So I got another review for Permafrost the other day. Another two-out-of-five review. This one was really just... insulting. It's here if you want to look.
At this point I might as well just take the product down. As much as it feels dishonest, it's a fucking waste of server space to keep it up at this point - after two STAFF reviews basically saying it's a piece of shit, no one's going to buy it.
Things like this really just make me want to quit. I hate this. This feels like such a fucking waste of my time - design, publishing, bothering to respond, taking any time out of my life that could be better spent on other things. I really wish I could talk to this reviewer and figure out what was going through his head, but I know it doesn't matter and never will.
Take heart. That's such a badly written review that I can't see how anyone would take it seriously -- certainly I wouldn't let it affect my decision to buy or not buy a product. Not everyone is a writer as this review shows. ;)
a) initially not worry about it. If it makes you feel better, drop the price for this edition to $2 or something.
b) take on board the major complaints. And start work on a new edition.
Make it a campaign setting and not just 10 classes. Add prose, art, writing, flavour text. All that. I'm interested in the idea though there's no way I'd buy a book of 10 d20 classes as *ta-da* I don't do d20.
As they say:
"Permafrost is an idea that just is not taken to proper level. As a Setting this is a book of a solid idea and theme but it does not take the detail the setting enough to really make it easy to use."
and
"In addition to the lack of some details the author has a questions and answers section in which he states that he will probably not be writing any more for this setting. That is a pity because there is a lot of really good potential here."
A real campaign setting is a shitload of work, and worse, it's work that I'm bad at. These days in D&D people expect inns, secret societies, store names, pages and pages of statted up NPCs, and more. We're talking about tripling the size of the book, at minimum. I was willing to do it for some other games that I've done (Valence, S.A.), but I just can't see spending six months or more on it, and I can't afford to pay other people to do it, especially since the game is selling like crap. With what I've made so far (about $50), I can afford a total of two decent pieces of art. If anyone feels like writing 40+ pages of setting info for that kind of price, I'm glad to fork over the cash to them... but it won't erase the bad reviews.
Sigh.
Thank you for the comments anyway, Matt. I appreciate them, and I'll think about it. You too, Michael.
Bad reviews suck, but there are ways to deal with them. I think that Fred and Rob (Evil Hat) have been doing this perfectly. Instead of the negative reply you gave on the page, which is very understandable from an emotional point of view and maybe even justified, it's more productive to thank the reviewer for taking the time, and then moving on to quickly pointing out where you politely disagree. That way, you can turn even a bad review into an opportunity to talk positively about your game.
Judd: A little, but I should try not to be too snooty about it.
Christian: I hear you. I try to do that as much as I can (see the game's previous review, and the recent reviews of Super Console and Metafiction). This one just pushed my buttons on the wrong day, being the fourth or fifth bad review I've had in a row. To some extent I wish I could go back and change my reply.
The second review is terriblly badly written but the first one is really quite keen. I'm intrigued by the setting as written (a couple of sentences) but as I said, d20 ain't my bad. This is the kind of area that I like reading (and writing). Statting up stuff bores the nipples off me.
Why do you think you are "bad" at this? Or does Permafrost not interest you the way that Valence does?
I just think that given the first review is saying "Give me more, please", you've got a potential market there!
Take heart, Colin. This is just part of what happens in publishing. Believe me, even this is preferable to silence. ;)
I concur with Matt, with a slight elaboration: consider if you have any interest in developing that setting. If you don't, slash the price and chalk it up to a learning experience (you're still in the black, right?). If you do have some remaining interest in the setting, develop a second edition where you address the (poorly presented) criticisms and develop a product that fills the needs of the market. Point being, the book, as issued, is already out there. Decide if it's done -- which means you're done with it, too -- or if it needs work. Either option is perfectly fine; you'll just drive yourself batty if you don't decide for yourself which one it is.
Ok my input for what it is worth. I read the second review, it is a bit harsh i would say. That is after reading the above comments so I am now naturally biased towards you Colin. I went and googled your company page and read the intro info for Permafrost. That was more interesting and it got me curious to go back to RPGNow and check the price. Now I hate buying PDFs, I just cannot stand it. Would rather give you 10$ for a Printed/bound copy than 7.50$ for a PDF. Yes I know I can print it myself, bind it for less than the other 2.50$ and come out dollar wise ahead even with ink cartridge costs. Not my personal point, and a separate issue.
Well with your despair it makes me want to add on content to your Permafrost, to write a few pages or more and donate to you to help Permafrost v2 look better and sell better for you. I like the idea, I am enamored of Ice Age and the idea of Gaming in the Pre-Mythic World, which is not the setting but it actually resonates to one campaign idea i had a few years ago. So the write up is cool on your site. The review was a bit mean, but then again i wont ever try to publish so kudos to you anyway. Feel free to slam me all you all want to.
Yeah, Crothian (Chris Gath) had some good points, such as the lack of bookmarks, which I fixed immediately.
As for why I consider myself bad at settings, it takes me forever to write detail. I can make broad, sweeping statements without too much trouble, but I say what I have to say and be done with it. I like being concise. Valence and S.A. definitely caught my interest better, but their settings are so large (multiple planets) that big statements are appropriate. But detailing individual NPCs? Towns? Anything that would be required in (for example) an Eberron book or Ptolus? Forget it. I just can't bring myself to care, or to think that others will find my NPCs so interesting that they'd use them above their own.
Right now I'm actually working on a more setting-oriented book just to get a little more practice doing it, but it's a Donjon supplement, so setting and rules can blend together with ease.
Brand: No offense taken; only old-timers on the M&M boards have reason to know me from my CV. This is about my 10th book or so. See here for the list.
Joshua: Still in the black on this product, yes. For my company in general, I'm still reducing my debt margin. I'll definitely make the decision in a day or two.
Tad: Don't worry, no slam coming. If you feel like writing some fluff for Permafrost, there's no reason you couldn't do so and make a few bucks yourself - the whole book is OGC, after all - but don't do it just to make me feel better. I'm feeling a little better already.
I think the point most of us (at least in this thread) are trying to make is that we don't really *want* another Eberron book, we mostly don't really care about the d20 stats, and just want to know more about the cool setting idea you've tempted us with. I really could care less about NPCs and other metacrap.
TADK wrote "Well with your despair it makes me want to add on content to your Permafrost, to write a few pages or more and donate to you to help Permafrost v2 look better and sell better for you. I like the idea, I am enamored of Ice Age and the idea of Gaming in the Pre-Mythic World, which is not the setting but it actually resonates to one campaign idea i had a few years ago."
I'm with tadk. I'd also write some stuff - though without a writers bible it's hard :) - as I'm interested with the premise and it's not about the money.
matt, Hi there, I love that Jeff Wayne version. I wore out like 3 cassette copies of it since it came out. Is it in CD form, I should look. As we suddenly hijack the thread on poor Colin. Yes as far as Permafrost goes, I had an idea of a setting to write for my best friend, as a pseudo-Birthday/Christmas gift since we have all since HS Scattered to the corners of the Continental US mostly. It being a Ice Age approaching/evil Cold oriented BBEG Villian and the icebergs coming closer with the minions on it sort of setting. So I could easly scarf from Permafrost for it. Hence my interest in Permafrost, i am a softie for the niche setting also which this should almost Earthdawn like qualify for, as it goes. I am still thinking on getting it, got an ER bill coming soon was there Saturday night with my son, so that is one determinate factor prior to Christmas time. But the money is not an issue to me, anything I would write would get gifted anyway, a few days and a couple of thousand words to expand it a bit is easy enough for me, if setting oriented. Now crunch is another story, still got crunch to finish on something I got 40 some pages done with almost 2 years ago. If I would finish a dozen monsters, create like 3 templates, and fill it out more, I could have submitted that to a company to sell. Ohh well, fluff I can offer.
Damnit! I knew I knew your name! I am an oldtimer from the M&M boards, I just haven't been there for awhile. I own at least 4 or 5 books from your publisher list.
So yea, at this point all I can say is "What Josh RamaTutenkaman said."
Is there any way to remove your publisher's comment from that second review? Because that would do more to unsell me than the review itself. I'm not trying to have a go at you there - it's honest advice.
I know I said this to you before, but it seems that the big problem (from both reviewers' PoVs) is that they're judging it as a setting rather than as a patch to "arctify" D&D with bonus flavour text.
No, once my comments are there they're set in stone. I could probably ask RPGNow for special permission to edit it. Believe me, if I could change it, I would.
I definitely seem to have marketed Permafrost the wrong way; everyone reacts to it as if it's a skimpy setting that has a few classes taked on, rather than a set of classes with a skimpy setting tacked on.
I agree with the suggestion that you thank reviewers who pan your product and point out any factual inaccuracies. (Different from disagreeing.)
Alternate strategy: I panned a product on rpgnow.com and about 5 weeks later the publisher released a revised version that fixed a goodly chunk of what I had complained about, and the response addressed that. That's highly cool.
well it is winter coming on for our Canadian and Nothern US readers, we can get some free shots of blizzards and frozen ground and lakes for artwork, not knowing the style you already got in there Colin. So there is potential for free artwork and the such. Perhaps one of our kind US or Northern European folks can get some Tundra or actual Permafrosted ground to donate to Permafrost Ver 2 (here I am sounding like I made up your mind right :) )
Colin_Fredericks wrote "Matt - what do you mean by "tell us the story?"
Well, what do you want to do with it?
I mean I don't know exactly why you put the thread up but I think a lot of positive stuff has come out of it, including but not limited to what I read as two people (tadk, me) on this very thread offering to write up the bits you're not keen on (fluff!). I don't know what you meant by "If you feel like writing some fluff for Permafrost, there's no reason you couldn't do so and make a few bucks yourself - the whole book is OGC" because I'm not hip and happening with the cool kids and don't know all the terminology. I just like writing...
And I have no idea how d20 works....
P.S. I just got paid so I'll plop down a few bucks and grab Permafrost as well as some other PDFs I've been eyeing...
Hey all, Depending on whether my son has xrays on his knee today at the Dr or not decides if I buy Permafrost today or not till next week when I get paid again
Then Matt you and I can chat about it better along with Colin :)
Wow. All this support is... wow. Thank you, everyone.
Matt, I believe the fact that you used the word "hip" excludes you from being hip. :) That having been said, the short version is that any or all of Permafrost can be reused - verbatim, if desired - in someone else's product as long as credit is given. OGL stands for Open Gaming License, OGC for Content. d20 products are essentially created under the OGL, with some additional restrictions. You have to get permission from Wizards, but they hand it out like candy, so it's not really a problem.
As far as what I want to do, I think I need another day to consider. A lot of stuff has happened between right now and this time yesterday, most of it having to do with my internal mental states.
Again, thank you, everyone, even those who told me I was off-base, because sometimes I need to hear that.
I mostly keep quiet on the forums, only posing the occassional question, but I can tell you from experience that bad reviews don't really mean all that much.
My last musical album drew lots of bad e-press, and I mean lots, and my fiction works have also gotten reviews that would have made me slit my wrists if my ego weren't so huge (that's a joke I am very humble and not the least bit narcissistic...just ask me).
One of my favorite reviews about my music said something along the lines of "should be used as a form of torture rather than a form of art", and another was "the text written doesn't involve any more depth than a fast-food commercial", etc.
However, those same bad reviews not only helped me to understand my weak points and then to improve upon those, but both of those critiques were shown to be so much piffle when that novella and that album were both successful to a respective degree.
My point is that one person's opinion of your work does not reflect on the quality of your work. From the second review, it sounds to me like the author of the review (who just happens to have no grasp of grammer AND opened his review with run-on sentences) didn't get the point.
It sounded to me, just from reading the review, that it is intended to be a setting within a game that the purchaser is proficient in. you had provided classes germaine to your setting, liner notes on culture, etc. sounds like a cool setting to me.
My thoughts were that if I were still playing D20 and I wanted to put my players into a glacial setting, that your setting would provide me with detail and flair. My other thoughts were that the critic didn't get that it was supplemental material to a campaign...to provide color to a setting.
Anyway, don't let the nay-sayers get you down, just take to heart those points that particularly ring true and work to improve on those.
Besides, anyone that can actually finish a setting, a supplement, their own game, etc, becomes one of the rare few that have actually done soemthing. Most never do finish anything...some are so afraid that they just sit back and rip apart what others have done.
Best of all, and never quit because somebody else didn't get what you were trying to do.
Matt, Tad, anyone else who feels interested, meet me over in another thread (which will be entitled "Permafrost: Stage 2", in the Little Ideas area). We're going to nail down more setting details, invent some major NPCs, and generally flesh out the book.
As a bit of an aside, I've gotten in the habit on Amazon of only reading the negative reviews. In my experience, I just find that you get a better sense of a product, whatever it may be, based on the negative reviews than the positive ones. Positive reviews tend to distill down to "This rocks!" while negative reviews vary much more. If detractors can say what they didn't like and why, I can use their reviews to decide whether I am likely to agree or even be effected by the perceived negatives. That's informed decision-making. If all they have to say is "omg ths is teh suxx0r!!!!1!111!!" then that tells me something too.
I guess my point is that negative reviews don't just eliminate market for product, they attract it too. Seemingly bad publicity is indeed still publicity and people will not necessarily come away from the review agreeing with the reviewer, especially in a culture like the gaming community where most of us like to think of ourselves as mavericks.
Eric, reading the bad reviews is definitely a useful thing to do. I personally find the two- and four-star reviews much more informative than one- and five-star reviews on Amazon. However, when a book's overall rating is two stars, it seems like a giant "stay away" sign to me. I don't think it's a coincidence that I've only sold nine copies so far.
Colin I certainly think with some revision (and extra input if you can get it. I'm in, of course) Permafrost: 0K will garner at least a 3of5 rating 9^> . Plus, reviews from buyers of the current game can ameliorate the staff review ratings. See you at the alpha site. Q