|
This may be a silly question, or even one that has been asked before, but here goes:
Are there any chances of collecting the adventure paths into hardcovers when they are done? Or would that be competition with yourselves? I know that I, for one, prefer the tactile feel of a hardcover enough that I'd be willing to pay the $120 or more for an entire path's collection in one place.
Anyhow, figured it would be worth asking.
Chief Technical Officer
|
I was hoping for the age of worms and savage tide adventure paths to make it to hard cover editions like the shackled city one. Did WoTC make that decision or was it paizo that decided not to make those hardcovers? Did the Shackled city one not sell well?
Kohl
The Shackled City sold so well that we had to go to a second printing. Wizards never gave us permission to collect the other Adventure Paths, though we did indeed ask for that permission.
There are reasons that the Shackled City did so well that would not contibute to the success of a Pathfinder collection. For one thing, magazines disappear from the newsstand after a month, and this was an opportunity to keep it as an open-stock item at retail. Unlike magazines, Pathfinders don't need to go out of print the month after they're released. So, when a volume sells out (like Pathfinder #2 did) we can reprint it if there's enough demand (which we're currently trying to gauge for Pathfinder #2).
Second, the Shackled City wasn't simply a collection of a bunch of magazine issues—it was a collection of one portion of each issue, with additional content, and, in the case of the early adventures, updated to 3.5 for the first time. We're content with the contents of Pathfinders 1-6 (plus the Player's Guide).
Outside of those reasons, it still doesn't make sense to collect the Pathfinder Adventure Paths. Probably the most important to us is that we can't afford to have people "wait" for us to publish a collection. (I know many people wouldn't... but many people would.) We need regular income from monthly releases to stay in business; anything we do to discourage that is counterproductive to our survival. Plus, collecting them would slow the sales of our current inventories, and that's bad.
Besides, a 600-page hardcover is just plain a hard sell at retail. In order to sell it effectively, we'd need to break it down into smaller volumes. And since it already *exists* as six smaller volumes... well... you know.