State of the indie publisher
Josh Roby:
I've published… quite a few things, at this point. Conquer the Horizon, Full Light, Full Steam, Sons of Liberty, Coronets but Never Crowns, Void Vultures. CtH is a quicky, freebie internet download. FLFS, SoL, and Coronets were all short print runs (through 360 Digital Books) and PDFs. Void Vultures is a ransomed, released-to-the-world PDF plus a few kickstarter backer extras.
I sold books at conventions and over the Internet, with a pretty plain slide from mostly-con to mostly-Internet. These days I don't bother with conventions at all. In fact, I've also slowly phased out selling physical books in general: too much hassle! I've signed up to sell PDFs through every RPG webstore I could find.
The thing that has helped me reach the most people has hands-down been Kickstarter. As a west-coast designer that doesn't make it to the Big Cons, Kickstarter has been invaluable in gathering attention, generating buzz, and building community. It has very quickly become a cornerstone of my business plan moving forward.
My biggest mistake—of the many different mistakes I've made—was probably the overproduction of Sons of Liberty. This is a game that really should have been a small, lean product, a $10 short booklet for playing a quick game for laughs. I spent tons of money on art, wrote long sprawling chapters about how to play campaigns and PvP games, and put out a 160 page book because I wanted SoL to match FLFS in profile and so the two of them would look good on a bookshelf together. I did sell through the first print run, but I've still got a box from the second print run sitting in my closet. Had I had a better idea of what that game should have been, in terms of the book and the social footprint for playing the game, it would have been a great little firecracker of a game. Missed opportunities.
My recurrent mistake, though, is making poor estimates of what shipping will cost or neglecting to factor in shipping costs entirely. Shipping from the printer to me, especially, always hits me for more money than I really need to be spending.
Back in the day, my design community was here. Then Ron asked us all very politely to please leave (intentional overstatement; we love you, Ron), and my "design community" became Story Games, which was never intended to be a design community. It took a few years for me to realize this, unfortunately. Then there was the two-year period where I worked with Cam Banks on the Smallville line; this was mostly emails and chat-based collaboration, and both of us pulling our hair out at the other one's assumptions. ;)
These days, my design community is my regular playtesting group, which meets weekly, and my often-collaborator Ryan Macklin. I am profoundly blessed by the game design gods to have these guys at my back. LAGames is technically a playtest collective, and playtest each other's games, but half of our members at this point just come to play and smash game designs without a great deal of interest in designing their own stuff. Which is great! More folks means more perspectives. Which is also what Ryan and I do, sharing notes over the Internet and giving each other new eyes to look at stuff.
This year I've got a pub plan that's more developed than "publish when I'm done." I've got a number of games and other products that I'm releasing over the course of the year, trying to establish some sense of a brand and keep interest up. I'm chasing the 'echo effect' where regular releases increase sales of all products. I'm also very excited about doing ransom-model creative-commons licensing of small games through Kickstarter. These prevent me from making the worst mistakes of overproduction, giving me an operating budget for the project and no need to worry about marketing after I'm done.
I am also very intentionally shifting myself out of game design and into fiction. Game design has been a lot of fun, but the time-to-profit ratio is just too damn low. So I'm clearing my plate, finishing up all my half-completed titles, and devoting real time to writing fiction, which has some vague hope of being more career-shaped than RPGs. Atlantis Risen, which probably won't be released until 2013, will most likely be my last big game design project.
Emily Care:
What have you published? How?
Breaking the Ice, Shooting the Moon, Under my Skin, Sign in Stranger, Dread House, Monkey Dome, The Color Game, What to Do about Tam Lin?, Diamonds and Coal, The RPGirl Zine, Giving and Taking and The Fluffy Bunny Game.
How have you distributed them?
BtI, StM, UmS and SiS in print: via online marketing and at cons, through IndiePress Revolution, the Unstore and my own site. All the above through pdf: the free ones through my own site, and commercial games for sale through my site, IPR and DriveThruRPG.
What has helped you reach the most people? Make the most sales?
Being part of the conversation, at the Forge and in person at conventions has made the biggest difference for me in many ways. It meant that I learned what I needed to know to design, and also helped me make contact with people to playtest the games as well as be interested in them when they were ready. The friendships that I made, whether on line at the Forge, Story Games or now G+, and face-to-face at conventions like GenCon, JiffyCon, Dreamation, Forge Midwest, Recess, Camp Nerdly, PaxEast, Ropecon, Fastaval and Nodal Point have really been the fuel behind my involvement. Selling eachother's games with love and passion at the Forge booth set the mold for me as far as interacting with my peers: we weren't there to run eachother down, but to hold each other up and to show people that there are many things that can be rpg.
What's the biggest mistake you've made in design & publishing? What were your best lessons learned?
Letting myself get caught up in the finish-by-GenCon cycle was great and horrible. It made me finish three short games, and get them out there. But with Sign in Stranger, I rushed and am still working on getting the game to a state where I'm truly happy with it. A free copy to everyone who's gotten a version is my goal, once it's complete and to then put it out and move on. The biggest lesson I've learned is that the most important thing to me is the games and the people. If I am out there for blood & money, it's just pressure and pain for me. But there is so much to learn, so many people to talk to, and so many more lessons in design to learn that focusing on growing keeps me honest and my interactions vital.
Who have been your communities of design? Who is right now? How do you work with them?
Throughout it all my base group has been my dear, local friends who game and design. It's grown over the years: Vincent and Meg Baker, Joshua Newman, Robert Bohl, Julia Ellingboe, Evan Torner, Kat Jones, and Elizabeth and Shreyas Sampat. And I even married in with Epidiah Ravachol. And half of them I met through the Forge, and other communities like Story Games and from conventions that were fed by the relationships begun at the Forge. And many of these folks worked with me at GenCon booths: the Forge Booth, PlayCollective, Pirate Jenny, or as neighbors at the Ashcan Front and Design Matters. Community game stores have become a new center for meeting people to game with and talk about design. From the Knife Fight forum, the RPGirl zine collaboration bloomed, and is now growing with Giulia Barbano's work with the Women in Games forum. Other groups of collaboration and design I treasure are the Jeeps in the nordic lands, the larger larp and game community in Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark, the amazing Italian artisans of publishing, and many more folks from Europe and around the world that are engaged with the game theory hub that are the Nodal Point conventions. And larp communities in the US who have their own innovations or lovingly embrace jeep & freeform. Conventions have made it possible to collaborate and learn from many more people face to face than just my local friends, but online in its many forms have facilitated many collaborations: email, forums, google+, facebook contacts, googledocs, etc.
What are your next steps?
Getting back into design and publishing. Continuing to work with collaborators on new projects, and wrapping up various projects to be able to move forward on new designs. Here in my area, we'll start a working group on game design at a local community space. I hope to get to design some more with friends who will soon move away! (You--Rob, Evan & Kat!) I'm excited by ways that the form keeps being pushed: with Vincent's Murderous Ghosts, the Play with Intent project Matthijs and I am working on, all the ways new media can be incorporated as Ben Lehman and Elizabeth Sampat are exploring. I'm moving soon, and a big part of my new space will be devoted to office space that will let Epidiah & I be able to publish more and more easily. I'm even doing freelance work, writing fiction for Pelgrane and Evil Hat. For me, I feel like I'm coming back to games after exploring many new things, including editing and larp.
Bret Gillan:
What have you published? How?
The Final Girl is done! It's a small, POD thing right now and I've sold half of my first print run. I have a PDF but haven't gotten around to selling it. Previous to that I published a reall TERRIBLE game called Pundits & Pollsters as a PDF a long, long time. It sold basically zero copies.
How have you distributed it?
My website, The Unstore and hand-to-hand sales at a horror movie convention. I'm going to take it to gaming conventions too.
What has helped you reach the most people? Make the most sales?
Being plugged by other established game designers that I've befriended over the years through gaming forums or through gaming with them at Dreamation/Dexcon.
What's the biggest mistake you've made in design & publishing? Or disaster you've experienced?
Trying to be a friend to people I'm paying to work for me rather than a boss. The Final Girl would have been done two years ago if I hadn't tried to be really hands off and be like, "Whenever you find the time to get this thing done is great." When you don't make your work a priority, it is naturally going to get bumped to the bottom of people's lists. Which isn't malicious, but everyone has stuff going on. That's life.
Who have been your communities of design? Who is right now? How do you work with them?
Well, everyone at the Forge and the designers whose games and blogs I have been quietly reading. I've never figured out a way to fruitfully engage with the world at large about game design, and submitting Cold Soldier to the Ronnies and the subsequent feedback from Ron was the very first time I felt like I was talking about my design on the internet in a way that was helpful to me. Mostly I work along in silence and isolation. Which is a little crazy since I had lunch with Luke Crane and Jared Sorensen, and play a weekly game with Matt Wilson. But I just don't find good opportunities to talk about design. So it's more like I soak up the design from everyone around me.
What are your next steps?
Finish Cold Soldier in the next month or two. Make more of a presence at game convention. And then onto the next exciting projects I have at hand. Learn more lessons! Design more things!
Edited for fomatting -VB
Robert Bohl:
Thanks for doing this, Em.
Quote from: Emily Care on March 21, 2012, 12:27:17 PM
What have you published? How?How have you distributed it?What has helped you reach the most people? Make the most sales?What's the biggest mistake you've made in design & publishing? Or disaster you've experienced?Who have been your communities of design? Who is right now? How do you work with them?What are your next steps?
I've published Misspent Youth in paper and in PDF. It's also been translated and published in Italian. I also completed an entry in the Artist's First Game Chef called Bitch Goddess.
I've distributed through my site, as well as through theunstore.com and IPR. I've also walked the game to many local gaming stores and arranged a few direct sales to retailers. Finally, I put the screen-friendly PDF that I just published on DrivethruRPG just yesterday. I've made the most sales through IPR, probably, though some number of those are to store so I don't know whether I'd count those as "sold." To me, a game isn't really sold until a person who wants to play it, owns it.
It's hard to say what's helped me reach the most people. I'd put it a three-way tie between hosting and appearing on podcasts, being a heavy user of social media and forums, and going to conventions. Tracking sales directly from the first two are difficult (though I have gotten confirmation from people that they have bought the game thanks to listening to Brilliant Gameologists, The Jank Cast, The Podgecast, and The Walking Eye. I have definitely gotten a large number of direct sales at conventions, too.
The biggest mistake I made as a publisher is being a shitty businessperson and failing to track backend things well. Everyone gets everything they need to from me in terms of books, files, and money, but it's utter chaos on the backend. As much as we talk about many parts of the process of being an indie designer, how to manage your business is probably the most-sorely-neglected.
My communities of design have included here, the Master Mines blog I was a member of at one point, Story Games, nerdnyc, i would knife fight a man, and Google+, In-the-flesh communities: First, Judd. After that, the Western Massive crew: Eppy, Emily, Evan, Joshua, Kat, Meg, and Vincent. Right now, it's G+ and Western Mass, and Judd. I playtest with them and talk to them about game ideas.
My next steps: I'm working on 3 games, considering creating an ePub edition of Misspent Youth, and planning on moving to NYC.
soviet:
What have you published? How?
I've published Other Worlds, a multigenre storygame with a heavy focus on worldbuilding and setting/genre exploration. It's a 210 page 8.5 x 11 book, available in both softcover and hardcover through RPGNow's POD service. It's also on sale as a PDF and I've been bundling the PDF for free with sales of the physical books.
Link: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=97631&affiliate_id=237084
How have you distributed it?
Originally I distributed it exclusively through RPGNow/DriveThruRPG. You get a better cut of the profits if you're exclusive and I didn't really want the hassle of handling individual sales and postage myself. Now that the initial rush is over I've switched to a non-exclusive deal with RPGNow and started to expand my sales presence elsewhere. I've put the book up on Lulu, sold some copies direct to a store, and am in the process of signing up with IPR.
What has helped you reach the most people? Make the most sales?
Posting on rpg.net primarily. I don't find that I get any traction on storygames.com at all, which is weird. I've got a facebook page and a wordpress blog but I think they let me speak to existing customers rather than create new ones. Fred Hicks did my layout and has given me a few plugs on twitter, which I'm sure has generated a lot of sales for me all by itself.
What's the biggest mistake you've made in design & publishing? Or disaster you've experienced?
Biggest disaster was that I had to go through 3 sets of proofs before I had a saleable physical book. The first bad proof was a cock-up on our end, while the second was a cock-up on RPGNow/Lightning Source's end (some sort of random misprint, which made us think our layout was still not right when it was actually perfectly fine). This meant that the book itself didn't go on sale until nearly 2 months after the PDF came out, wbhich I'm sure must have cost me sales.
Biggest mistake was not a mistake at all. It may have been ill-advised, but I did it deliberately: I spent a lot of money on art, editing, and layout. I got what I paid for, and I'm very proud of the final product, but from a commercial point of view it was not sensible (especially for a first-time designer). I just thought: fuck it, I've spent a lot of time writing and developing it, I'm now asking people to give me money for it, it's absolutely my responsibility to make the physical object as wonderful as I possibly can. If anyone's heard of Tony Wilson and Factory Records, that's exactly the ethos I was guided by. Part of being a punk indie publisher is also having the freedom to prioritise art over commerce. Sales have been good, so I'll still make my money back, it will just take me a little bit longer than it would have otherwise.
Who have been your communities of design? Who is right now? How do you work with them?
I've not benefitted from communities but individuals. Mike Holmes was a huge help and influence in the early stages of the design. My own playgroup were very helpful during playtesting and over 3 separate campaigns helped turn the vague first drafts into a solid and playable game. And finally Fred Hicks not only did a great job with the layout, he's also been a tremendous source of advice on the business side of publishing and I continue to badger him with annoying questions 3 months after release.
What are your next steps?
At the moment I'm working on a space opera supplement that I intend to fund through Indiegogo. It's not intended as the first in a long series of genre books, more an example of what people can do to expand the game in any genre if they so choose. I've also got some other ideas percolating in the background, including an article about using Other Worlds to emulate a certain HBO programme and an entirely separate game about zombie survival, but I don't know if they will ever be published or not.
Mark Humphreys
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