Printing experiences for free RPGs

[malladin_ben]

Hi all,

a while ago I started to throw around some ideas about how to print publish a free rpg. While I considered the idea of selling advertising space to cover printing costs, I found out from others more savvy than myself that such an approach was unworkable.

Therefore I have set out to release my first free RPG with a print run, Midgard, as a for-sale-at-cost product. I thought some others might like to know what experiences I had and others still like to share their own experiences of similar activities.

I chose to use Lulu, not out of any great market research, but because so many other small RPG publishers seem to use it. I also like the fact that I don't have to print it in batches - I could not print any copies if I so desired and it wouldn't have cost me a penny!

The first thing I found i had to consider was the page layout. If any of you have seen earlier drafts of Midgard, you will (hopefully) realise I'm not someone who struggles with graphic design or layouting. When I got on to Lulu I found another issue that might affect the layout of the book: size of publication. I had originally laid Midgard out as a Letter-sized document. However, when I came to printing through Lulu I came to the conclusion that such a size would cause problems. Albeit Letter could let me use cheaper paper for printing on, such paper is not available outside of the US, and Lulu's shipping costs are notoriously steep for shipping overseas (over $100 for a single book - ridiculous!). As such I decided that I needed to use standard paper, and looked into the prices of different sizes of paper. In the end I decided to go for teh comic book size, as this was the largest size (6.5x10.25") that fitted into the "cheap" price category. As a result I had to redo my layout, and also make sure I had accounted for he bleed opn the page. This was within my computer skills, so no big problems there, although it was a fair bit of work to go through and resize everything in my original document.

Next I had to sort myself out with a cover, and this was where Lulu proved tricky. I created a really nice cover for my book and then read through some of the instructions on the site and figured I'd need to use the one-sheet wrap-around cover mode to get the cover that I wanted. Hence I had to completely rework the cover image to add a back cover and spine. It took a while to move all the different image components around and check they were measured out right before I had the cover ready to upload. However, it was (I thought) just a quick case of distilling it to PDF and uploading it, right?... No. No matter how I set the properties on the PDF distiller or I couldn't get lulu to accept that my PDF was the right size!! Annoyed I gave up and had a look at the built in wizard to see if there was something I could do with that. Fortunately I found that I could actually just upload the front and back covers as separate images and remove the text boxes and I'd have a pretty much okay cover. The only issue was with the spine - I couldn't add the picture background or use the fonts I wanted bacause I was stuck with the options available on the wizard, but by this stage I thought it a small price to pay. I've loged a support call with Lulu so hopefully they will be abel to get to the bottom of my PDF woes and hopefully I'll be able to give it the spine I want. There was also an issue on the wizard that the indicatior marks for the page bleed don't seem to match the finished cover as it appears on their site. I'm hoping that the printed copies match the cover I saw on teh wizard and not the one that appears on the site (as it looks a little lob-sided) but I'll have to wait for them to arrive to know for sure.

I now know a bit more about the process and I'm sure I could manage it with a lot less stress next time. Hopefully I'll be able to sort out the one-sheet cover thingy and get that working, but otherwise I'll just have to account for the limitations on the spine with the wizard and use that instead. Overall I'm not put off and will probably do similar for my next free product (although that could well be a savage worlds product and I'm not sure what the licence means for a for-sale-at-cost product).

Cheerio for now,

Ben

[malladin_ben]

[Rob Lang]

[malladin_ben]