Lisa Stevens's page

I'm curious, will anyof them go back to the printer after the reprient of thr capaign setting is released?

We don't plan to reprint any of the books listed in the blog post.

-Lisa

So, will the PDF versions continue to be available after the print editions are gone?

We will offer PDFs of all of our books for a long, long time. It really doesn't hurt us to keep them available, even if a newer edition of a book sees print.

-Lisa

@Lisa Stevens: Have you ever considered the option of creating Paizo Gift Cards that retailers can sell in their store for online or PDF products?

Yep, we have. And it is on the long list of things to work on in the future. But it isn't an easy thing to add, so I have no idea when it might come into existence.

-Lisa

Fayries wrote:

I couldn't get "Flip-Mat: Woodlands" on time, but I finally snatched a copy in a store half a planet away.

Thanks!

Ended up they couldn't find Woodlands in their stock. I'm trying to get it a country away, now.

This time I'll do my homework and buy just after you release the list… ;-)

You'll be surprised how large the list has become! Things are selling well and fast. Sometimes we are shocked how low some of our stocks have become.

-Lisa

I guess yoda8myhead can now get direct input regarding items that are soon to be out of stock but what about an update for the rest of us?

I couldn't get "Flip-Mat: Woodlands" on time, but I finally snatched a copy in a store half a planet away. And I just found "Map Pack: Village" with "Map Pack: Countryside" at my local store this week.

So… What are the items soon to be hard to find?

I'll put up a Store Blog sometime soon with an up to date list of products that are soon to be history.

-Lisa

@Lisa; Except you can't do them as part of the preorder. The PDF has to be ready when you set up the preorder.

Yep, that makes sense. But once the PDF and the print product are ready and available, it is pretty easy to do bundles.

-Lisa

The one thing I would really like for Paizo to do at the store, Bundles. That would be fantastic.

We can do bundles. We have print and PDF bundles of a bunch of third party products on the store. Send an email to Jeff or Vic if you are interested in doing that.

-Lisa

Paizo's hardback releases are moving forward in slow motion, 4 releases a year. The game has yet to release a hardback magic or setting book (which will come in the second year of publication instead of the first). Off the top of my head, I'd say that the line can probably support about 30 hardbacks before needing a refresh. That gives this edition about a eight year life expectancy, though possibly they could push it to ten and forty books.

Paizo is laying the groundwork for that new edition now. APG, Ultimate Magic and Ultimate Combat all offer or will offer rules divergent from the 3.x core. Once you've been playing with these divergent systems for a couple years it's going to get harder to remember what is 3.x and what is Paizo and really most folks aren't going to care. By 2018 you'll be more worried about backwards compatibility with your Paizo library than with 3.x.

For the next several years Paizo is going to have it's eyes squarely on the current challenges to its business: navigating a changing print and pdf marketplace; dealing with the rise of e-readers; price deflation and a poor economy; finding the correct balance of release schedules and staffing; and coming up with products that people want to buy. There's a long time before a new edition and a lot can happen between now and then.

+1

Btw, have you been hanging out in my head lately? :)

-Lisa

Probably my question was unclear, I apologize since I am a non-native speaker. I just wanted to know if never changing the ruleset completely like the OTHERS did with "the world's oldest rpg" was something that was part of the company mission, or if the future might hold such possibility. I just wanted to know if it's a "maybe who knows what the future will bring, we will think about it in due time" or a "we will never do that, we were born to continue an EGG tradition and we will stick to the roots of the game, we prefer to keep releasing quality stuff for a consolidated ruleset maybe with some - unearther aracana-like options - but we will never change the core rules, as they're part of our foundation".

It's a little bit of all that you wrote. There is a good chance that someday in the future, we will probably do a new edition of Pathfinder if there seems to be a reason to do so and a market of people who would want to buy it. But as Vic said, we are one year in! You don't start making wedding plans when your baby is one year old. You don't pick out a burial plot. :) There will most likely come a time in the future when we will start to think about that. Until then, we are enjoying creating new stuff for the rules that are just getting up and running! One thing you can be sure as long as I own the company is that we will always follow the EGG tradition and stick to the roots of the game. That is who we are and what we believe in.

-Lisa

3. For the most part Paizo does not give pdf-only companies blog time, unless they are Super Genius Games. Now a lot of that has to do with promoting what sells, Paizo's own love of Print over PDF, Promoting to your customer base (print), SGG long term weekly releases vs. our releases twice a month (we are now releasing 3-4 times a month). This is not a complaint this is a statement of fact and if you see the two above how I am trying to address it.

Not entirely true. We recently did blogs on IPG and Conflict Game's PDF, as well as Frog God's stuff. The Super Genius's get regular coverage since they come out with a PDF every week like clockwork. This makes it easy for us to plan for their coverage. As I said in my email to you this week, I plan to cover your latest PDF releases soon. I have seen that covering new PDF releases will increase the sales multi-fold for PFRPG releases. Let's see what happens when I give Rite Publishing a little boost in the next few days. :)

-Lisa

Anonymous User 711 wrote:

A few posts below mine is a thread asking if the APG will include the errata reprint. Given that every other product has included errata, my question is simply when should I anticipate being able to purchase an updated reprint of the APG? I was unable to purchase the book when it was released for financial reason, given that I've waited this long I figure I might as well hold out until I can get a revised copy.

Thanks in advance.

They do reprints whenever the previous edition is sold out so depending on how well the APG sells it might be 6 months, it might be a year.

PS: Neither of these are official numbers.

Correct. It takes about 3 to 4 months once we pull the trigger on a reprint. We do that when we are close to selling out. However, we printed quite a bit of the APG so that we wouldn't sell out soon. As of right now, we haven't ordered a reprint. That could change in a day or in a month or two. All depends on sales of the original print run. So I can't give you a definitive answer because of that.

-Lisa

I looked at these while at GenCon. They seem to come much like our own FlipMats, being a folded sheet. Matter of fact, they are almost identical in size to the FlipMats. I didn't have a chance to compare them side by side yet, but from handling one at GenCon, that was the gist that I got. As for being able to mark them, again, they seem to have a similar substance on the maps to our FlipMats, but I didn't have a chance to write on and wipe off markers, so I can't 100% speak to that. But it LOOKS like they might wipe off just fine. I plan to buy a few myself and see how they compare, but right now, I can only make observations based on the one I looked at and handled at GenCon.

-Lisa

I looked at these while at GenCon. They seem to come much like our own FlipMats, being a folded sheet. Matter of fact, they are almost identical in size to the FlipMats. I didn't have a chance to compare them side by side yet, but from handling one at GenCon, that was the gist that I got. As for being able to mark them, again, they seem to have a similar substance on the maps to our FlipMats, but I didn't have a chance to write on and wipe off markers, so I can't 100% speak to that. But it LOOKS like they might wipe off just fine. I plan to buy a few myself and see how they compare, but right now, I can only make observations based on the one I looked at and handled at GenCon.

-Lisa

I looked at these while at GenCon. They seem to come much like our own FlipMats, being a folded sheet. Matter of fact, they are almost identical in size to the FlipMats. I didn't have a chance to compare them side by side yet, but from handling one at GenCon, that was the gist that I got. As for being able to mark them, again, they seem to have a similar substance on the maps to our FlipMats, but I didn't have a chance to write on and wipe off markers, so I can't 100% speak to that. But it LOOKS like they might wipe off just fine. I plan to buy a few myself and see how they compare, but right now, I can only make observations based on the one I looked at and handled at GenCon.

-Lisa

I am actually thinking about having the kingdom building run in a much more roleplaying way in my game. I plan to do this by NOT giving the rules to the players. Instead, they will be encourage to hire a kingdom planner who will give them advice based on what they are thinking.

"My lords, if you truly wish to build building X, you might wish to build building Y first, since it will make it a bit cheaper due to the cheap labor that building Y will provide."

In this case, there is less of a sense of gaming the rules, and more of a sense of building the kingdom through trial and error. If they hire the right consultants, there may be less error. But all in all, I think this will be a more fun way to handle this.

-Lisa

And unless I sorely mistaken, there is minimal work put into these on Paizo's part; King of the Castle Games is the one actually making it, Paizo just gets them (presumably) a fair bit more business by including it in their GameMastery line. Not to mention that Paizo most likely would get some small amount from them too, as they are using one of their lines.

This +1

-Lisa

A kind soul sent me the Seoni button from 2009. So, I am only missing 2 buttons now from 2009. I'm not sure who was on the other 2. If anyone has any extras of the other two, I will gladly purchase them from you. Thanks.

There were only three buttons in 2009. Seoni, Grey Maiden, and a goblin.

-Lisa

Every Wednesday for the past seven years, I have run a game at my house. We started off playing 3.5 but switched to Pathfinder when we released the Beta. Yet, I still find myself saying things like, "See you at D&D next Wednesday!" or "Hey, I am going to have to cancel D&D this week." I usually catch myself and am really trying to say "Pathfinder," but it's like the word Kleenex to me. I haven't bought a Kleenex brand tissue for a long time, preferring the Kirkland brand tissues from Costco, but I always ask Vic to pass me a kleenex. And I'll probably keep using D&D, even though I know we are playing Pathfinder.

You now what they say about old dogs and new tricks...

:)

-Lisa

I don't have a regular credit card, but these would look sweet on my Bag of Holding. Do pre-paid credit cards work on the Paizo store? I need these....

Yep, prepaid credit cards work just fine!

-Lisa

Are 2009 going to be made available?

No, they won't be. We didn't think about selling them when we made them last year, so we only made enough to hand out at GenCon. But going forward, we will make sure to print some extra to sell on paizo.com after the show.

-Lisa

I found out yesterday morning that 179 of the 200 copies we printed off have been shipped from the warehouse to distributors. I've got a few reports of distributors already running out. If you are looking into getting a physical copy, you might want pick it up before supplies run out.

Sounds like you need to print some more! :)

Congrats!

-Lisa

What is the new job? And congrats.

Yeah, I am kind of curious where Mark is going to end up! :)

-Lisa

TwoPi wrote:

Vic Wertz wrote:

For those of you who weren't able to pick up a free set at Gen Con, we'll have some button sets for sale in the near future.

Awesome, that Goblin and his d20 avoided me as well.

Ooh, yay! :D I didn't know there'd be a set this year, didn't have my con ninjas keep an eye out for em since I couldn't attend.

Any ETA? :)

Probably sometime next week. I asked Crystal to get me a picture so I could make a product. We'll blog it in the store blog once they are available.

-Lisa

Not me! Not me!

Just wanted to get that out there in case there was any confusion. For the record I only call a few people mouth-breathers...and their names are Logue and Pett.

It isn't fun to fan the flames of the Logue vs. Pett War when one of the combatants has left the field of battle. Ohhhhh, those were good times when those two worthy foes tested their wits against each other on the paizo.com fields of battle. I miss those days!

-Lisa

I can say unequivocally that we did NOT rush this book out the door. It was given a more thorough going over than almost all of our other books. We took extra time and staff members to make it the best that we could. We made many more passes by both developers and proofreaders than we would most of our other books.

That said, we are human and even if we quintupled the amount of time we spent on this book, errors would still be there. That is just the nature of the beast. Now, if we had a staff of 20,000+ looking at the book, we could probably narrow down the errors to just a few. But we aren't THAT successful yet. :)

I appreciate that everybody wants a perfect book. We do too. But it just isn't going to happen because we aren't robots. And if you want to see how the competition is faring in this regard, check out this thread over on ENWorld.

-Lisa

You're welcome. :)

Three more pages have been uploaded.

These are great and will totally get used in my Kingmaker campaign once we get to that section. Thanks much for doing this work! This is the best part of the Paizo community for me, all the great contributions from you guys!

-Lisa

Lisa Stevens wrote:

Uninvited Ghost wrote:

What was the price back in 2007?

I believe that it was $17.99 way back then. :)

-Lisa

I asked because it seems like a very high price for what it is. I can see it's essentially the same price this time around.

I'm sure the quality that goes into Paizo products will make it one of those you-get-what-you-pay-for purchases.

This is one of those products that we do in cooperation with another company, Open Mind Games. We did the art part and they did the manufacturing and set the price. Still, I can tell you that I get my money's worth out of this product every week that I run my game!

-Lisa

What was the price back in 2007?

I believe that it was $17.99 way back then. :)

-Lisa

Is the Paizo logo intended to look like the letter pi?

Yep!

-Lisa

Lisa Stevens wrote:

Sakai wrote:

Dark_Mistress wrote:

I imagine the list price is but not sure. Likely just a glitch as it was on sale before I believe and that was the old sale price. Though with it being Sunday and the last day of Gencon I doubt you get a reply till tomorrow.

Thanks, do you think I should wait for an answer here or post elsewhere ?

The price should be $4.99. Hopefully, Gary or Ross will see this tomorrow and fix things. The rest of us are flying back from GenCon. I'll try to remember to check back here on Tuesday to make sure that somebody took care of this.

-Lisa

Hi Lisa, congratulations on the huge success of Paizo at GenCon.

The price is corrected and works like a charm :)

Excellent! Thanks for the congrats. We had a wonderful con that will keep us excited for at least a week or two! :)

-Lisa

Just adding my voice to those who would love to see Rise of the Runelords updated to Pathfinder and published as a single volume. I'd pay for that in a heartbeat.

Would you pay $100 for it? There would be a LOT of pages in a compile RotRL. How much would you pay for it? Remember that the original 6 volumes would have sold for $120! We wouldn't want to make it too much cheaper than that otherwise nobody would buy the original volumes. So, does $100 change the mind of folks who want this reprinted?

-Lisa

James said that 4 hardcovers of the size of the GMG/APG was too much. I note that Ultimate Magic is only 256 pages rather that 330 - If all four hardcovers are that size, it works out to the same amount of paper as three 330ish page books.

They also said that Inner Sea wouldn't count against next year as it was a left over from this year.

+1

-Lisa

Dark_Mistress wrote:

I imagine the list price is but not sure. Likely just a glitch as it was on sale before I believe and that was the old sale price. Though with it being Sunday and the last day of Gencon I doubt you get a reply till tomorrow.

Thanks, do you think I should wait for an answer here or post elsewhere ?

The price should be $4.99. Hopefully, Gary or Ross will see this tomorrow and fix things. The rest of us are flying back from GenCon. I'll try to remember to check back here on Tuesday to make sure that somebody took care of this.

-Lisa

I just recieved my last issue in Kingmaker and first issue of Serpents Skull, the covers are way softer and flimsier (if thats a word) it just seems that the cover is not the same hardness and thickness as before, is it just me?

It is just you. We haven't changed the cover stock one iota since we started to print books.

-Lisa

Try using someting cheaper, like lead.

Oooh! And maybe some glass filled balls of mercury would look cool.

What's the worse that could happen?

Says the lawyer. Looking for a class action suite to represent? :)

-Lisa

How about pricing?

/I'm reaching here...

They have to cast it in metal first so they can see how much it will weigh. Metal is one of the highest costs in making a miniatures and has a huge input into the final price. Reaper says that they are hoping to get this out by November to coincide with the Bestiary 2 release. But like I said earlier, they have a lot to figure out to get that done.

-Lisa

Awesome!

Where can we preorder it?

Reaper hasn't even worked out how to fit it into a blister yet...

Is this still slotted for a November release with the World Guide: Inner Sea pushed back to February?

Yes, it will still have the same release date.

-Lisa

Am I correct in assuming that since the second image in this blog update has the same product code (PZO9414) in its filename as this book that the cover for Inner Sea Primer has been uncovered by a certain pair of curious goblins?

Good eye!

-Lisa

Psst... Gary or Ross! This blog needs a title...

The scary thing is that it isn't the only mountain of boxes from this past shipment. There is another near that one and a third starting to take form. Needless to say, there was a LOT of product heading out the door last week!

Shhhh! Everyone, stop posting comments, or else Erik and Lisa are gonna hear!

You mean like now? You kids are gonna get a whooping when your dad and I get home! Boy are you in trouble!

Josh posted this photo of the Paizo org play room on his Facebook page.

-Lisa

Now, the question is, Lisa, when can we expect Plot Twist Cards II? ;)

If the sales warrant it, I'm sure you will see part 2 sometime in the next year or so.

-Lisa

Hi Lisa,

Not trying to be too much of a pain, but when would you expect to finish??

just so I know when to be worried :)

There is a decent-sized stack of orders that need to be processed on Tuesday. With any luck, they can get through all of those on Tuesday. However, there is a slight chance that a few might linger until Wednesday. If you haven't heard anything by around 4pm on Tuesday, you might want to give Sara Marie an email and let her know so she can look into it for you.

-Lisa

We have been working our way through the orders as fast as we can. Normally, we can get through all the subscriptions by the Friday after we start, but this subscription run was a lot bigger than normal, so it has taken longer than expected, especially since we have had sickness run through the warehouse, causing some folks to miss a day or so as they recover. All I can say is that we will keep shipping as fast as we can and get the subs out as quickly as possible.

Back to the warehouse for me...

-Lisa

We have been looking into the issue today and are trying to track down the trail of where the product came from, which is a lot harder to figure out than you might imagine.

-Lisa

I mistakenly had the D&D 3rd edition product sale ending at the end of July. I have taken that restriction off and everything should be back to their discounted prices. Sorry for the confusion.

-Lisa

Wizards of the Coast is able to maintain street dates on their products, and they don't use the "sue" card. They simply tell the offending distributor and store, "You won't be getting any of our products for the next six months."

The main reason WotC has the clout to do this is that they sell direct to many accounts, so there is no middle-man in the system. However, if we know the details about a store breaking the date and who their distributor is, we can do what we can from our end to make sure it doesn't happen again.

-Lisa

So, what is your policy? Are you okay with stores selling your product early, so long as they get it from a distributor who, nominally, you're allowing to distribute early? Or are you like WotC, and will shut down any future instances of these kinds of occurances?

Hi there!

We are not OK with stores breaking the street date. If you could send any info you have about the store and their distributor to pierce@paizo.com, our sales manager will look into it. We've found a couple other broken street dates and managed to shut them down before they got too out of hand. Thanks for letting us know!

-Lisa