the industry, I felt like it was my only viable option if I wanted to carve out a niche going forward.
Finally, I should say that writing and then publishing my own work doesn’t seem like a big deal. Writing.… It’s just what I do. I have been writing professionally in one form or another for 40 years, and before that I wrote for school newspapers and such. While I like to think that I’m good at it, I also know that I don’t write all that quickly. I tend to write carefully, and I go back and fiddle with stuff whenever I have the luxury of time. What you see in the photo above represents 7 years of output. Alexander conquered the Persian Empire in less time than that. Of course, he didn’t have time sinks like managing his own Twitter and Facebook feeds and posting on EN World to publicize his conquests as necessary distractions. But even so, I often feel that I should have more to show for myself. If people want to be impressed by what I’ve done so far, I guess I’ll take it as a win. But I still have a lot more to write and a lot more to prove before I am done. Whether or not I can keep writing until I get there depends on whether or not I can find enough of an audience to support my work.