#16: Publisher Implosions

[RPGnet Columns]

http://www.rpg.net/columns/free/free16.phtml

Summary:

Don't stand too close to the blast radius when this happens.

Go to the column (http://www.rpg.net/columns/free/free16.phtml) for more information.

[JLowder]

http://www.rpg.net/columns/free/free16.phtml

Summary:

Don't stand too close to the blast radius when this happens.

Go to the column (http://www.rpg.net/columns/free/free16.phtml) for more information.

Some good advice here, some OK advice stated in rather vague terms.

You use "small publisher" in several places, but that's a phrase that needs a little definition. Small compared to what? Wizards of the Coast, when compared to Time-Warner, is tiny. Really, most companies in the hobby game industry are small companies--either sidelines for their owners or just a few employees. Anyway, the best points you make apply to all publishers, both in the hobby market and outside the hobby market.

What's a Publishing Right?
Copyrights and publishing rights are often intertwined in discussions, so some fuzzy uses of the words are common, even among people who know what they're talking about. Yes, there is a difference between the two, and that difference is important, but the terms are related and can get muddled in conversation.

When discussing contracts, publishers need to know the difference between offering a contract that buys limited publishing rights (first rights, reprint rights, all rights) and one that is work-for-hire. In the former, the copyright (ie. base ownership of the material) resides with the creator. In the latter, the creator agrees that he or she never had any rights to the material, that the publisher is the creator of record and holds the base ownership. Even with an all rights contract, the copyright once belonged to the creator and it was transferred to the publisher when the contract was signed. The distinction about who holds (or once held) the copyright matters when a company implodes, as it will impact whether or not you stand a chance of getting the rights to unpublished work back.

The real warning flare--for me, at least--is a publisher who doesn't understand that work-for-hire is not the standard contract for all of publishing. Or one who fails to grasp the notion that a publisher should compensate for the rights he or she wants to buy. Want to offer a work-for-hire contract or an all-rights contract? OK, what are you offering in return that compensates the writer or artists for all the rights you are taking? The deal should be balanced.

Also, publishers should be able to consider and intelligently discuss reversion clauses in their contracts--terms by which the writer or artist regains rights to the material he or she created. These clauses kick in if the product is never published, the company fails to pay, and so on. Barring reversion, kill fees should be offered that compensate the creative for the work in case it isn't published.

There is an important caveat here: a smart publisher will want to protect its intellectual property, so if you as a freelancer are asked to write an adventure set in the Great Land of Snid, which is owned by Company X, you should expect your reversion agreement to specify you must remove all references to the Great Land of Snid (and other existing Company X intellectual property) if the work reverts to you. Otherwise known as "filing off the serial numbers," this is possible for most--but not all--work freelancers do for game companies.

Short Stories
"Be careful of publishers who actively seek this kind of work because, in all likelihood, they won't sell enough to stay in business."

Publishers like WotC or Games Workshop or White Wolf? They all publish short fiction. TSR/WotC's fiction has made the company piles of money. GW does just fine with fiction, too. Eden is a small company and did pretty well with the zombie anthologies I put together for them.

Yes, fiction is a tough market. No hobby game publisher should enter into it without a clear business plan and an understanding that a) hobby shops are reluctant to carry fiction titles (because the chains regularly undercut them on fiction from the bigger houses like WotC) and b) chain book stores are unfriendly to small fiction publishers, meaning most hobby game publishers will have a hard time getting them to stock their fiction titles. If a publisher doesn't understand those truths about the fiction market and tries to publish fiction, they are headed for trouble. But publishing fiction by itself, or soliciting for fiction (especially if it's going to be published as part of an RPG book)--these just are not the telltale signs of doom you make them out to be.

This point might be better stated as: "Be careful of publishers who actively seek to branch out into new types of products--fiction, miniatures, music, comics--without a clear understanding of that product-type's distribution and marketing peculiarities."

Thunderous Silence
"Former employees (sometimes part of the Incredible Shrinking Staff) who blatantly refuse to discuss the company are saying more than they're saying, if you know what I'm saying.

The employee could be under a legal agreement not to talk about the company. Or he or she could be showing professional restraint, thinking ahead to his or her next job. (Would you as an employer jump at the chance to hire someone who is actively bashing a recent former employer in a place like RPG.net?) So you overstate this whole "silence is telling" thing. For freelancers or potential freelancers, silence is telling when the publisher does not respond to questions in a timely fashion, particularly about money owed or a product's release date. The silence of ex-employees is all but meaningless because it can be chalked up to so many different things.

Overall, though, the column is a good (and timely) discussion.

Cheers,
James Lowder

[pawsplay]

Nice column. While some of the advice is vague, and some of the specifics could probably be more specific, I think the overall point is well made: the second thing a freelancer needs to understand (the first being craft) is business. If you are an unpublished freelancer, rest assured it is a bad sign when a novice to the freelancer side of things can spot deficits in the professional demeanor of their would-be employer.

Freelancers are business people, and as such, should be looking at things like investment vs. returns, gain vs. risk, networks, reputation, and so forth, all points touched on in this article.

Bravo.

[daemonica]

...the second thing a freelancer needs to understand (the first being craft) is business.

I couldn't agree more with that statement.

[smascrns]

Great column, very well complemented by James. One of the interesting things is that it applies as much to publishers as to freelancers. I mean, if the reader is thinking in terms of starting a rpg publishing house (or garage) he should read this to know several mistakes he should avoid.

[LBrownIII]

Thanks for your contribution, James.

I'm sure everybody understands that a large part of the vagueness is based on trying not to mention names. While I don't mind mentioning the surely-dead (like Precedence), I'm certainly not going to comment on anything that I merely speculate is dying or whose death might be exaggerated. Harsh assessment is one thing; libel is another!

When I talk about the RPG industry, I use small publisher to refer to nearly all startups and most RPG publishers that fall below a certain threshold I've never really established. I consider the big boys to be WotC, White Wolf and arguably Steve Jackson (although GURPS' market share is only like 3%).

I consider publishers like Mongoose, AEG, Kenzer, FFG, Eden, Green Ronin and some others to be mid-tier.

I understand that the relative values for the RPG industry are different from the relative values for the larger publishing industry. In the publishing industry, I think everyone other than WotC & White Wolf would be considered a small publisher.

On short stories: yes, I understand that a few markets have found a use for short fiction. They are the exceptions that do not disprove the rule. The number of times I've seen solicitations for fiction vs. the three instances you name overwhelmingly favors my "warning sign" caution. Again, it's just a tell--it's not proof.

Also, the fiction that makes WotC piles of money is not short fiction--it's novels, and that's a different kettle of fish. While I'm not current on how they're paying their novel writers, I know that TSR/WotC has previously offered substandard terms for novel writers compared to, say, Random House. However, I specifically did not mention novel solicitation as a warning sign (although it arguably should be, it's a big enough issue for its own discussion, and I don't want to deviate from this one right now).

Lastly, on Thunderous Silence: Legal obligations notwithstanding, people often talk about former employers. However, I'll agree that I could have overstated the value of this item. Edited to add: Hey, I just read my own article. I even said "Don't read too much into this one"! I think I'm covered there.

[LBrownIII]

: the second thing a freelancer needs to understand (the first being craft) is business.

Thank you. That is the raison d'etre of this column.

[JLowder]

On short stories: yes, I understand that a few markets have found a use for short fiction. They are the exceptions that do not disprove the rule. The number of times I've seen solicitations for fiction vs. the three instances you name overwhelmingly favors my "warning sign" caution. Again, it's just a tell--it's not proof.

Also, the fiction that makes WotC piles of money is not short fiction--it's novels, and that's a different kettle of fish.

A few markets? You need to research this more actively. TSR/WotC has indeed made piles of money on short fiction. I personally edited two Forgotten Realms anthologies that sold well over 100,000 copies each and have been translated into several languages. The big WotC project of the moment is that dragons-across-the-settings short fiction book. GW publishes short fiction successfully, as have White Wolf, Chaosium, Eden, and a host of others. WizKids solicits paying short fiction for their online site. Other successful game publishers frequently use short fiction as "tone-setters" at the starts of RPG products.

There are too many specific examples of publishers who have published short fiction successfully for you to claim soliciting short fiction is, by itself, telling of anything dire about the company.

Cheers,
James Lowder

[LBrownIII]

The number of small publishers asking for short fiction without actually ever releasing their product or releasing their product and selling pathetic numbers is large. The success stories are limited to relatively few. For every success story you named, I could name a dozen failures.

But in any case, I think we can disagree on how important this point is without disagreeing over the point of the article.

I think we both agree that novels are more marketable than short stories. How about that one?

[JLowder]

The number of small publishers asking for short fiction without actually ever releasing their product or releasing their product and selling pathetic numbers is large. The success stories are limited to relatively few. For every success story you named, I could name a dozen failures.

Far more than a relative few. And from both large companies and small. These multiple examples at multiple tiers of the industry disprove your point that soliciting short fiction is a sign of trouble. You have to ignore massive successes and minor successes from too many companies.

Your failures are likely examples from companies that could not sell RPGs either. But please name some of them. I'd like to see your first dozen at least. Be specific. Provide at least ballpark numbers for the pathetic sales or the losses incurred.

If a company solicits fiction and fails to release it, it's not proof that fiction is a problem, but rather that the publisher in question lacks basic business ability. No doubt they solicited work for other products, like RPGs, that were never released. Yet you do not list soliciting RPG materials as a warning flag. That's because the flaw is unrelated to what the poorly run company solicits and fails to publish. Could be an RPG or CCG art or a boardgame. Again, this says nothing about an inherent trouble sign in soliciting fiction.

So, no, it's not a matter of a disagreement with your point's relative importance. I disagree with your point about fiction.

As far as novels go--a company that fails to research the fiction market will do just as poorly with novels as they do with short fiction. Novels may be easier in some ways to market, but they typically cost more to put together than anthologies, for the same "name value" level of writer. Small publishers are far more likely to get "names" to write short fiction for them for an affordable rate than they would a whole novel. And even a bump from C-list to B-list author makes a difference to booksellers and potential readers when considering carrying or buying a book. That can often offset the relative benefits of marketing novels over anthologies.

Cheers,
James Lowder

[LBrownIII]

I'll concede the point.

I can't name many people in the industry who know more about that aspect than you do. I am not on that short list.

[JLowder]

I'll concede the point.

I can't name many people in the industry who know more about that aspect than you do. I am not on that short list.

Thanks.

The point on fiction aside, though, I think you raised a lot of great issues and were often right on target. And anything that educates potential freelancers about warning signs, particularly in the current rocky market, is a very good thing indeed. Keep up the good work.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder

[thele]

If a company solicits fiction and fails to release it, it's not proof that fiction is a problem, but rather that the publisher in question lacks basic business ability.


That's not necessarily true either. There are many possible reasons for not releasing something that was solicited. It’s also not always in the control of the publisher either. I'm not saying that it's right, I'm just saying that it's a stretch to claim that the publiser "lacks the basic business ability".

~Le

[daemonica]

That's not necessarily true either. There are many possible reasons for not releasing something that was solicited. It’s also not always in the control of the publisher either. I'm not saying that it's right, I'm just saying that it's a stretch to claim that the publiser "lacks the basic business ability".

~Le

Well, I understood his comment differently. From my humble impressions and the stories I've heard, yes, there are several cases where RPG publishers cancel fiction lines for different reasons (aka production costs, timing, line cancellations, etc.) but in reality, that does go back to running a business. If there's one thing that both Lloyd and James have made abundantly clear is that in order to be a freelancer (or a publisher for that matter) you have to know business in order to do business correctly and be successful.

Maybe James can jump in here and verify this, but I am not aware of any other industry that allows you to write an entire novel, not pay you for it, cancel it for whatever reason <i>regardless of whether or not you have a contract</i>, and not give you a "kill fee." In my book yes, that's a publisher (regardless of size) who "lacks basic business ability." Why? Because any business has an accounting system set up in place to account for expenses. I'm more familiar with the financial side of business, and I can say simply that: If a publisher doesn't look at their books or project conservatively to account for incurring the high cost of a novel, then yes, I would venture to say that they don't know business. This is true of any other business in any other industry, and I have seen businesses fail because of not paying attention to cash flow correctly.

Of course, I could be reading into the comment incorrectly and my apologies if I did. :)

M

[JLowder]

That's not necessarily true either. There are many possible reasons for not releasing something that was solicited. It’s also not always in the control of the publisher either. I'm not saying that it's right, I'm just saying that it's a stretch to claim that the publiser "lacks the basic business ability".

I was using the example in the context of the original column--assuming that the cancelation was to be attributed to problems with the publisher. That said, you're right that there can be reasons for products to be solicited and canceled other than simple lack of business ability. Sometimes a publisher needs to know when to pull the plug on a product or line that just isn't earning out, and printing a product you know isn't going to sell is throwing good money after bad.

No matter the cause, however, canceled projects are a workable red flag.

If you, as a freelancer, consider working with a company and they have many canceled products on their past schedule, it's a concern. Each of those products cost the company money they will not recover--opportunity cost, staff costs for setting up the project, whatever they paid for kill fees. The farther along the production road they were, the greater those costs were. So if they did everything with a project, just decided not to print it, they're out a lot. They might have had good reason for canceling, but that cancelation is a negative cash flow most hobby publishers can't simply absorb.

You have to look at other factors, too, to get the context of the cancelation.

If the ratio of canceled projects to published ones is high, it's a more serious concern. TSR used to do 100 or so products a year and cancel a couple. Not a big deal. Company X does five products a year and cancels a couple, it's a much bigger deal.

And the freelancer should find out what happened to the material the publisher solicited for the dead project. Did they pay authors and artists some sort of kill fee for the dead project? If the creatives met their deadlines and the project was canceled by the company, there should be some sort of kill fee involved. Also, what happened to the work? Did it revert back to the authors, minus any of the company's proprietary IP? If not, a freelancer should be very wary of sending that company material, especially if thay don't pay kill fees. If the project is canceled, you're out all your work for no money. Even if you are paid a kill fee, you may still be on the losing end because your work isn't being read in the product for which it was written and, if you didn't get it back, may never be read at all.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder

[JLowder]

I am not aware of any other industry that allows you to write an entire novel, not pay you for it, cancel it for whatever reason <i>regardless of whether or not you have a contract</i>, and not give you a "kill fee." In my book yes, that's a publisher (regardless of size) who "lacks basic business ability."

A publisher that tries to make the freelancer take on an unfair burden for a dead project--when the freelancer met her or his obligations in the transaction--certainly lacks an understanding of how businesses operate. Or, perhaps, they are assuming the freelancers lack an understanding and will stand for giving up their work for no pay.

Now, if the freelancer blows deadlines or turns over work that fails to meet the contract's specifications, that's a different story. The contract should set out how the publisher can deal with that (subtracting $X from the payment due for each week late and so on), in just the same way it should spell out kill fees and reversion procedures, should the publisher not publish or pay for the freelancer's accepted work.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder

[LBrownIII]

I believe all this about cancellations and kill fees applies only to word rate projects. In the larger publishing industry, royalty-paying publishers do not offer kill fees and can cancel the publication of your book at any time with no obligation to you.

One instance of this might be a non-fiction work where you exaggerated the market for the book in the marketing section of your proposal, and the publisher found out. Another might be a substantial and sudden decline in market demand for your book's sub-genre.

This might be another reason why, in the RPG industry, word rates are often superior to royalty rates.

[JLowder]

I believe all this about cancellations and kill fees applies only to word rate projects. In the larger publishing industry, royalty-paying publishers do not offer kill fees and can cancel the publication of your book at any time with no obligation to you.

Not so. Even within this industry, royalty-paying projects (like novels for WotC) pay a standard advance against royalties. Advances are part of a good contract whether you are being paid per word or by royalty.

Most of the mainstream publishing contracts I've seen make it clear that, should the publisher cancel the project for reasons other than author non-compliance, the advance (or a large portion of it) serves as a kill fee. If you lied in your proposal in a way that led the publisher to take the book when they would not have done so, had you told the truth, this would likely be cast as non-compliance should they catch on. If the publisher read the market wrong and later canned the project because of their own mistakes, you would be paid a kill fee under most reputable contracts.

The functional part of the process here is usually the advance, which doubles for a kill fee when the project goes off the tracks. It doesn't matter if you are being paid, at the end of the project, per word or a royalty.

Cheers,
James Lowder

[LBrownIII]

You're right about the advance, of course. Publishers don't expect authors to pay back advances (although that's one of those major myths about publishing out there).

[JLowder]

You're right about the advance, of course. Publishers don't expect authors to pay back advances (although that's one of those major myths about publishing out there).

Since advances tend to be relatively small for most authors, publishers often assume they'll double as kill fees. If the advance is structured correctly (so much on signing, so much at milestone #1, so much on final acceptance), it can indeed serve as a fair and progressive kill fee, in case the publisher pulls the plug on a line. Even when an author fails to produce anything for a contract, publishers will sometimes simply write off part of the advance--the part paid on signing--as a kill fee to be done with the matter.

Of course, a responsible writer or artist who fails to produce anything for a contract should feel obligated to return an advance, or to work with the publisher to come up with a fair kill fee, based on the amount of work completed.

Things get a little more frantic with publishers when you start talking about big-dollar advances--like Random House suing P. Diddy over the return of his $300,000 book advance, plus interest, for his never-written autobiography. See story here: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6975658/

There's a whole PR component here, one that made a public brawl over the advance more likely. Random House hyped landing the P. Diddy book, along with the big money they paid to land it, so having nothing come of it left them with egg on their face.

Cheers,
James Lowder

[LBrownIII]

Byzantine Corporations

You sometimes see small publishers with as many imprints as they have titles. Going to their web site is an endless routine of clicking and clicking through many pages of cookie-cutter webpages. One such publisher who I won't name (but who was recently DELISTED from the Writer's Market Online) has at least 10 different imprints. Their best-selling title, by my estimate, has sold about 500 copies. This one's a pretty substantial tell, as it indicates that the publisher's main effort lies in ego-stroking rather than selling books. A proliferation of imprints or "divisions" exists only to inflate the publisher's size and importance.

[JLowder]

Byzantine Corporations

You sometimes see small publishers with as many imprints as they have titles. Going to their web site is an endless routine of clicking and clicking through many pages of cookie-cutter webpages. One such publisher who I won't name (but who was recently DELISTED from the Writer's Market Online) has at least 10 different imprints. Their best-selling title, by my estimate, has sold about 500 copies. This one's a pretty substantial tell, as it indicates that the publisher's main effort lies in ego-stroking rather than selling books. A proliferation of imprints or "divisions" exists only to inflate the publisher's size and importance.

Imprints can have a valid purpose--if a publisher wants people to identify a certain line as a mystery line, another as an SF line, and so on. Of course, for an imprint to be valid, it needs to have enough releases to establish and maintain that identity.

And larger corporations are awash in imprints. Take the Bertelsmann Group. In addition to the BMG record group, newspapers, magazines, large chunks of AOL in Europe, a big piece of Barnes & Noble online, and various broadcasting stations and production companies, Bertelsmann owns the following book imprints (and this doesn't even list sub-imprints or lines):

Bantam Doubleday Dell group
Bantam Books
Doubleday
Dell - Delacorte
Broadway Books
Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers
Bantam Doubleday Audio
Bantam Books Canada
Doubleday Canada
Transworld Publishers (UK, Australia, New Zealand)
Doubleday Direct (direct marketing book operations)
Literary Guild
Doubleday Book Club
Crossings
Random House
Random House Trade Publishing Group
Random House Information Publishing Group
Knopf Publishing Group
Crown Publishing Group
Ballantine Publishing Group
Random House Children's Publishing
Random House Audio
Random House Value Publishing
Fodors Travel Publications
Random House New Media
Random House Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa
Barrie & Jenkins
Bodley Head
Jonathan Cape
Century
Chatto & Windus
Doubleday
Ebury Press
Expert Books
Hutchinson
Julia MacRae
Partridge
Stanley Paul
Pimlico
Secker & Warburg
Sinclair Stevenson
Tellastory
Transworld
Yellow Jersey
Arrow
Black Swan
Corgi
Dell
Fodor's
Mandarin
Minerva
Red Fox
Sweet Valley
Vermilion
Vintage
Bee Book
Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag
Donauland
Science Fiction Book Club
Bold Type

Cheers,
Jim Lowder

[LBrownIII]

I re-read my post, and I can see a source for possible confusion. I wrote " A proliferation of imprints or "divisions" exists only to inflate the publisher's size and importance."

It should have been "An unnecessary proliferation of imprints or divisions..."

Care to offer an opinion on how many titles it takes to justify an imprint?

The point still remains: if you can't tell which company owns which other company, or what this division's relationship is with that division, or why the same person answers 10 different e-mails, then it's all fluff meant to impress you.

Stay away.

[JLowder]

Care to offer an opinion on how many titles it takes to justify an imprint?

Four titles a year--one per quarter. Fewer than that and you'll have a hard time convincing bookstore buyers that you're anything other than a vanity press or a tourist. Of course publishers can test the fiction market with less, or release the occasional fiction title as part of a larger publishing program, but to establish yourself as a fiction imprint, you need to have more frequent releases.

The point still remains: if you can't tell which company owns which other company, or what this division's relationship is with that division, or why the same person answers 10 different e-mails, then it's all fluff meant to impress you.

Stay away.

Do most people really know that Bertelsmann owns Knopf and Dell and Del Rey and the rest? Does that really make them risks as markets?

And imprints can be useful in differentiating lines to book buyers and the public, particularly with genres. Del Rey has an identity as an SF/fantasy line within the greater Bertelsmann collective, and buyers recognize the "brand."

I will give you one person answering ten different e-mails, though. That's a tell, especially if they're set up to give the illusion of being part of a bigger company.


Cheers,
Jim Lowder

[LBrownIII]

Four titles a year--one per quarter. Fewer than that and you'll have a hard time convincing bookstore buyers that you're anything other than a vanity press or a tourist.

For the record, this example publisher has no bookstore presence that the author doesn't go out and arrange personally. They also produce about a dozen titles a year, with 10 imprints.

Do most people really know that Bertelsmann owns Knopf and Dell and Del Rey and the rest? Does that really make them risks as markets?

Check out this page as an example that clearly lays out which does what, complete with logo and link. Each has a brief corporate bio, as well. The transparency is vastly different from the deceit practiced by the "puffer fish" publisher.

http://www.randomhouse.biz/publishers/

Wizards has essentially one fiction imprint, targeting their young adult market, if I'm not mistaken. They don't have any RPG imprints.

[JLowder]

For the record, this example publisher has no bookstore presence that the author doesn't go out and arrange personally. They also produce about a dozen titles a year, with 10 imprints.

A dozen books a year is a solid output for a small house--I was happy when the Pendragon fiction line got out one a quarter--but twelve spread over ten imprints? Hard to see the point of the imprints.

If an author wants to let local bookstores know that he or she has a book out, fine. In an era of shrinking ad budgets for all but the top authors, that's probably the only way a local store is going to learn about your book. But chain stores neither buy books at the local level nor will they typically even arrange local author signings. Borders and B&N arrange those things through national buyers and regional corporate PR officers. Indie bookstores are a different matter, but even they can be pretty uninterested in small press books, particularly if the books in question are published print-on-demand and are not available to them through normal distribution channels (Ingram, Baker & Taylor). The publisher you mention above probably fails on both counts.

Check out this page as an example that clearly lays out which does what, complete with logo and link. Each has a brief corporate bio, as well. The transparency is vastly different from the deceit practiced by the "puffer fish" publisher.

Right. The notion that the publisher would try to deceive writers or readers about who owns what, or the size of an imprint, is a cause for serious concern. I like your "puffer fish" phrase to describe that.

But the presence of lot of imprints is not, by itself, a worry. And it is sometimes difficult to tell the signs of a puffer fish from the typical fog that exists around large media companies. That Random House link you provided does list imprints, but the fact that they are all owned by Bertelsmann is buried way down in the Random House Ventures section, and the other Bertelsmann imprints are never mentioned. It's sometimes in the best interest of giant corporations to downplay their size. Get too big, show too many tentacles of the octopus at once, and the consumer gets creeped out. The "We're Beatrice" TV ad campaign of the 1980s was pulled from the air for that very reason--it alienated consumers when they realized how big the company was, how many familiar product lines it owned.

What I'm getting at here is be careful about reading the information (or lack of information) related the imprints the right way. You're better off judging how worthwhile an imprint is by its market presence--as you do above--than by trying to decipher the corporate PR around it.

Wizards has essentially one fiction imprint, targeting their young adult market, if I'm not mistaken. They don't have any RPG imprints.

WotC publishes everything--fiction and RPGs--under what amounts to a single imprint. Back in the TSR days, the fiction operations had at various times tried to establish lines that aped imprint designations--the TSR Books line was marketed as the creator-owned line, with books different from the shared world "game" fiction. But naming the line "TSR Books" kind of defeated the push toward an imprint-type identity shift away from the company's existing shared world image.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder