RANDOM THOUGHTS #79
Steve Cole muses: Just thinking to himself that Jean wanted a blog that was actually about the company.
1. Jean wanted us to create two pages of advertising for the two main RPG systems. (These were to be included in that RPG intro pack she did to explain the universe to new customers.) I basically blew a fit, since I am overloaded with things to do, hate doing marketing, and I get stuck with writing all of the advertising because nobody else seems to know how. Jean understood my situation, and decided to sneak one by using the old Rock Soup system. She told Joel to create "rough draft" advertising pages using the copy from the shopping cart. She cleverly thought that once it was shown to me, I'd start marking all over it, take charge of it, and it would get finished. Well, it worked, but perhaps not the way she expected. Joel did what he could, and brought it to me. Rather than taking over the project as Jean assumed I would, I explained to Joel that I was going to teach him how to do ad copy. (That way, I'll have someone to delegate this stuff to.) It took Joel five trips back and forth to my office with updated drafts, but we made it work. I would show him a problem and discuss how to fix it, he'd go take his best shot (he's actually pretty smart), and then I'd discuss with him ways to do it better. I guess I'm just getting too old, but I was calm and tutorial during the process. I figured out that it was easier to give Joel inadequate instructions and then show him how to fix the result than to lay out the instructions so fully that I had basically done all of the work. I had him write some new copy to fill in one item, and told him to "go find some art" to fill some blank spots. He found some art, but the four pieces of art came from three different places, and didn't look good together. I pointed this out to him, and suggested that since Xander Fulton keeps bombarding us with all kinds of art, that maybe he could find four Xander graphics that would work and would actually look like a matched set. That is just what happened! In the end, the process took two hours, but only about 15 minutes of my time. I could have done it by myself in an hour, but after we worked our way through the first of the two pages Jean wanted done, Joel was able to whip up the second page by himself in only 10 minutes. So, I learned something. (If there is no one to delegate things to, invest the time in training someone.) Joel learned how to do ad copy, and learned a few tricks, tactics, and principles for building a creative ad. He stretched his skills and in the end did a better job than I could have, since he knew better than I did where to find all of the art pieces in his computer. Jean honed her skills at manipulating me (and others in the office) to get her goals accomplished.
2. I did four Federation Commander battle tug Ship Cards for Captain's Log #44. When we did the supplemental file, I did two more. Leanna was upset with me taking "billable hours" to create new pages for a supplemental file that is supposed to be only leftover material and designer notes. Then it struck me that six battle tug cards (which were black and white in the issue and supplement) would make a dandy e23 Ship Card pack, getting us at least a few dollars in actual revenue for the billable hours spent creating the last two.
3. Way back in 1973, I created a wargame magazine called JagdPanther. The first issue included three games (Cowpens about a battle in the American Revolution; Scrimmage IV about football; and MP44 which was a squad-level game that presaged Squad Leader and did it better). That was another time. The magazine pages are typed, the game counters are printed on paper (and drawn by hand!), and the map was (you guessed it) drawn by hand (using hex paper that I created from scratch on my drafting board with a T-square and a 60-degree triangle). Over the next three years, we got better and better, producing pages on an IBM Selectric typewriter (home computers did not yet exist), and doing the art with rub-on lettering and rub-on graphics. When that company closed in November 1976, I stuck my share of everything that was left into two boxes. (I have no idea if my partner kept his boxes, or if he even packed boxes to keep.) I got married in 1977 and Mother thoughtfully sent the boxes to my new home where Leanna helpfully hid them in the attic. Years later, in 1999, ADB incorporated and moved to its own offices, and Leanna gleefully shipped any box that looked like "wargame junk" to the new office (and out of her house). The boxes got put on a high shelf in the warehouse and forgotten. When we moved to the new office in January, 2010, the forgotten boxes went to the new warehouse. During all of those years, people would write or call at least once a month offering $100 per issue for my stock of JagdPanther magazines, but I refused (if only because I had no idea where the boxes even were). I saw copies of JagdPanther sell on eBay for anything from $3 to $165. I guess that just depended on someone who really wanted them noticing them appear. In January, 2012, yet another person asked if I could find the boxes because he desperately wanted a couple of pages from one of them. He hounded me enough that I agreed that I would ask Mike if anyone had seen the boxes. Mike said he knew where they were, and they showed up at the office a week later. On 3 February 2012, I dug through the boxes and found copies of all of the issues, and sorted out what seems to be 95% of the pages from JagdPanther #1 (missing the Cowpens map). I gave the pile of pages to Joel, scanned them into PDFs for upload to e23. The theory is that even if few buy a copy, once it's in electronic form, it will never die, and will never be lost to history. Anyway, we sold enough copies on the first day (8 February) to pay for Joel's time so I gave him the second copy to scan on 9 February and it is now uploaded on e23.
1. Jean wanted us to create two pages of advertising for the two main RPG systems. (These were to be included in that RPG intro pack she did to explain the universe to new customers.) I basically blew a fit, since I am overloaded with things to do, hate doing marketing, and I get stuck with writing all of the advertising because nobody else seems to know how. Jean understood my situation, and decided to sneak one by using the old Rock Soup system. She told Joel to create "rough draft" advertising pages using the copy from the shopping cart. She cleverly thought that once it was shown to me, I'd start marking all over it, take charge of it, and it would get finished. Well, it worked, but perhaps not the way she expected. Joel did what he could, and brought it to me. Rather than taking over the project as Jean assumed I would, I explained to Joel that I was going to teach him how to do ad copy. (That way, I'll have someone to delegate this stuff to.) It took Joel five trips back and forth to my office with updated drafts, but we made it work. I would show him a problem and discuss how to fix it, he'd go take his best shot (he's actually pretty smart), and then I'd discuss with him ways to do it better. I guess I'm just getting too old, but I was calm and tutorial during the process. I figured out that it was easier to give Joel inadequate instructions and then show him how to fix the result than to lay out the instructions so fully that I had basically done all of the work. I had him write some new copy to fill in one item, and told him to "go find some art" to fill some blank spots. He found some art, but the four pieces of art came from three different places, and didn't look good together. I pointed this out to him, and suggested that since Xander Fulton keeps bombarding us with all kinds of art, that maybe he could find four Xander graphics that would work and would actually look like a matched set. That is just what happened! In the end, the process took two hours, but only about 15 minutes of my time. I could have done it by myself in an hour, but after we worked our way through the first of the two pages Jean wanted done, Joel was able to whip up the second page by himself in only 10 minutes. So, I learned something. (If there is no one to delegate things to, invest the time in training someone.) Joel learned how to do ad copy, and learned a few tricks, tactics, and principles for building a creative ad. He stretched his skills and in the end did a better job than I could have, since he knew better than I did where to find all of the art pieces in his computer. Jean honed her skills at manipulating me (and others in the office) to get her goals accomplished.
2. I did four Federation Commander battle tug Ship Cards for Captain's Log #44. When we did the supplemental file, I did two more. Leanna was upset with me taking "billable hours" to create new pages for a supplemental file that is supposed to be only leftover material and designer notes. Then it struck me that six battle tug cards (which were black and white in the issue and supplement) would make a dandy e23 Ship Card pack, getting us at least a few dollars in actual revenue for the billable hours spent creating the last two.
3. Way back in 1973, I created a wargame magazine called JagdPanther. The first issue included three games (Cowpens about a battle in the American Revolution; Scrimmage IV about football; and MP44 which was a squad-level game that presaged Squad Leader and did it better). That was another time. The magazine pages are typed, the game counters are printed on paper (and drawn by hand!), and the map was (you guessed it) drawn by hand (using hex paper that I created from scratch on my drafting board with a T-square and a 60-degree triangle). Over the next three years, we got better and better, producing pages on an IBM Selectric typewriter (home computers did not yet exist), and doing the art with rub-on lettering and rub-on graphics. When that company closed in November 1976, I stuck my share of everything that was left into two boxes. (I have no idea if my partner kept his boxes, or if he even packed boxes to keep.) I got married in 1977 and Mother thoughtfully sent the boxes to my new home where Leanna helpfully hid them in the attic. Years later, in 1999, ADB incorporated and moved to its own offices, and Leanna gleefully shipped any box that looked like "wargame junk" to the new office (and out of her house). The boxes got put on a high shelf in the warehouse and forgotten. When we moved to the new office in January, 2010, the forgotten boxes went to the new warehouse. During all of those years, people would write or call at least once a month offering $100 per issue for my stock of JagdPanther magazines, but I refused (if only because I had no idea where the boxes even were). I saw copies of JagdPanther sell on eBay for anything from $3 to $165. I guess that just depended on someone who really wanted them noticing them appear. In January, 2012, yet another person asked if I could find the boxes because he desperately wanted a couple of pages from one of them. He hounded me enough that I agreed that I would ask Mike if anyone had seen the boxes. Mike said he knew where they were, and they showed up at the office a week later. On 3 February 2012, I dug through the boxes and found copies of all of the issues, and sorted out what seems to be 95% of the pages from JagdPanther #1 (missing the Cowpens map). I gave the pile of pages to Joel, scanned them into PDFs for upload to e23. The theory is that even if few buy a copy, once it's in electronic form, it will never die, and will never be lost to history. Anyway, we sold enough copies on the first day (8 February) to pay for Joel's time so I gave him the second copy to scan on 9 February and it is now uploaded on e23.
posted by Federation Commander at 1:00 PM
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