Adamant Entertainment will be creating PDF adventures for Trail of Cthulhu under their imprint. They do good quality stuff, they've worked with other licensors and it will extend the range of ToC material for Keepers. A more detailed press release will follow next week.
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A freelancer emailed me with the following query
I'm pondering on the idea of writing an RPG for another successful series of fantasy books and wonder if you can give me a very brief outline of the process you went through - when you have time.
I'm imagining:
1) contact author through his agent
2) make business plan
3) get artist involved
4) get financial backer
but of course all these steps probably have lots of details I'm not aware of
I only have limited experience in this arena, having only acquired one license, but I know a little more from other licensees. This post, I'll consider whether it's even worthwhile pursuing a particular license. Next, agents.
The first thing to consider is the commercial viability of the license. What is the author's position in the Amazon book ranking, for example? If you google for the author, do you find pages of active fan sites, or just a few die-hards and old links? You will sell to a teeny tiny fraction of the the author's reader base.
Second, read interviews with the author and check out the author's views. Some authors specifically don't want other people mucking about in their world (Jasper Fforde springs to mind).
Third, consider the suitability of the background for roleplaying. Stargate and Starship troopers are both ideal for roleplaying; they have small squads of people with different skills working together to deal with differing problems. Inspector Morse? I'm not so sure.
The other very important question is, how popular is the license amongst roleplayers? Almost your entire audience will be existing roleplayers who like the author; getting non-roleplaying fans of the author to buy the book is likely to be very difficult. Online polls at big rpg sites are a good idea, here.
Then you've got to consider, how big a footprint do you have compared with the author? There has to be a match. You aren't going to get the Harry Potter RPG unless you are Games Workshop-sized and have a substantive record with previous licenses.
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