The New Flavors of Azeroth: The Official Cookbook

[vizzle]

Ok, so you -DO- work in the industry and you can give us the tight range of costs ranging from a few ten thousands to 100 thousand plus. Right, nice ballpark. It could be 20 to 150 thousand? You have no clue.

The majority of the fee would be to the author. It starts from a few ten thousand if you start at the normal base rate of everyone involved -- author, illustrator, photographer, editor. It's the profile of the author involved which gives it a wide range. I don't know how costly this particular author might be, and that depends on how much of a name she is in this exact niche.

This was all an off-the-top-of-my-head estimation, but here's a quote for you:

Publishing houses pay an advance for the cookbook, and this can vary from $10,000 for an unknown author to closer to $100,000 for more established authors with a proven audience and some level of fame.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-m...b69933645e3d3c

I wonder how I knew that? Huh. I guess I'm not talking out of my ass.

Get a job.

[hydrium]

Oh look, Blizzard attempting to milk more money out of a dwindling playerbase.

Fuck off.

[ONCHEhap]

Have you ever heard of a cake?

I mean,unless there's sugar in your bread (which I heard is a thing in uncivilised countries), there's quite a difference between bread,and the base of a cake

[Gadzooks]

The company put SOME resources into this atrocity

What resources would that be? Feel free to show us, even using graphs and diagrams if you need, to show how this impacts game dev at all, in any way. Air any of the workloads of the 4700 Blizzard employees.

I won't even bother asking why a cookbook is an "atrocity". That's just childish.

[Biomega]

I mean,unless there's sugar in your bread (which I heard is a thing in uncivilised countries), there's quite a difference between bread,and the base of a cake

The boundaries are not sharply defined. What's counts as "bread" and what's "cake" is usually an intuitive decision based on usage - e.g. whether it's a desert. They can have a lot of structural similarities: there's cakes made with yeast, and there's breads made with baking powder, for example; similarly, there's breads that are quite sweet, and cakes that are not very sweet. What to call it is usually simply a matter of tradition.

[Gadzooks]

Dude, it's called licensing. One creator approaches the holder of any intellectual property and says 'we'd like to take your IP and make product X with it.' The Licensing department then checks wheter or not that is in the companies interest. For example: Harry Potter Lego sets are something that benefits the Harry Potter IP. It is a huge money maker. Officially licensed Hermione Granger Sexdolls on the other hand would probably get you a lot of bad press. So these are declined.

The creator and IP holder come to an agreement. Let's stay with Harry Potter and Lego. Warner Bros. allows Lego to use the HP trademark and IP to make a Lego Hogwarts set. Now the fine people at Lego start bricking around. Warner Bros does nothing at all, aside from sending them some digital files for promotion, Logos, etc. Once the set is done, it's thrown at the market, and people buy it. Warner Bros get's a share of the profit. So, if you buy a Lego Hogwarts set, some of the cash you spend goes to Warner Bros, some of it to Lego, some to the store you bought it at, and everybody wins.

Livensing IPs is incredibly profitable, you'd be stupid not to do it. This book is going to make Blizzard money, and at best it will cost them a few hours of an intern mailing Chelsey artwork.

Can't believe I have to spell this out for your.

All correct. I have some background in publishing, this is how it works. The only variation is companies will often shop an IP around to the highest bidder, in some cases, in others they're approached. Blizzard has a licensing department who oversees their merch, and products like this. In this case I believe the author contacted Blizzard originally for her first book, but most companies these days that own lucrative IPs have a department who's job is to develop merch, and seek out licensees and vendors. ATVI has the Activision Blizzard Consumer Products Group, who may be the division who deal with book contracts like this.

For a book like this, the photography is going to be the biggest part of the cost, along with the actual production and getting it to the press. The publisher would pay for it. Looking at the photos, they're using top notch people, and they're not cheap, but the publishing company knows they'll sell enough to cover production costs and profit.

I would almost guarantee Blizzard's involvement is minimal, other than the licensing department, and having art assets sent to the book designer, like logos, and then approving galleys and checking names and such for proper spelling. Done by people who work at Blizzard who have nothing to do with World Of Warcraft, and probably don't even work in the same building as Team 2.

Blizzard is a corporation with 4700 people working for them, anyway. The minimal effort needed to approve and manage a license for this book is so minuscule compared to the daily workload of the company overall, it's utterly ridiculous to be bitch and complain and fall on your fainting couch over it. I would bet the contracts for this book were signed quite a while ago, and it coming to market now has nothing to do with WoW, Team 2, and the scandal that broke last month, or the development of Warcraft at all.

[LedZeppelin]

bro how can one cook book cause so much salt? (lol food pun) some of yall need to take a deep breath.

[GratsDing45]

bro how can one cook book cause so much salt? (lol food pun) some of yall need to take a deep breath.

Everything Blizz does at this point people on forums will cry... I guess they got nothing else going on their lives

[Nnyco]

People only capable of making 50cent ramen soups complain about a cook book.

[Falkeshall]

This community is the fucking worst.

[Noxulos]

Where's the Spiked Jello recipe?

[Pakheth]

I miss those days when Blizzard branched out with merch like manga and western style comics so it's nice to see them making this. I have the previous one and it has some nice recipes in it that fits very nice thematically.

[Algorath]

Apart from the ridiculously cunty last line, that was a pretty good post bro. Ditch the twatiness and you'd be alright.

[majesta]

I feel bad for the author of this cookbook. The timing is awful for them as the Blizzard name is heavily tainted at the moment.

As an author of several non-fiction books myself, I can say that writing is a challenging task regardless of the topic or format. There is a lot of work and effort that goes into perfecting the material so that it is ready for publishing. Most authors, even somewhat more known or established ones, make the bulk of their income from sales. Unless of course, you are some super celebrity that gets the mega advance or one of those talking head news entertainment people that has an entire network that will promote the book.

[MoanaLisa]

Technically, she has a contract with Blizzard to make the cookbook.

Her contract is likely with her publisher, a Simon & Schuster imprint. Blizzard has licensed Chelsea to use their intellectual property to produce the book. That's likely the extent of it and Blizzard will be collecting some royalties because that's what happens when you license your IP for other uses. It's very easy money and very profitable to license an IP. Especially to someone that you've worked with before. Her agent contacts Blizzard with a proposal, Blizzard marketing takes probably 10 minutes to review it since they've worked with her before, it gets approved and that's it for them. They can sit back and collect royalties off the book sales from everywhere else and a bit more from the Blizzard store. The editor for the book may talk to Blizzard to ask questions and do some fact-checking about any graphics they might have provided and to insure that things are spelled properly. But Blizzard really has to do nothing other than give permission to Chelsea to do another book based on their intellectual property.

She's done a couple of books for A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) and it's just insane to imagine that the IP owner George R.R. Martin paid her to produce the cookbooks. A lot of people have this entirely backwards.

- - - Updated - - -

I feel bad for the author of this cookbook. The timing is awful for them as the Blizzard name is heavily tainted at the moment.

The book has been out since June and was available for presale for months before that. It's available in book stores now. I've seen it at the local B&N along with some of her other titles. If sales are front-loaded after a release date (they are) then the lawsuit is less of a factor than you might think. The hothouse atmosphere that exists in this forum about the lawsuit is not so much of a thing out in the real world where people buy cookbooks.

[Gaidax]

This community is the fucking worst.

Ditto.

It's just a bloody merch book, people totally fly off their handles as if it's some sort of war crime.

It's not like bloody devs sat down and wrote it instead of fixing their shit.

[Lurker1]

Oh look, Blizzard attempting to milk more money out of a dwindling playerbase.

Fuck off.

Not happening

[exochaft]

Blizzard is a corporation with 4700 people working for them, anyway. The minimal effort needed to approve and manage a license for this book is so minuscule compared to the daily workload of the company overall, it's utterly ridiculous to be bitch and complain and fall on your fainting couch over it. I would bet the contracts for this book were signed quite a while ago, and it coming to market now has nothing to do with WoW, Team 2, and the scandal that broke last month, or the development of Warcraft at all.

Half the responses in this thread are akin to the ones I got for suggesting the insane idea that the announced 9.1.5 changes were content that was in the works for a long while prior to the lawsuit announcement, not a "new Blizz dev team bringing changes everyone wants in less than two weeks!" It's becoming increasingly obvious that many in these forums have little/any real life experience. I've even seen people mocking people who try to learn about concepts and industries and the workings of the world because they're not college/university-trained specialists... when the reality is that anyone can learn anything outside of said setting or on-the-job. I'd even go so far as people gain way more knowledge and information about almost any topic from just working in the field and picking it up as one goes along (aka experience).

Admittedly, I don't too have much experience when it comes to publishing books and similar content, but I do have experience operating and managing businesses (some within physics/engineering/academic/research settings, some with production)... and with that life experience behind me I can say the following: this cookbook is likely a licensed IP venture that takes little time and effort to execute. The devs probably had zero input in the creation of this book at all. If anything, there may have been some discussions with the "official lore" people to get spellings and facts, but otherwise there's no reason for game dev time/money even coming near the book. There was at least a couple people who called this book "free money" for Blizz, and that's very true.

I will push back and say that the whole lawsuit thing may have some impact on the cookbook sales, but likely not much. If you want to go by this thread alone, I could see people canceling their preorders just to stick it to Blizz without have a concept of what really goes on in making such a book. Blizz will get some money out of this, so if one is adamantly against Blizz at this point there's some sense in that (although you could make the argument that due to the crimes of the few, you're punishing everyone, but that's another long thread).

How much would the sales be affected by the lawsuit? I'd be shocked if there was a 3-5% loss in the end, as I think it would realistically fall into the territory of sub-1% lost sales. The lawsuit itself is actually not that well-known even within the WoW community, as the people who follow such news (or even read the patch notes) are an extremely small segment of the WoW player base. However, there's a much better case that the lost potential sales in general for the cookbook would be the result of WoW itself being terrible, causing people to move away from the IP, which would impact all IP-related products and purchases. As a personal example, I've made it no secret that I've canceled my subscription for the first time since vanilla before the lawsuit became public, and the majority of this decision is the result of the game being in such a terrible state. While I purchased the original WoW cookbook, I've not bought a single WoW IP book since Chronicles I due to my wanning love for the IP based upon the creative decisions being made at Blizz with respect to WoW as a game and a franchise. I guarantee I'm not the only one in this category.

[Sluvs]

Nice.

I got the first one, they have plenty of very cool recipes.

I still working through the first one, but a second one is definitely going right into my kitchen.

[Doombringer]

The cookbooks are some of the LEAST offensive and least useless works associated with WoW... come on guys. What's with getting your trousers in a knot over a COOK BOOK?

All MMOs have food. This is a chef or somewhat savvy cooking person-type who's taking a crack at some of those dishes. It's harmless. And I own the first cookbook and tried some of the recipes in there, they were pretty good.

The devs at Blizzard are not putting a cookbook together instead of fixing the game.