A.) Covenants will use up and trade off copies fairly quickly, meaning you quickly get competition for sales of your own book from previous owners.
B.) Demand for your tractatus is determined by its quality and the supply of other tractatus of similar value.
C.) Game balance issues will stop any magus from earning 100 pawns (over time) for a single season's work. High end Verditus magi can earn 14+ pawns a season (lab total 140, enchantment level 70), and earning 100 makes them seem like paupers.
more signifigantly, mundanes do not grow on trees. Yes they are paid in silver, that doesn't mean you can recruit an unlimited amount, and they still have to fit within the covenant budget. So if your covenant can afford to support 3 scribes at ability 6, do you want them working on summae which you can sell for 36 pawns of vis for a season's worth of copying, or tractatus at 6 pawns per season? Are you really going to turn down the 30 pawns of vis because you can pay the scribes in silver?
The market for summae is much smaller than the market for tractatus. Eventually you will saturate the market for the few summae that you can actually make copies of.
That was one of the points I was trying to make. In this case, game balance and game rules appear (to me) to collide.
If I can earn that much Vis from scribes, I can certainly afford to throw Vis at rituals to create either Gold (Touch of Midas, CrTe 20), silver coins (The Riches Rightfully Mine(d), CrTe35) or just food directly (CrHe 20). Yes, that breaks the economy and probably violates the Silver Consensus, but there are work-arounds.
And why should I care about the Scribe skill of my scribes? They're only copying tractatus, not summae. That market gluts far too fast.
...which is why I didn't even mention summae, except in passing. That market gluts far too fast.
Sort of. Your point was that the tractatus market can get glutted easily through competition, but my point was that after a very short period, you are competing with YOUR OWN books, as your early sales have been used and are being traded away (which does not violate Cow and Calf, only copying does that). The only way to avoid this would be to manufacture MANY copies before distribution and sell them all at once, which requires a lot of lead time or a seriously epic scribal staff.
One thing that deserves more attention is the method of distribution. The most efficient method of distribution is to sell quick copies (a scribe can make 3 a season) to covenants, who prepare proper copies on their own. This limits how many useful additions to the library a covenant can make a year (roughly 2 tractatus per scribe, assuming they only labor 2 seasons a year), but from the publisher's perspective it gets more of his books out there quickly (therefore he gets more vis in a shorter period of time with less investment in scribing). The covenants that made proper copies return the quick copies to the author, and can later sell their finished version once they're done with it, recouping their investment in the book.
Assuming the locating a buyer, distributing the quick copy, the copying and recovery of the exemplar takes a full year, that means that each year, 3 copies of your book are created. You'll saturate most tribunals in 3 years, at which point 9 copies of your book exist and those copies are starting to circulate beyond the covenants that created them. If you've earned 1p per copy, at this point you've recovered 9p for a season of authoring and one season of scribes making quick copies, and the covenants that made the good copies are probably selling them for 2-3p once they've done with them.
If the tractatus are rigorously traded, assume one tribunal per 3 years gains access through trade to your copies, and in roughly 30 years everyone who has wanted to use your book has had the chance, and the 9-odd copies end up sitting in somebody's library in the edges of the Order (and massive collections that don't trade away books) until the next generation of magi need to use tractatus.
From a game balance perspective this looks good to me. 9p for a season of work (spread over 3 years) is a good return on investment in time for a good author but won't break the game, and massive resources aren't required to distribute hundreds of copies, leaving resources for other books to be made.
Not an unreasonable argument, but I thought I was arguing that tractatus prices would drop to rather below the 2 pawns per season?
So competing with myself only strengthens the point, no?
If the market for summae is saturated, the price would drop, which would still put the price of tracti higher in relation to summae. In fact that is simply an extreme version of my main point, that tracti should be in higher demand and fetch a higher price.
There's not much room at the bottom. The price of a tractatus is basically irrelevant so long as you can trade it away for the same amount. A good copy took a season to make as well as resonant materials (presumably), so there has to be a bottom. Tractatus are so much better than studying from vis (barring the exploding dice) that 2p to allow 3-7 magi one season of study is pretty much a stellar bargain, especially when you can probably recoup some or all of that amount reselling the book.
I'm more concerned with how much a magi should reasonably expect to earn flogging his (presumably sound) tractatus. I'd ball-park it around (Quality=Pawns Earned), but magi turning out Q6-7 tractatus probably don't earn 6-7 pawns and Q14 writers probably pull in more than 14p (these are the guys who pre-sell copies).