- Find a writer or write it yourself: If you are not a good writer, then hire one. There are a lot of people out there who want to write. It is better to get some who is passionate about working with you then someone who does it for the money only. At this point, pay only ½ a cent up to 1 cent a word for your writers. You are poor and starting out so that is all you can afford. Just tell people the truth and more often they will be willing to work with you. At this rate you can spend $30 and get 3,000 to 6,000 words (roughly 6 to 12 pages finished). TOTAL SO FAR: $30
- Editors: Forget them!!! You can afford them. Right now you are only just trying to get your name out there. TOTAL SO FAR: $30
- Get some stock art: Forget getting a “real” artist, you don’t have the money in the budget for it. Go to RPGNow and get some of Shaman’s Stock Art. Why should you get Shaman’s Stock Art? First off it is cheap; for $8 you can get several (like 5 to 6) good pieces of art. Second it’s in color. Color artwork helps sell PDF products better. Third, you don’t have to use every piece of stock art in this product so you will save money for your next product. TOTAL SO FAR: $38
- Do cheap layout: Find someone who will do layout work cheap. I personally can layout 10 pages a hour (meaning in is correctly designed and formatted and looks great) but on something for a starting publisher just do simple and clean (look at my True Arcane Story line for what I mean). Find someone to do it for $10. They will do the layout and convert it into a PDF for you. Hey it is not a lot of money, but this should not take longer than an hour to layout and for a guy who knows what he is doing (like me) it is like getting free money. TOTAL: $48
So you have $2 left over and you can go down to Wendy’s (or In-n-Out Burger if you are on the West Coast) and grab something to eat as a symbol of creating your first RPG PDF product. Congrats you are now a PDF publisher. Now you have to get your PDF online to sell. We will talk about that another time. Talk to you later…
Awesome tips
ReplyDeleteWhat layout program do you use?
ReplyDeleteI use InDesign CS.
ReplyDeleteAh the standard for the industry in RPGs too I'd guess
ReplyDeleteGood Post. I will give some more advice based on my Experiance with Rite Publishing.
ReplyDeleteYou write it. $0
You pay the editor a precenttage of sales. $0
You buy stock art $8
You use pdf 995 (free) and Word to make simple clean layout $0
So it costs you $8.00
Get the art first and then write the book, so that the artwork matches your design.
I would price it at $1.99 assuming that One Book Shelf takes 35% of the gross sales because you also sell at Lulu and Your Games Now. You pay the editor 16.25% of gross sales, you get the remaining 48.75% of gross sales. You sell 20 copies and you are making a profit.
I disagree with LPJr about editing, because your need for cusotmers is very small, a single good word means an additional sale a single bad word creates a net loss of three potenital sales, one on this book and two on your next book. If your planning to do this seriously get an editor.
Laters