Will there ever be an option to make an alternate selection for your AP subscriptions? For those of us getting to the ball late, it would be a wonderful boon for us to decide to, say, get the Jade Regent or Kingmaker AP's sent to us each month in place of the current option... it could be simply done, offering an option to check under your subscription page and paizo could decide which alternate to offer each six month cycle based on whatever they had more of in stock.
Just a thought - it would be absolutely wonderful to have this option, especially if a particular AP came out that simply didn't spark my interest - otherwise its six months of getting something you might not want while staring longingly at the things you do OR cancelling the subscription which I'm sure benefits no one at paizo...
They try and avoid ever providing an incentive to hold off on subscribing. If what you suggest were possible then someone may choose not to subscribe to the pirate AP (even if they're really into pirates) on the grounds that they don't like the look of some upcoming AP and will get it then. The end result being that paizo produce something a customer really wants but then have to wait a while before it sells.
I know how you feel (I went back and grabbed everything I'd missed once I discovered paizo), but imo the best you can do is subscribe to the APs then pick up back orders at a discount. They do put out "AP bundles", from time to time, as well which is another option.
Ultimately, no matter when we began, there's plenty of good stuff to look forward to.
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Yeah. One thing I have noted is that they tend to push out both volume 6 of the old AP and volume 1 of the new AP on the same date, so as to not allow for a good stopping point.
Technically that's not suppose to happen if everything goes well. 12 AP issues 12 months. Just lately they seem to have been running into problems causing some months to have no AP's and others to have 2 AP's.
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Yeah. One thing I have noted is that they tend to push out both volume 6 of the old AP and volume 1 of the new AP on the same date, so as to not allow for a good stopping point.
I'm willing to bet that if you emailed customer service and explained what you wanted, they would be open to working with you on it.
I think it's a reasonable idea, and would also help with their backlist. I subscribe to the Doctor Who audio series that Big Finish produce, and when you start your sub, which is for six or twelve months, you can specify which of the 160 odd releases you want to start your subscription with, and it carries on from there.
One issue I could see would be if you subscribed to part one of AP n, and then it turned out that, say, part three was out of print. Off the top of my head you could have the option to take the pdf and carry over the credit for the price difference, or skip to the next available volume.
I don't know how much extra work it would entail, or what the implications might be for the current AP volumes though.
I think it is definitely in Paizo's best interest to keep subs going. Take me, for example -- I was sub-ed through Serpent Skull and Carrion Crown, but absolutely did not want Jade Regent, so I canceled. When Skull & Shackles rolled around, I was like "meh," so I didn't renew, but if I had still had my sub I would never have canceled over it. The point being that momentum matters.
If taking Kingmaker over Jade Regent had been an option I may not have canceled, but I do see how that could make planning tough.
I think it's a reasonable idea, and would also help with their backlist. I subscribe to the Doctor Who audio series that Big Finish produce, and when you start your sub, which is for six or twelve months, you can specify which of the 160 odd releases you want to start your subscription with, and it carries on from there.
One issue I could see would be if you subscribed to part one of AP n, and then it turned out that, say, part three was out of print. Off the top of my head you could have the option to take the pdf and carry over the credit for the price difference, or skip to the next available volume.
I don't know how much extra work it would entail, or what the implications might be for the current AP volumes though.
My idea was for them to offer 1 alternate AP to the one currently going on... like when Skulls came out they offered the option of getting #1-#6 of Kingmaker instead at the same distribution times... just a matter of checking alternate or not in a box somewhere. That way they would know ahead of time what they would need on hand and could even use it to get rid of backstock.
Honestly, if I felt like I wasn't going to like the next AP I'd rather cancel my subscription than go through 6 months of buying something I didn't want... but if I had the option of an alternate I certainly wouldn't.
Yeah. One thing I have noted is that they tend to push out both volume 6 of the old AP and volume 1 of the new AP on the same date, so as to not allow for a good stopping point.
Unless things have changed since I started up, which was in a double-shipping month, you can pick whether you get the current month's AP volume or the next month. Which on double-shipping mouths means you can pick which of the two you want. Hence I got started with the first Second Darkness volume instead of the last Crimson Throne volume.
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Yeah. One thing I have noted is that they tend to push out both volume 6 of the old AP and volume 1 of the new AP on the same date, so as to not allow for a good stopping point.I'm willing to bet that if you emailed customer service and explained what you wanted, they would be open to working with you on it.
I haven't actually planned to cancel, I just noticed that #6 and #1 have shipped together, at least with the past few APs.
Your missing one of the biggest reasons that subscription models are worthwhile for a publisher, something that has been mentioned by Paizo staff on numerous occasions:
It gives them a better idea of how many units to produce.
This is a large factor in making the subscription models used by Paizo viable. What you suggest would in large part invalidate this, and could invalidate the subscription model entirely. Remember that it's not always about what can or cannot be done, it's about what can be justified financial. This is especially true when a decision involves billing and production practices.
Your missing one of the biggest reasons that subscription models are worthwhile for a publisher, something that has been mentioned by Paizo staff on numerous occasions:
It gives them a better idea of how many units to produce.
This is a large factor in making the subscription models used by Paizo viable. What you suggest would in large part invalidate this, and could invalidate the subscription model entirely. Remember that it's not always about what can or cannot be done, it's about what can be justified financial. This is especially true when a decision involves billing and production practices.
I can't believe this is the case. I certainly don't have access to the facts of the matter, but somehow I suspect that the numbers they produce for retail sale nation/world-wide far outstrip what they send out as part of a subscription, by entire orders of magnitude probably.
And as I said, by their determining which alternates to offer every six months, it would allow them to move backstock more easily.
Erik Mona on the importance of subscriptions to Paizo's business model:
The simple fact of the matter is that the more subscribers to the hard copy Pathfinder we have, the more we can afford to print, thus lowering the per-unit cost per book. Pathfinder is already underpriced relative to comparable products in the industry, so it's important that we keep the per-unit print cost as low as possible while still being able to deliver the high-quality product Pathfinder readers have come to appreciate and expect.
Vic Wertz on subscriptions helping them set print-run size, keep costs down, and maximize revenue (my bold):
In my post above, I tangentially approached a really, really major issue that's worth a post to itself: print run sizing. It's a complicated topic, but since you've got the background given in my previous post, it's probably easier to discuss here than anywhere else.
If you consider my above logic for a bit, you'll realize that one of the biggest challenges we have is setting a print run size.
If reprinting is generally bad, then printing too little is just leaving money on the table. Not only have we failed to maximize sales, but there's a possibility that if we'd chosen a higher number, that may have brought our per-unit print costs down more... so there are actually *two* ways that we've failed to maximize return.
Of course, if we print *way* too little, then a reprint may actually be viable... but we've *still* left money on the table, because if we'd printed it all at once, the higher volume would have almost certainly given us lower per-unit print costs. And we could have either A) lowered the retail price, which may have increased the appeal to price-sensitive customers, thus resulting in even higher sales, or B) kept the retail price the same, and taken higher profits.
On the other hand, if we print too much, then we have product taking up room in our warehouse for years, which does have a monetary cost. If sales eventually trickle to the point that the cost exceeds the revenue, then we have to either discount it or destroy it. Destroying it usually has a cost as well. And while discounting something now and then is ok, and often good for business, when a lot of your products end up on clearance, that actually has a whole bunch of bad effects. One is that it reduces consumer confidence in your products—some folks think if it's on clearance, there must be something *wrong* with it. Another is that it may encourage people to buy your old cheap stuff instead of your new stuff, which not only reduces the profit you make, but also has a cash flow impact by reducing the front-end sales bump. And if that happens a lot, that's death to a product line whose only flaw may have been overprinting.
And if we print *way* too much, then the initial sales bump may not even cover our print costs, and we have to shuffle money around from somewhere else to pay for the run. That doesn't just harm the product line—that harms every aspect of the company.
If you think about these possibilities a bit, you can see one case that's not covered. What if we print more than we can sell right away, but the sales *don't* slow to a cost-inefficient trickle? Well, that's really what defines an evergreen product. In these cases, the trick is mainly just working out the cash flow to ensure that you can cover the cost of reprinting. That's why sometimes you'll see our evergreens go out of print for a few months—we're letting demand build back up so that we can have a mini-bump at the front to cover more of the reprint cost. (Sometimes, though, the delay is because we're reworking the product a bit, or we're just waiting for the shipment to arrive.)
At any rate, you can see that getting the print run size right is really good, and getting it a little bit wrong either way is not the worst thing in the world, but getting it really wrong is really bad.
And that's one reason we have subscriptions to so many of our lines. The fact that we know we're going to sell a certain number of copies right out of the gate really brings down the risk for us. Subscriptions let us get more of our print runs into the sweet spot, and that has a huge overall effect on the company.
So thank you, subscribers, and those of you who commit regular orders through your retailer; you're—quite literally—the reason we're here.
But, hey, if there's an old AP you're looking for, they're now on sale! :D
Director of Sales
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So, Joana totally nailed it... and using our own words, no less. :D
But there's one earlier point I'd like to address:
Yeah. One thing I have noted is that they tend to push out both volume 6 of the old AP and volume 1 of the new AP on the same date, so as to not allow for a good stopping point.I'm willing to bet that if you emailed customer service and explained what you wanted, they would be open to working with you on it.
This is absolutely correct. If you want to cancel your subscription "between" the volumes of a double-month, just let us know and we will set it up for you.
Double months don't happen to "not allow" a good stopping point. They happen because we often have an intended starting date for an AP, and we try extra hard to not delay those volumes. This has the side effect of making the double months tend to coincide with AP start. Rest assured that we take great pains to avoid this outcome, and I like to think that you will see it happen less and less as time goes on.
This is why I'm here, though. It's Paizo CS's job to mitigate these types of issues for you, so if there's a problem, just let us know and we'll work something out to the best of our abilities.
Thanks,
cos
Indeed, Joana did a much better job illustrating what I was attempting to communicate.
This isn't to say that Paizo isn't interested in supporting its customers. When it comes to support of and communication with customers, Paizo is one of the best companies around. It's important we remember, though, that they are a business; we as customers not only need to support them by buying their products, we need to realize there are some practices they need to follow in order to remain viable and provide us with all the little extras they make available.
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Chief Technical Officer
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Another reason that the "alternates" idea wouldn't work for us is that it effectively makes subscriber benefits retroactive. (Why subscribe now when you can get the same benefits on the current AP later?) We want to ensure that the answer to "when should I subscribe" is always "right now", and so all of our subscription benefits are designed so that if you subscribe later, you don't get as good a deal (if you even get *any* deal) on older stuff.
What if that option unlocked after a year or two of subscribing?
But, hey, if there's an old AP you're looking for, they're now on sale! :D
I appreciate everyone taking the time to answer my questions, and in such depth. I especially appreciate this head's up - just added the complete Second Darkness and Legacy of Fire to my collection for a song!
Shame the pdf's are so much more expensive considering there's no hard copy to manage.
What if that option unlocked after a year or two of subscribing?
There's an idea.
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Chief Technical Officer
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What if that option unlocked after a year or two of subscribing?
Then that would encourage you to delay purchasing back catalog items until a year or two have passed. We almost never want to encourage people to wait before buying! (Plus, you'd run the risk of being disappointed if we sold out before your benefit kicked in!)