A couple years back I discovered a thing about myself: I will spend years denying that I want to undertake a creative project I see as difficult, because it feels crazy and irresponsible and impossible to even try, and if there’s one thing I am it’s responsible. Meanwhile I’ll slowly learn about the thing, do stuff that’s kinda adjacent or related to it, and gradually accumulate enough information and skill that eventually it doesn’t feel so impossible. And then abruptly I’ll do it, and it’ll go great. I’m trying to get better at just doing the thing.
I’ve done this with standup comedy, with moving to Los Angeles to pursue writing movies, and most recently with publishing a physical RPG book. Today I’m gonna talk about how I did that last one, because it was surprisingly easy for me: I put out Dice Forager, a 50 page zine (is it still a zine if it’s perfect bound, or does it become a book then? I’m going to use the terms interchangeably) containing four of my games from the past few years along with some new designer commentary.
I’m confident you can do this too. Maybe this is the push you need to go make yours, and then we can trade.
Goals
I have become fanatical about setting my goals for a project early and explicitly. For this project, my goals were:
Learn how to do physical production of a book and whether or not I hate doing it
Learn how to ship books from home and whether or not I hate doing it
Make something fun I could gift my friends
Lose as little money as possible
Note this last goal was very explicitly NOT “make money.” If you want to make money from your books and games, you probably already know more than me about how to do so. At the very least you should listen to Sean McCoy instead of me. I’m here to value getting books into my friends’ hands. I’m here for Aaron King’s worksheet manifest. Maybe the next project will be learning how to make a little money.
Other sets of goals are obviously more than valid, but these were mine going into this.
Picking a Project
I actually started with those goals and not any specific project. I went looking through my games for which might be a good candidate, and none felt right for a whole zine or book that I actually wanted to put in people’s hands.
Instead I decided to try and put Dice Exploder as a podcast into a book: throw a few games in there along with some commentary and essays. That seemed fun, and a great choice to help keep the scale at “this is for my friends and people who already know who I am, it’s not supposed to be a big money maker.” Anything to stay focused on the goals of gifts for friends and learn production.
I did this the layout and writing myself. This isn’t a post about how to do those things, but I would note that (1) per Aaron’s manifesto, who cares if you do them well. Just put some prose in there and go to town. And (2) Explorers Design is a great place to learn about layout in more detail if you’re interested.
Working with a Printer
I’d heard a bunch of people talk about working with online self-publishing printers before, most thoroughly Idle Cartulary’s breakdown of working with Lulu. This seems perfectly reasonable, and probably easier than working with printer that has a human face, but for whatever reason I think this was always one of the things keeping me from actually printing a book. I wanted to work with an actual human printer, but that was scary, so I just didn’t instead.
I found a recommendation for Fireball Printing on the Explorers Design discord. Real people with politics I like, but also an easy price calculator and form to set up a print run. It felt like the best of both worlds: something I could easily plan around at 3am without talking to anyone, but real people I could contact during the actual process of things.
Maybe Mixam and Lulu and 48hr Books all work the same way. I dunno. I was very happy working with Fireball. If you use them, let me know, because I think we both get a promo code if I refer you.
What I did:
Price everything out
Upload my pdf for print
Pay for it (~$400 for a 50 book run)
A person on their end emailed me to say they were sending me a proof
I got the proof, marked it up, made changes to the pdf, and reuploaded it. This step felt crucial. Definitely get a proof - I had some really wacky mistakes in mine, like page numbers near the spine instead of edges of the books.
Emailed them “go make me my books”
They did and then shipped them to me
Simple. Now I have 50 copies of my book for $400. Remember my goal about money not being the important thing here - I could lose $400 and it would be fine.
Quick aside: I’m totally satisfied with the quality of book that I got from Fireball, but I suspect not everyone would be. The perfect bound books feel a little cheap to me? I dunno, I’m happy, and I think if I’d cut 4 pages and done a staple-bound thing, I’d be over the moon. I don’t have the vocabulary to talk about this in more specific terms.
MEANWHILE...
Preorders
One of the more daunting aspects of game production in our little indie rpg scene is running a crowdfunding campaign. Marketing is hard and it makes me feel bad. People who are good at it are genius aliens to me. I’ve decided that instead of marketing, I’ll simply make a very high quality podcast and hope I get popular from it. This is going okay.
But on this project, I still didn’t care about money, which meant I didn’t care about marketing, so I decided to just run preorders and tell my friends and discord server about them. This was mostly about knowing how many I should order; I figured I’d order about double whatever I got so I’d have some to give away in the future.
Ken Lowrey recommended Big Cartel to me as a storefront, which is free, so I went with that. Setting up a shop was trivial. I put a link to it in the toolbar at the top of this here Dice Exploder Dot Com website, but I doubt I got any orders from that, and it would’ve worked fine to just have the Big Cartel url link.
I priced the book at $18 (plus $10 shipping - see the next section). I think I got to 18 by saying “unit price on the books is going to be ~$8, so add 10 to that.”
I got 22 USA preorders through Big Cartel (plus a few international - see the next section), and I ordered 50 zines. It was either that or 125 zines. I suspect 50 will have been not quite enough but 125 would’ve been too many, so I decided to err on the side of cheap. Goal: lose as little money as possible.
Even if you don’t have podcast and a discord, I suspect you won’t get too many fewer preorders than me. Most came from very close friends and family.
Shipping and Handling
After working with a printer, shipping out of my home has been the most daunting thing about book production. It’s been easy for me, though by all accounts it is just as if not easier to work with a distributor like IPR.
Anyway, here’s what I did:
Limited delivery to US only on my Big Cartel site. This cut off a lot of folks, which is sad, but I didn’t want to deal with strangers if there were problems with international shipping. Instead, I told my actual friends who live outside the US they could DM me to figure out how to pay for one and ship it to them, and that all went fine.
Set the Big Cartel shipping price at $10 because I’ve been hearing horror stories about shipping for years, and 10 was the highest number I could name that didn’t feel completely unreasonable.
Buy some bubble mailers that my book would fit in. I bought from Bubblefast.
Go to https://www.pirateship.com/ and follow all their instructions for buying and printing shipping labels. I have never found a site with an easier UI experience for a relatively complex task. These mateys are doing the lord’s work.
Use a kitchen baking scale to weigh my package as needed for Pirate Ship.
Download my list of Big Cartel preorders as a csv file, then upload it to Pirate Ship. Buy and print a bunch of labels. Attach some of them to packages. Forget to buy tape, go to CVS, buy some tape, come home and finish attaching them to packages.
Take one to the post office and drop it off with a human guy to be like “hey I bought this postage online, do I need to drop this off with you or can I just put it in the slot over there?” He told me I could bring in the rest of mine and just put them in the slot.
Bring in the rest of my 25 packages and put them in the packages slot inside the post office.
Come home and bask Scrooge McDuck style in my remaining 25 zines.
Ship out future orders one by one as they come in using the same process.
Turns out while I charged $10 for shipping, it’s more like $5 within the US as of this writing. I guess the book actually cost $23, which is fine, or maybe it’s better to say that the US folks subsidized the few people outside the US that I mailed copies to. But if you’re in the US and bought one and want $5 back, DM me.
Another offer I made was that I would trade this zine for any other zine sight unseen. No one has yet taken me up on this, but my friend Victor did take me up on it sight seen - I got my hand-printed and bound copy of The Lonely Oak this way. God I love that module.
How’d the goals go?
Learn how to do physical production of a book and whether or not I hate doing it
I totally did this, and it was so manageable at the scale I’m working at. I feel very confident about my ability to do this in the future, even at a larger scale.
Learn how to ship books from home and whether or not I hate doing it
I totally did this, and it was so manageable at the scale I’m working at. I feel very confident about my ability to do this in the future, though once we’re talking more than 100 books or so, I’m inclined to experiment with bringing a distributor into the process. 100 is probably still doable. 200 and this would become my job, whether I liked it or not.
Make something fun I could gift my friends
Complete success. I hope they like it.
Lose as little money as possible
Selling half my books brought me slightly above break even. Cool! And I still have books left! Very cool. This makes me optimistic about doing more of this in the future.
Goals for Next Time
Next time I want to learn what it’s like to work with a distributor. That also probably means trying to get up to a scale where a distributor feels necessary, and that probably means dipping my toe into marketing more.
Luckily, I’ve experimented with the crowdfunding thing in a process very similar to this one for funding the podcast. For those, I intentionally offered no physical rewards so I could focus on the mechanics of crowdfunding. I guess the next project is probably trying to marry what I’ve learned there with this physical production process.
...ideally while still making art to share with my friends and not losing money!
TL;DR
How do you print a book?
Well, if your goals are to share some art with your friends and not lose money, this might be a blueprint for you:
Set your goals
Write and lay out your book
Pick a printer that you feel comfortable with. If you pick Fireball, let me know, because we both get a promo if I refer you.
Set up a website for preorders. I recommend Big Cartel.
Tell your friends / audience / whoever about the preorders. Wait a month and see how many you get.
Put in an order to your printer for however many books you want. Maybe 2-3x your preorders, I dunno.
Get a proof from your printer. Mark it up, make changes, send a new file back to them. Possibly repeat this step.
Wait for your books to show up.
Print up and pay for shipping labels for all your books. Put your books in bubble mailers and tape the labels to them.
Take everything to the post office and ship it.
It’s not a small number of steps, but each one was remarkably easy.
You can order Dice Forager here.
Thanks To:
A bunch of people offered me advice and suggestions throughout this process. They include but are not limited to:
Michael Elliott, who figured out that designing games with a form factor you can fit into a standard envelope is a hugely winning strategy for making a living out of punk games.
Kali and Dan of Gem Room Games for sharing their process around Dukk Borg.
Mikey Hamm for sharing tons of things not to do and also creating one of the best products of the year in Two Hand Path with a similar model to what I had going on here.
Ken Lowery for being so sensible, having great recommendations, and smartly taking this whole process one step at a time. Learn one more thing every project.
Aaron King for their incredible essay I linked above, cheerleading the deprioritization of money in favor of sharing art with your friends, and for sharing their process for doing a similar thing with preorders.