James, I voted "shorter, more focused" but thought I would expand a bit here in the comments.
My personal recommendation would be longer anthologies if your motivation is primarily archival; and shorter anthologies if you want a bigger profit stream or have thoughts of going through a traditional publisher (vs self-published POD). I tend to think that shorter volumes built around a particular theme (specific time period, specific type of post, etc.) make for a better reader experience (I find the idea of a more focused and smaller book called "Grognardia's Dragon Magazine Essays" more compelling than "All of Grognardia 2010-2013" just psychologically speaking, but I certainly own enough mammoth game-related tomes that I see the value of a bigger all-encompassing book, too. Just my $.02. I am excited to read it in whatever format you choose!
While I have your ear I'll just say one more thing--one thing that would be an instant sale for me personally, regardless of how you organize the anthologies as a whole, would be a smaller book along the lines of "Best of Grognardia." With the contents chosen by you, a team of trusted readers, stats about most-read/most-commented posts, or a combination of these. I know Random Internet Suggestions about How You Should Do Things are not the most helpful but as a longtime reader I'd click "buy" sight unseen.
As for who would read 300 pages of old blog posts, well... I did. So at least there's *one* guy! ;-)
As far as the format is concerned, I prefer the larger, date-delimited "omnibus" format, given that one of the primary goals of this project is preservation. Keeping the posts topically unrelated but grouped by date helps to preserve the overall nous of the blog through the ages; it makes the evolution of both your thinking and the broader OSR more clearly evident.
Go through your list and mark the 'definite yesses' and then see if a pattern emerges. If there is a thematic trend to any of them, extrapolate that trend to its maximum inclusion, regardless of quality. Pare down that list per trend and see how much you have for each.
Everything in order, multiple volumes per year if needed for example: Spring&Summer 2009, Autumn &Winter 2009. Go with print on demand (which I'm guessing you were anyway).
I'm sure you're not particularly interested in what some rando dude on the Internet thanks but I believe thelar a 250 or 300 page book is just fine. Regarding the topics to be included, I would split the difference between the two extremes you proposed. The way I envision it, is maybe you could divide the first year up into months or quarters or some other grouping that makes sense to you, and then pick maybe 5 or 10 representative samples from the pulp fantasy and retro blog entries and use those entries as the "dividers" between the group entries ( I think in publishing terms they call these "interstitials", but I could be completely wrong about that LOL). With this sort of layout, you would keep the thematic integrity of using only the first year of the blog but you also give the reader a little "palate cleanser" occasionally to show the more varied and broader scope of the overall blog.
I'm interested in every perspective on this I can get, even if I ultimately go in a different direction. One of my problems is that I live too much in my own head. Getting outside perspectives, even wildly different ones, is quite helpful to me. Thanks for sharing yours.
I'm not sure that a book is an ideal form for preservation. Books go out of print all the time and become all but impossible to find. For preservation, I would think converting everything to plain text (or markdown), one article per file, indexing it all, and then placing the package at multiple locations across the internet is the way to go. Seriously, that will likely survive longer than both of us, and remain accessible until the internet collapses :).
But that's not as cool as having Grognardia books.
Personally, I am more interested in books with thematically related content. For instance, maybe a volume of the best posts about roleplaying in the old-school style, another about Appendix N authors, another about SF gaming with Traveller and Thousand Suns, etc. All with the kind of introductory material you talked about previously and especially commentary where the modern you disagrees with the past you or has additional insight.
An example: you recently wrote about how your view on "story" in RPGs has evolved or become more nuanced. I would love to find the series of posts that show different stages of your thought about story included in one book rather than have them spread across many books.
Obviously, these are all just my preferences, and they may not align with your goals for this project and so you should, of course, ignore everything I just said. :) The only book of blog posts I own is the The BLDGBLOG Book. It is grouped thematically, more or less, and includes extra content, commentary, and editing.
Hello James, my vote goes to a kind of 'annales' (annual volumes) like in ancient Rome... Romans conquered the world, they couldn't be wrong!
If an annalis is too long, then you can split it into two volumes!
(And if this is not yet convincing, you can keep the tags of the posts according the classification by topic so that you can eventually group the posts in a topic-driven book in an easy way)
James, I voted "shorter, more focused" but thought I would expand a bit here in the comments.
My personal recommendation would be longer anthologies if your motivation is primarily archival; and shorter anthologies if you want a bigger profit stream or have thoughts of going through a traditional publisher (vs self-published POD). I tend to think that shorter volumes built around a particular theme (specific time period, specific type of post, etc.) make for a better reader experience (I find the idea of a more focused and smaller book called "Grognardia's Dragon Magazine Essays" more compelling than "All of Grognardia 2010-2013" just psychologically speaking, but I certainly own enough mammoth game-related tomes that I see the value of a bigger all-encompassing book, too. Just my $.02. I am excited to read it in whatever format you choose!
This is a very useful comment. Thank you.
While I have your ear I'll just say one more thing--one thing that would be an instant sale for me personally, regardless of how you organize the anthologies as a whole, would be a smaller book along the lines of "Best of Grognardia." With the contents chosen by you, a team of trusted readers, stats about most-read/most-commented posts, or a combination of these. I know Random Internet Suggestions about How You Should Do Things are not the most helpful but as a longtime reader I'd click "buy" sight unseen.
Once again, this is helpful to me. Thanks!
I second what Andy said!
As for who would read 300 pages of old blog posts, well... I did. So at least there's *one* guy! ;-)
As far as the format is concerned, I prefer the larger, date-delimited "omnibus" format, given that one of the primary goals of this project is preservation. Keeping the posts topically unrelated but grouped by date helps to preserve the overall nous of the blog through the ages; it makes the evolution of both your thinking and the broader OSR more clearly evident.
Go through your list and mark the 'definite yesses' and then see if a pattern emerges. If there is a thematic trend to any of them, extrapolate that trend to its maximum inclusion, regardless of quality. Pare down that list per trend and see how much you have for each.
Everything in order, multiple volumes per year if needed for example: Spring&Summer 2009, Autumn &Winter 2009. Go with print on demand (which I'm guessing you were anyway).
I can't imagine I'd do an offset printing run, since it'd be prohibitively expensive for the number of sales this project would likely generate.
I'm sure you're not particularly interested in what some rando dude on the Internet thanks but I believe thelar a 250 or 300 page book is just fine. Regarding the topics to be included, I would split the difference between the two extremes you proposed. The way I envision it, is maybe you could divide the first year up into months or quarters or some other grouping that makes sense to you, and then pick maybe 5 or 10 representative samples from the pulp fantasy and retro blog entries and use those entries as the "dividers" between the group entries ( I think in publishing terms they call these "interstitials", but I could be completely wrong about that LOL). With this sort of layout, you would keep the thematic integrity of using only the first year of the blog but you also give the reader a little "palate cleanser" occasionally to show the more varied and broader scope of the overall blog.
I'm interested in every perspective on this I can get, even if I ultimately go in a different direction. One of my problems is that I live too much in my own head. Getting outside perspectives, even wildly different ones, is quite helpful to me. Thanks for sharing yours.
I'm not sure that a book is an ideal form for preservation. Books go out of print all the time and become all but impossible to find. For preservation, I would think converting everything to plain text (or markdown), one article per file, indexing it all, and then placing the package at multiple locations across the internet is the way to go. Seriously, that will likely survive longer than both of us, and remain accessible until the internet collapses :).
But that's not as cool as having Grognardia books.
Personally, I am more interested in books with thematically related content. For instance, maybe a volume of the best posts about roleplaying in the old-school style, another about Appendix N authors, another about SF gaming with Traveller and Thousand Suns, etc. All with the kind of introductory material you talked about previously and especially commentary where the modern you disagrees with the past you or has additional insight.
An example: you recently wrote about how your view on "story" in RPGs has evolved or become more nuanced. I would love to find the series of posts that show different stages of your thought about story included in one book rather than have them spread across many books.
Obviously, these are all just my preferences, and they may not align with your goals for this project and so you should, of course, ignore everything I just said. :) The only book of blog posts I own is the The BLDGBLOG Book. It is grouped thematically, more or less, and includes extra content, commentary, and editing.
Hello James, my vote goes to a kind of 'annales' (annual volumes) like in ancient Rome... Romans conquered the world, they couldn't be wrong!
If an annalis is too long, then you can split it into two volumes!
(And if this is not yet convincing, you can keep the tags of the posts according the classification by topic so that you can eventually group the posts in a topic-driven book in an easy way)
May the fun be always at your table!