I'm cautiously lofting this subject because it sounds like the sort of thing RPGPundit might find interesting (and I'm curious about it).

So, obviously, there's DriveThruRPG for rpg materials.

What are the issues surrounding publishing on Amazon?

Generally, with self-publishing, the key difficulties seem to be:
Editing (you need to hire an editor, what's pricing like on this??)
Artwork (there are various packs you can buy of artwork, commission prices seem all over the place... what have people found to be typical?)
Layout (like Editing)

Then once it's ready to GO...

Advertising

(Basically, inviting folks to weigh in with real experiences or issues they know about)

i would have thought that of all industry's this would be the one where its easiest to not pay for advertising pretty much all the rpg forums have an advertising section (you have not been banned at the big purple yet right)

Actually, yes, yes I have.

I was thinking more for regular fiction, but forums do seem the answer for RPGs.

Ah fiction in that case yeah you will probably need to pay for advertising.


You know come to think of it i dont think i have seen a single advertisement for d&d 5e its all being word of mouth (or maybe they just did not bother to advertise in Australia)

I'm going to move this, since it really should be somewhere else.

I'll note that I have never actually PUBLISHED a game in my life. Or anything else for that matter.

well you could say you published this website i suppose

Unfinished, but pertinent, and all the content in the folder here is free for re-use in your own work:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B4qCWY8UnLrcVVVNWG5qUTUySjg&usp=sharing

You need a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, or at a bare minimum a subscription to InDesign. You need a seller's account on OBS. You don't need anything involving Amazon at this stage, because OBS is a couple orders of magnitude more likely to get you sales, since all of its customers are looking for RPGs and very, very few of Amazon's are. Lulu has extortionate printing costs last I looked and shares Amazon's lack of RPG-focused browsers.

Start with a small freebie product that showcases your talents. Build it nice but cheap; stock art and clean layout. Clean layout does not mean "layout ignorant of the most basic typographic principles", which it regrettably is left to mean in some cases. See "The Smoking Pillar of Lan Yu" in the folder above as an example, albeit if you do something like it try to use something other than Avant Garde for the font. The guide in the folder above will tell you how to avoid the very worst mistakes in layout, and that should be enough for a small, basic b/w product.

If your freebie product is 32+ pages, set it up in print. Always issue freebies in print if this is at all practical; this allows fans to give you money while keeping your freebie free. Avoid PWYW unless this is just a one-off for you and you don't expect to have any future monetization chances. At this stage your only concern is building an audience and a clearly-identifiable style. Be the guy for X, whatever X is, and whether or not there are other guys for X. People who like X will then be more likely to become dedicated buyers.

Print costs are $9.99 minimum, $19.99 for 64-page supplements, $29.99 for softcover full games of 120+ pages, and $39.99 for hardcover full games. This assumes b/w work; color can charge more, but not a lot more until you've got a name and a track record. PDF costs are half print, and PDFs are always bundled free into print products. Turn off the watermarking on your PDFs- it's not worth it, and at the beginning obscurity is a much worse threat than piracy. Don't set a PDF price below $4.99; if it's not worth that, make it free. Pricing less than that puts your work in the shovelware ghetto, and you won't like the company there.

After you've put out a freebie product or two, put out a related for-pay product. Expect circa 50 sales over the short term, PDF and print combined. Budget accordingly for its production. Leverage your OBS mailing list, which has been built up by your free product downloads, but don't email more often than once a month. Now rinse and repeat for several years, and if you can maintain quality and output you will be making a non-trivial amount of money.

As for copyediting - I highly recommend getting a good one. Fortunately for me - I use my wife.

Pimpage -
http://lisapoisso.com/copyediting-services/

The copy-editing community is a tight one. There are others, obviously, but they tend to be a rare bunch of OCD grammar Nazi's that can really make the difference between your good writing being "great" or just being "meh". I'm willing to say this is not just imo, but closer to being a fact. I've *never* met a writer that couldn't use a good professional editor.

If you are selling a novel, don't go crazy with expenses.

I put one up on Amazon a few years ago, and I literally got my first royalty check last month. My sales finally crossed the $10 threshold.  

OTOH, I recently put up a quickie OSR adventure I made just to see if I could make one, and already I've made half as much.

Quote from: SineNomine;803693Unfinished, but pertinent, and all the content in the folder here is free for re-use in your own work:

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B4qCWY8UnLrcVVVNWG5qUTUySjg&usp=sharing

Kevin, that's a terrific document, thanks for putting it together!

Quote from: tuypo1;803651well you could say you published this website i suppose

From a legal, liability point of view, I would guess that  nobody "publishes" a web forum, but IANAL.

Most of my buddies publish through CreateSpace, the self-publishing associated directly with Amazon... unless it's an RPG project then like you already said DriveThruRPG.

We did a version of Squawk RPG 1 Ed. through create space, it wasn't much worse than doing a print version through DriveThruRPG.