[Hell for Leather RPG] Things You Gotta Do Before Printing
Sebastian K. Hickey:
Dear Diary,
Today I got an email back from CPI (Anthony Rowe) complaining that my "PDF contained transparencies." What does that mean? I did some research.
Older RIPs (Raster Image Processors—the things that turn your lovely PDF into something understandable to the printer), especially the ones built in to the printer's firmware, are not compatible with certain features of the PDF 1.4+ standard. In other words, they are obsolete. The newest PDFs standards have all sorts of cool, work-saving features to help designers with the job of production. One of those features is transparency, which includes blending.
So, if I have three layers of images—each blending over the one below, to create a funky effect—and I export this as a PDF version 1.5, the printer that uses an obsolete RIP firmware will not be able to rasterise the transparency properly. It will not understand what the fuck is going on. In order to circumvent this issue, I have to export the PDF using an old standard (1.3). Unfortunately, in doing so, I have to flatten the PDF.
Flattening the PDF is way more complex than it sounds. It involves building vectors for the text and the images, and can lead to some nasty artefacts where it guesses how to segregate an image into a vector/raster. I spent this morning bashing my head against the issue until I came up with a neat fix. I took out all the text, exported the entire PDF as a flat graphics solution (no vectors) and then imported that entire PDF back into the document and dropped the text layers back on top.
In a sense, I collapsed all the fancy image into one, non adjustable, flat layer. It's not a good solution for editing, but it's a good solution to preserve the look of an existing layout without having to worry about dodgy raster artefacts.
Sebastian.
Tom Tom:
i've got an rpg going into print in about 3-4 weeks and here's my story so far:
phoned mongoose publishing to see what their policy was on independent games. the guy i spoke to refused to even look at my game!
emailed kurt ziegel from game geeks to see if he'd do a video review of my book when it's printed; he ignored me. i was disappointed about that because i used to think he was a genuine guy but i think he's sponsored to do the reviews he does now. bad sign.
i got hold of leisure games in london who actually took the time to look at what i'd done so far and said they liked it and would stock it in their shop when it's in print in a few weeks time. yay!
this is my first experience with trying to promote a work of mine and for every nice person it seems, like this forum's host ron, there's an unpleasant person that you have to deal with; like the guy from mongoose.
you have to believe in yourself and your product and fight till the bitter end to get it noticed.
Tom Tom:
your diary is very interesting. especially to me who is doing what you're doing. i've just contacted irp and drive thru myself now. keep up with the posts! :)
Sebastian K. Hickey:
(Hi Tomas, thanks for posting your appreciation. In the interest of keeping this thread on target, I'm not going to answer your comments here. Maybe start another thread?)
Dear Diary,
Both prints have been processed for shipping. IPR should get their hands on the Hell for Leather book sometime this afternoon. What does that mean for me? A cleaner financial projection. That is, I now know how much I've spent, to the cent, in getting this game into distribution. With that knowledge, and my pricing structure, I can understand (and talk about) the cash bucks.
Over on Cobweb Games, I've outlined the cost per unit and projected profits via three methods of distribution (direct sales, IPR sales and DriveThru RPG sales). After some totting up, I've calculated the full potential earnings for 100 copies of Hell for Leather and the Target playsheet. From IPR, I could net around $300 if all the items sell direct to customers. That's not including PDF only sales and it wobbles significantly if retail get involved. From the direct sales (Cobweb Games), I stand to earn a much larger piece of the pie (around $600) but that's totally unpredictable. There's going to be discounts here and there, some of it will get chewed up by retail, I haven't deducted the stall costs, and so on and so on.
Sebastian.
Sebastian K. Hickey:
Dear Diary,
Today I opened up Hell for Leather for pre-ordering. I started by creating a "Merchant Account" on Paypal. They take 3.4% off any transaction + €0.34. That's not bad. I used their button making wizard to create a series of Buy Now buttons for my website. Using the pricing structure from yesterday, I made four buttons.
After I set up the shop, I promoted the game on Story Games, RPG.net and DriveThru RPG. Customers were able to visit the website and pre-order the package they were interested in. So far, most people have gone for the Deluxe Bundle even though it's the most expensive option. That could be because these are the grass roots folks. That's something to consider in another thread.
Anyway, the way it works is simple. A customer pays for their package using Paypal, I get sent a notification email, and then I use the "Canned Responses" feature of Gmail to automatically reply to the Paypal "Payment received" notification—thereby giving new customers instant access to the PDF bundle from a secure ftp address. This is my crappy, clumsy, jury-rig way to make sure that customers always get something for their money RIGHT NOW, even if they have to wait a few weeks for the pre-order to come through.
Sebastian.
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