Devoted to technical writing and technical writers

Strategy guides for video games are not a huge niche in the computer books market, but they are a respectable one. According to market data reported in today's New York Times, they generated just under $70 million dollars last year (a slightly lower year than 2004). However, the interesting thing about this is that print guides seem to be the preferred mode of publishing by the players who buy them.

While there's quite a bit of free online content, it seems players don't like to shift between screens while playing a game to refer to the published strategies, and the print story for online material is usually quite poor, so gamers are paying $15 to $20 for the typical guide and the two main publishers: Prima Games (part of RandomHouse) and Brady Games (part of Pearson) are benefiting from it. So are the authors who do the work, averaging $3,000 to $12,000 per book plus a free copy of the game. Read the full story in today's New York Times.

For the record, RandomHouse doesn't accept un-solicited queries. Since Brady Games is an imprint of Pearson, I've given the link to Pearson's author guidelines, but Brady Games isn't actually listed there so interested writers might want to contact Brady Games directly.