WHY ARE SO FEW GAMES PUBLISHED? It is a truism that every gamer has an unpublished book. Gamers are inveterate tinkers who can't leave well enough alone. Assuming that most of these games are derivative (and thus can't be printed due to copyright infringement) and that more of them are just plain bad, that still leaves a large body of work that is hidden from the world. Why do these gems stay hidden? Simply because of the high cost of printing and most people's general lack of business knowledge. People don't have the money but they also don't want to become full time game sellers. But what if they didn't have to? What if they could publish their work and sell it without mortgaging the house or turning into a used car salesman? It is possible. The rest of this article tells you how. DIFFERENT LEVELS OF PRODUCTION It used to be that there were two ways to go about printing books. The commercial way and the non commercial way. The first involved going to a printer and spending thousands of dollars. The second involved running a photo copier and doing a lot of work collating and stapling. The amateur could not easily break into the market. Now two new methods of production are available. Full service copy shops (ala Kinkos) and Lightning Printing (available via the internet). These bridge the gap between strictly amateur publication and professional work. Both are print on demand methods. This article will look at each production method and explain its advantages and disadvantages. All these methods assume that the writer has access to a computer and word processing and publishing programs. DO IT YOURSELF AMATEUR PRINTING Anyone with access to a photo copier and a saddle stapler or plastic binder machine can print game books. All it takes is time and effort. One literally is one's own press operator. If the copying is free (ie done on the sly at the office) then this method is inexpensive. If you have to pay for copying, it is expensive per book. It is also labor intensive. The advantage of this method is that anyone can do it. It is easy to turn out games for your local group and make materials for convention games that look pretty good. It is also what everyone should do before going into the business so they appreciate why they don't want to use this method. It is a great education. The disadvantages are many. It takes all day to make a hundred books. It takes all your energy and time to do it. If it costs money then you are forced to spend up to a hundred dollars on a print run. And in the end result, the products are not something that can be sold to stores - they are just not professional enough. FULL SERVICE COPY SHOPS Over the last twenty years, full service copy shops (like Kinkos) have started up around the world. These businesses will take your material, do the printing, collate and do the bindery for a cost. It is expensive per unit but it looks a lot better than what one can do with amateur production. Though it is expensive per unit, one does not have to buy in bulk. Getting them made as they sell is perfectly viable. This method has potentially been around for many years but without a way to sell games easily it has not been widely used. Now, with the advent of the internet it will be possible to sell on line. The internet still lacks a site dedicated to the sale of such small games but I think one will come into existence in the next few years. When this happens all those hidden games will finally be able to come out! The advantages are that it is not labor intensive (at least for the game maker) and that it only takes ten bucks to get started. One pays as they play. This also means that one's house is not overrun by boxes of unsold product! The disadvantage is that it still looks a little amateurish. The covers are not generally color and it is not quite up to snuff to sell to stores. Also since the unit cost is high, one can't discount it enough to sell to distributors. So it is great for mail order and to sell over the internet but it is not really commercial. LIGHTNING PRINTING A couple of years ago at a book publishing trade show, a company pulled a machine off a truck as set it up in the hall. It was big, but it literally fit on the back of one truck. At one end was a computer (with standard publishing programs) it was attached to a cover printer, a printing press and a binding machine. A person selected a book from a menu pushed a button and a few minutes later collected the product from the other side of the machine. Still warm from the press, indistinguishable from a regular trade paperback. Professional printing on demand! The book publishers have yet to adjust to this development. So far, what it has done is to become the latest version of vanity press - since anyone can get anything printed. The printers make their money in the set up since no one expects these books to sell. but that will likely change. There are a couple of places on the internet that do this kind of printing. They charge around 500 dollars set up costs and then sell the items on their own web pages and at amazon.com. The cost per book is more than at a full service copy shop but the end product is professional. It can be sold at a discount but unfortunately not a big enough one to use traditional distribution. Only places geared up to selling on demand (without having to warehouse hundreds of books) can make a profit with the discount available. As the internet develops as the place where people come to buy games this problem will not be as important. The advantages of this method are that one gets a professional quality book without spending thousand of dollars. There is no labor expended on the game makers part and the game has a ready market on the internet. It has similar advantages to the full service copy shop method. The disadvantage is that 500 dollar up front cost. This is not a no money down method. Also since it is high cost per unit and thus can't be discounted enough to sell to distributors, it can't be sold to game stores. I may have high hopes for the future of the internet, but game stores are still important. PROFESSIONAL PRINTING Any printer, anywhere can print a book for you and a low cost per unit. They do this by giving a discount for number of copies printed. 1,000 copies is a tiny run and does not bring much discount. 10,000 brings a decent discount but it is only when one gets to 100,000 copies that the real discounts kick in. So say the unit cost was 1 dollar for 1,000 copies. One spends 1,000 dollars before making the first sale. If the cost was 50 cents for 10,000 copies, one spends 5,000 dollars before the first sale. If the cost was 25 cents for 100,000 copies, one spends 25,000 dollars before the first sale. How many people have 5,000 to 25,000 dollars just laying around? Even a tiny run of 1,000 copies makes each unit inexpensive enough that it can be discounted 60% to sell to distributors. The product looks professional (hopefully – if you have learned your craft at lower levels of production) and should fit in stores. If one is lucky, one could even get a hit! But don't count on that. If a store sells one unit of your game a week, that is a great seller, one sale a month is respectable but one in six months could happen. The advantage of professional printing is that it is a tried and true method for making games. As far back as 1860 Milton Bradley sold 45,000 copies of his first board game! Monopoly and Trivial pursuits have certainly made more dollars than any wargame have. But game making is a tricky business since it is really part of the entertainment industry. Its just the poorly paid part! The disadvantages of professional printing are high up front cost. Nothing new there. And that your game might not sell. If that happens then prepare to have your house filled up with boxes for years to come. TESTING AND EVOLUTION Before now, one either printed a professional product (and assumed the risk of it not selling) or did an amateur product for your friends. The step between amateur and pro was too great to be easily jumped. Now one can write a game for amateur press, translate that into a Kinko version (making corrections along the way). Continue to make corrections while selling the Kinkoed product. If it proves itself there, make a lightning press version or even go to a tiny run from a professional printer. These methods allow products to evolve as they are being sold. The lesser printing methods act as a minor league where the best games can be trained and honed for the big league. This is a very exciting development in game making, one that will spark a renaissance in new design. Back to Table of Contents -- Matrix Gamer #7 To Matrix Gamer List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Chris Engle. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com