12 Reasons TTRPG Publishing Has Never Been Better
12 Reasons TTRPG Publishing Has Never Been Better
Now is the time to publish
BY JAMES KERR OF RADIO JAMES GAMES
In the course of this blog we’ve talked about how small new ttrpg publishers burn out because they’re doing too much and don’t have the experience to prepare them for the work from a publishing or business perspective, but that’s still a fairly reductive view of the whole thing and it belies, to a certain extent, all the benefits of today’s publishing circumstance.
We’ve gone over the normal state of the industry, and the need to be kind to yourself if you’re going to publish, but even given everything I’ve said above, here’s another dramatic statement for you...
It has never been a better time to start a ttrpg publishing house.
Full stop. It has never been easier to be a one-person publisher, or a small house. Things have never, in the entire history of print media, been better and more potentially rewarding than they are now.
Here are twelve reasons that it’s never been a better time to be an indie ttrpg publisher.
Access to Industry Information: When I started in publishing you had to have someone teach you. Now you can go on YouTube and sink into a course on layout best practices while munching on your bowl of corn flakes. The information is out there. The genie left the bottle and hardly anyone noticed.
The Computer Age: Publishing programs like Affinity and InDesign save you a lot of time. Compared with Quark or laying out on wax it’s like having a whole other staff member or several. You just need to take the time to learn it, and, again—the resources are out there. This industry rewards endurance.
Remote Offices: Most print media publishers in North America gave up on central offices even before the pandemic, so dealing with people over Zoom and Teams in different time zones and chasing down freelancers over email was already what was considered normal. Working from your bedroom in your underwear has been more legitimised in the publishing industry.
Publishing Legitimacy: The nature of being a small team or solo-publisher, and the growing availability of new print technology, messes up what used to be the line between “self-publisher” and “publishing business”. Don’t put yourself down with a statement like “I’m just self-publishing”. If you have a business number and you’re filing taxes you’re not self-publishing, you’re a goddamn publisher. Be proud of it.
Distributors Want You to Succeed: Distribution points like DriveThruRPG have extensive resources. I’ve heard some people complain about how difficult it is to post something to DriveThruRPG like they have insanely rigorous requirements, but, I’ll tell you they do a lot of hand-holding. Just take it slow, and do it often, and you’ll come to realise what normal is. They want you to be able to do this, and even if their user interface is sometimes pretty bone-headed, they want you to succeed. More traditional distribution outlets like Indie Press Revolution and Studio 2 also want you to succeed. They’ll answer your questions and take you through the process as much as possible because they’re small, and they love small business. The industry is kinder than you might imagine.
The Internet Means Networking: Under the grand auspices of the Internet, people network easier than ever. You can throw out a request for a cartographer on social media and get some worthy applications in your inbox. That’s wonderful. In the before-times, you had to know someone who knew someone, and while that’s still probably the best line to good talent, the fact is you have so many more options today. Community forums rising up around games like what happens on itch.io can create wonderful gaming communities, and if you like a publisher they probably have a Discord where you can talk with them directly. Amazing.
Getting Money is Easy: Specifically, crowdfunding is easy. I know it’s not usually characterised that way. It’s stressful, but it's super easy when you compare it with the alternative—schmoozing some rich person, convincing them to give you seed money, then being vulnerable to them pulling out or beholden to them to turn over all your profits, what little there are to be had. That used to be the only way to start a publication, and crowdfunding—say what you will about its corporatisation as a pre-order structure—is an outrageous luxury compared with the rest of the last 400 years of publishing.
Digital Can Be It: The industry is changing. Coming from traditional publishing I can tell you, print is transitioning into being a luxury product. It’ll be around for more than your life-time, but its role amidst hyper-digitalisation and rising paper, ink, and shipping costs, is changing. If you want to do a primarily digital or digital-only product, there has never been a better time for that. Every year more and more small publishers are only distributing pdfs on itch.io and lulu, and still getting the most out of the ttrpg industry.
Print Options Scale with You: And if print is your bag, the options you have for printing have never been more plentiful. Previously, everything had to be pressed in four-colour plates in an off-set print run, which if you’re not printing quantities of a couple-thousand, is going to be cost prohibitive because your MSRP would be through the roof. (A normal minimal print run is 1,000. That’s twice as many books as most indie ttrpgs will sell in their lifetimes.) But today, we have Digital Print runs, which are kind of a happy medium between plates and your home printer, and we have Print on Demand (POD) services which—frankly, are terrible quality, but, you have the advantage of not having to care about fulfilment, shipping, and returns, which is amazing, especially if you’re just starting out. People complain about how much of a cut POD takes out of your margins, but compared sourcing a distributor, shipping, tracking things, and returns...it’s a deal. The real hit you take is in colour quality, but, if you’re doing a black-and-white interior you’ll probably never notice a quality difference with POD.
Even-ish Playing Field: The Internet is a playground. Big companies, long-established businesses, are struggling to be seen. So, even while the ttrpg marketing bastion of Twitter has dissolved into a puddle of goo, you’re actually on just as good of a playing field as the big guys. Obviously, they can afford to throw more money at the problem than you, but the gap between rich ttrpg publishing houses and poor ttrpg publishing houses has never been narrower. (That may change with the rise of importance of VTTs, but for now, I think I can make that case.)
Ampersand Game is Too Big: Sometimes it’s easy to bemoan that a single ttrpg game takes up so much of the hobby, but, in many ways that also presents great opportunities for small publishers. Dungeons & Dragons can’t be everything to all people in the hobby—despite how it markets itself. It leaves a huge artistic gap in players’ appetites, and you can fill that with your work. If WotC was more comprehensive in their coverage of the industry it would be harder to break in with your creative idea. As it is, in my perspective, the ttrpg industry is open and waiting for your great idea.
Artistic Freedom Has Never Been Greater: Running your ttrpg publishing house as a no-profit or slight-loss hobby is easier these days than it ever has been. If that’s what you want to do, you don’t have to listen to anybody. Who cares if you only publish a game every three or four years? Who cares if it’s a game that only a handful of hyper-fixated nerds are going to love? If you want to make a game about race car drivers in love, competing for speed on the track and for each other’s affections off the track—you shine on you crazy diamond! You did something great for you, and shared it with like-minded folks. That’s possible now.
If you’re noticing a theme here, it’s that everything is cheaper and easier to do than it was before. That’s what today is like. Keep on fighting.
I’ll take this time to mention that if you want to be more aware of the indie ttrpg industry from the inside I encourage you to consort with your fellow publishers as part of the Indie Game Developer Network (IGDN) by becoming a member. We support each other, we educate each other, and gosh it’s nice to complain sometimes to people who struggle in the same way to achieve the same dreams.
This IGDN blog article is brought to you by James Kerr of Radio James Games. If you want to get in touch with the contributor he can be reached at info@radiojamesgames.com or visit their website at www.radiojamesgames.com.