🤑🤑 Money and Collaboration - Paying People 🤑🤑
Project Managing for TTRPGs
TL;DR: This post focuses on how to compensate collaborators, including resources for determining fair pay and a custom Google Sheets template that helps calculate collaborator pay and earnings.
This is part of a series on Project Managing for TTRPGs. Stay up to date by subscribing:
This is the last post in a mini-series on money 💰. By now you should:
This post focuses on the basics of paying collaborators as a project lead.
Payout Options
Generally, there are two broad ways — that I’ve seen — to pay folks:
Either you pay them outright for the work done (via an hourly, per word, or flat rate)
And/or you give them a percentage of any profits the project makes (called royalties).
Royalties
Collaborators on Encounters in the Radiant Citadel were paid through royalties, meaning they get a percentage of the money we make from sales. This was (relatively) easy to set up on DMsGuild and DriveThruRPG and now everyone automatically gets paid on each sale. Note that itch.io doesn’t currently have a revenue split option.
We did an entirely even royalty split between all authors. What this means is for every copy of Encounters in the Radiant Citadel sold at $4.95:
DMsGuild gets ~$2.47
The other ~$2.47 is split evenly between the ten of us
I personally get around $0.25 cents
Royalties Lessons Learned
Even though I led the project and did the layout, I took the same split as the other collaborators. I did this because it was my first time negotiating royalties and I decided I cared more about who I got to work with than a larger royalty split. I’m thrilled with how things turned out, but now that I’ve got a few more titles under my belt, I’m doing “royalty shares”.
Royalty Shares
For Out of Luck, I used a method called Royalty Shares to split payment with my cover artist, Mehitabel. To start, each contributor gets a certain number of “shares”, which represent what percentage of each sale they get. For example, person A has 5 shares, person B has 1 share, and person C has 4 shares. That’s a total of 10 shares between everyone (5+1+4). Then A gets 50% for their 5 shares, B gets 10% for their one share and C gets 40% for their 4 shares.
Shares for Different Tasks
To determine royalty shares, I suggest looking at what Jazz Eisinger, Caroline Amaba, and Jacky Leung did for the Unbreakable Anthology (this is based on an earlier system from Ashley Warren’s Uncaged Anthology):
Unbreakable Anthology Charter (the bottom has proposed royalty shares for different types of contributions).
Royalty Shares Example
For Out of Luck, this worked out to be:
4.5 “shares” for me for a combination of writing (1), layout (1), cartography and spot art (1.5), and project lead (1)
2 “shares” for Mehitabel for the cover art (2)
What this means is for every copy of Out of Luck sold at $4.95:
DMsGuild gets ~$2.47
The other ~$2.47 represents 100% of the shares (6.5 shares)
Each share is 15.38% of the profit, or $0.38
I have 4.5 shares and get $1.71 on each sale
Mehitabel has 2 shares and gets $0.76 on each sale
As part of my transparency around payment, I calculated how much money we’d each make given different sales numbers and made sure Mehitabel knew they might make less than their standard commission prices. I did that using the Royalty Split Projection Calculator I provide at the end of this post 👇.
Hourly, word, and flat rates
As I’m beginning to do some freelance writing work, I have some sense of what folks should be paid. Most of it came from this extremely helpful document written by seasoned game designer and freelancer Anthony Joyce-Rivera (@AJoyce_Rivera):
Freelancer Experience and Compensation (shared with his permission). 👈👈👈👈
Read this document. I shared it with all of my collaborators on Encounters. If there’s one message I want to highlight, it’s that “The industry standard of an acceptable per-word rate is 10 cents per word”. This is what established publishers are (or should) be paying folks. I’ve seen at least one publisher publicly criticized for offering less than this amount and well-known writers can be paid upwards of 0.25 cents or higher per word. Editing is also work and you can read more about editing rates on Taylor Navarro’s How to Hire an Editor for (Your First) TTRPG Supplement blog post.
Transparency
Being 100% transparent about pay is one way you can set the tone of your project management. The information in this post is what I shared with collaborators as part of the Encounters and Out of Luck project plans. If anyone felt hoodwinked or taken advantage of, that was a major failure on my part.
I wrote up and shared all my reasoning for the project goals, pricing, and how exactly the money was being split. I also wrote a full project plan and had collaborators sign via a Google contract before formally starting the collaboration. Details of what I included in the Project Plan will be covered in the next post in this series.
Template: Royalty Split Projection & Freelancing Fees Calculator
When I was working on Out of Luck and talking to potential artists, I created a spreadsheet to show projected sales and royalty splits (with the numbers filled for my project). I’ve made this spreadsheet a copyable template that you can use for your own projects. It includes:
The ability to designate different “shares” for each contributor
Calculating how much money everyone receives based on different projected sales
Calculators for hourly/word/flat rates as found in the Freelancer Experience and Compensation document
Make a copy of the spreadsheet and try it for yourself 👉here👈
TTRPG Experts Talking Money: Dollars and Dragons
Alright, that’s all I have to say for now about money! If you’re looking for more content on the financial side of TTRPGS, I highly suggest Dollars and Dragons. Friday, who runs the podcast and substack, is a full-time professional GM and she brings on guests from all corners of the TTRPG industry to talk game development and money.
The most recent episode with Brian Cortijo is “Getting Paid What You’re Worth As a Freelancer” and Brian talks candidly about his 15+ years as a freelance D&D writer. It’s a great listen.
The next post in the series will be about putting together a project planning document.
Over and Out,
- 🫙 👁️ 👁️
The formula of agreeing to work for royalties only with a group of new writers makes sense but it seems less feasible when looking to include art. Additionally, it feels like the standards for any artists are going to be higher than the new writer. Do you suggest doing the same royalty split for artists (which potentially means they make zero) or budgeting art as an out of pocket expense? I know I potentially could go to fiverr and find an artist that's just underpricing themselves and exploit that but I want to make sure I'm paying people what they're worth.