I managed to get two products up today; a Free20 release from Otherverse Games and a Modern SMG Stock-Art Sketchbook.

I have more Sketchbooks on the way as well as more traditional releases.

I still have not seen any word on the revised GSL.  Go WOTC!

I have an idea for a “Dungeon Tiles” type product, and am working on the PDF version, but also want to have some heavy card-stock versions printed.  Anyone know anything about getting this type of thing printed?  I suspect it is closer to game-board (think: Monopoly) than book publishing.

I am also working on a Wild Western RPG accessory line.  I love Boot Hill 3rd edition, but it is long out of print.  So I am aiming to make this line system-neutral.  I plan to add a Fantsy RPG equivalent as well; once I work out the details. Naturally, there is also a Modern version lurking around as well.

I was missing a font on my new laptop when I went to edit an older PDF product, so I ended up going online to find it, and downloaded two or three dozen new fonts last night.  I find fonts very inspiring; they get my creative juices flowing.  Makes me want to start laying out a couple of projects I have been procrastinating on.

I spent much of the day messing around with a new Flash thingamajig I downloaded.  I finally got it (almost) figured out, and plan to use it in my new Footer on the OBS sites.  One thing I also noticed was that the Footer console in the OBS dashboard will let you “stack” footers!  What this means is that I had a category section of my footer which I can make static and apply to all my products, while I can make several different, possibly ‘themed’ product showcase-type bars and apply them separately.

Check out what I put together today by clicking HERE.

This is a good examply of where I want to get with all my products.  I have a product desription, a Flip-Book along with an Audio Commentary, followed by a product showcase and the category links.  I think this type of sales listing will provide maximum exposure for the product featured, as well as help me stand out in the ’sea of publishers’ on OBS.  It is not exactly as I want it, and will need some tweaking.  But you get the idea.

And all of this, boys and girls, is one major reason I am not on E23 or Piazo; I don’t have any control over how my rpoducts are listed.  Sure I might be losing a few bucks in sales, but so far I am sold on the features OBS is making avaliable to publishers that strive to take advantage of them.

I spent last night tweaking the Footer code in Dreamweaver, trying to get it looking the way I want it.  I got it to where I felt it was worth deploying and assigned it to all our products.  The neat thing about the feature is that I can take the code and just change the top part that shows a sampling of our products and switch them out with different products, then assign a ‘weight’ in the Footer control panel and let it randomize the display.  I would like to see a way to assign ‘weight’ by category instead of individual products, but it is still very workable.  I also included a link to this blog, so that should drive some traffic here for info on upcoming releases. I think I got it looking “right” in both IE and Firefox, but if any of you notice the footer looking weird or pushing the page too wide please shoot me an email at skortched.urf.studios@gmail.com to let me know, or even just to comment on what might make it work better.

I’m toying with the idea of holding a “Upgrading to Adobe CS4″ sale to help raise some money.  Still want to get a few new releases out before I do it.  I’ll try to get a release out later tonight.

In other news we had some friends over Saturday night and played the new edition of Talisman.  I have to say I really enjoy what they have done with it.  The new cards are great, and we also got the Reaper upgrade which makes it even more interesting.  A very fun game has been improved in my opinion.  I can’t wait to see what some of the future expansions bring!

I spent some time today going through several products and fixing the Flash flip-books that weren’t working for some reason.  (I suspect it had something to do with the DriveThru and RPGNow servers merging since I also found most of them were missing the author and artist names when I edited the product.)  I got several of them fixed, and will continue to tweak the sales listings for maximum effectiveness and exposure of our products.

I also “discovered” the Footer feature in the OBS control panel; which will make it easier to highlight products.  I will be working tonight on my Footer HTML code and overall layout before implementing it.

Our latest release dropped off the front page, so it’s time to get another one up.  I have two “Free20″ projects and several others in the pipeline so there are plenty of options.  I also got a few more images from my artist-friend.  I am excited about his work and can’t wait to start marketing his talent. Here are several of his not-quite-finished:

I was in a class all last week learning Exchange Server 2007 for work.  Busy week.

This weekend I was going over some of the various reports avaliable to publishers on OBS and found that my percentage of views to sales wasn’t as high as I would like.  So I decided to go product by product and re-examine each of the sales listings to improve them.  While doing this I am also changing out the D20 logos and might tweak the content of certain PDF’s if required.  I’ll also do flip-books and audio commentaries as I go.

The first product I changed the sales listing for is the first product I ever released: More Mighty Than Steel.

I changed the D20 logo, added a flip book (even though its only four pages, a very short PDF indeed!) and tweaked the sales text in the listing.  I also added six thumbnails at the bottom under the text “You might also enjoy one of these products from Skortched Urf’ Studios:”

Then I added six, 100 pixel wide images taken from my publisher page on OBS along with links to other SUS products in the same category.  It took me a while to get it formatted correctly but I managed to get the code snippet saved out that will let me re-create the series of images for any of my products simply by changing the product number in the code.  I plan to add them to all/most of my products in an attempt to cross-promote and get more sales.  I toyed with the idea of doing a scrolling image showing various products but I suspect that would be more distracting than helpful.  Click on the link above to check out the new setup.  Here is the code I used for the images, you should be able to swap out your product numbers and implement the same thing if your so inclined, though if you are using the OBS flip books it will appear above the preview instead of below it.  (Part of the reason I do my own flip books so i can control the placement and content.)

<a href=”http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=24453“>
<img src=”http://www.rpgnow.com/images/402/24453-thumb100.jpg” width=”100″ height=”129″ /></a>

<a href=”http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=15871“>
<img src=”http://www.rpgnow.com/images/402/15871-thumb100.jpg” width=”100″ height=”129″ /></a>

<a href=”http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=25453“>
<img src=”http://www.rpgnow.com/images/402/25453-thumb100.jpg” width=”100″ height=”129″ /></a>

<a href=”http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=57404“>
<img src=”http://www.rpgnow.com/images/402/57404-thumb100.jpg” width=”100″ height=”129″ /></a>

<a href=”http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=55318“>
<img src=”http://www.rpgnow.com/images/402/55318-thumb100.jpg” width=”100″ height=”129″ /></a>

<a href=”http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?products_id=27793“>
<img src=”http://www.rpgnow.com/images/402/27793-thumb100.jpg” width=”100″ height=”129″ /></a></p>

I put the product numbers in Bold, so all you have to do is swap them for the product you want to appear and you are good to go.

In other news I am gearing up on work for our first dead-tree product, which will be a compilation of our Modern PDF releases along with some all-new content that I am tentatively titling the Department 7 Agent Field Manual. Expecting to to be available at the end of Q1 2009.

Christmas was fun.  I worked Christmas eve and left about 2:00pm.  (I had to kick a couple of guys out cuz there was no way I was working until 4:30 on Christmas Eve.)  I went to my parents house for the big party.  I was supposed to meet my wife and daughter there, and I called them before I left work, while I was driving over there and many times while I was at the party.  I was starting to get worried.  I called a buddy of mine that lives fairly close and sent him over to check on them.  Turns out my daughter was asleep and my wife was catching up on Heroes episodes while her phone was on the charger up in the bedroom.  Neither of them heard me calling the two cell phones and home phone.  So even though they got to the party very late, they did make it.

For Christmas I got some goodies I wanted including the Dead Reign RPG from Palladium Books.  I am reading it now, and I have to say that Palladium has the right idea when it comes to RPG releases.  Full color cover with eye-catching artwork.  Black and white interior with a good mix of artwork to round out the text; all presented in a softcover 8.5X11 perfect bound format.  The Dead Reign RPG is 225 pages and retails for $22.95.  You can walk away with a complete RPG for a twenty dollar bill plus some McDonalds money.

Now I love the production values on the new 4E stuff, and the Dark Heresy stuff is Abso-freakin-lutely gorgeous!  But I saw the new book in that line selling for FIFTY DOLLARS!  (Not the main game, a friggin suppliment!) Times are tough, and getting a quality RPG for ‘around twenty to twenty-five’ bucks is the sweet spot for price point on brick-and-mortar-dead-tree RPG’s.  Guess which one I’ll be emulating for our Pandora Project RPG release?

I just posted the newest Otherverse release over at OBS.

It’s the first of many new releases from us in 2009.  I was going to do a new years resolution like “I want to release X number of new products.” but decided against it.  I don’t want a certain quantity of product as much as I want to release great stuff people want to buy.  So the goal is to double our gross sales from 2008 to 2009.  With some of the projects in the works I think it is a very doable achievement.