Printing

05.19.2013

Saturday I got the proof copies of the Zombie Mall rules that I made through CreateSpace. One of the reasons you order proofs is to check the lightness/darkness of images. I had always heard that you want to adjust when making graphics for printing, as looking at things on a (lit) monitor will make images lighter than they will appear in print.

On the back cover of my rule books, I've got a faded/semi-transparent image on the top for decoration/to take up what would otherwise be white space. I set the transparency to 35% when making it.

What I received is pretty close, but when actually printed out on a glossy cover it looks more like the printer was just running out of ink. Now I've gone back and changed the transparency to 75%, which should offest it enough from the pseudo-wrap-around picture that's on the front and back covers.

While I was at it, I noticed I entered the wrong web address on both back covers. My lesson there is to not go surfing to similar web addresses when typing things up!

I haven't committed the changes yet, as I think there are a couple of little things I might tweak. Change a little spacing here and there.

If I read everything right, these should be showing up on Amazon by the end of the week - unless my tweaking with the covers starts the process over.

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Zombie Mall - POD Publishing, Formatting, and lots of Uploading

05.12.2013

It's been about a month since I had a Zombie Mall update. It's been a busy month (beach vacation not withstanding) just chock full of education to the publishing and printing process.

I was last talking about publishing through RPG Drive Thru. I went through their submission pipeline and submitted the files for Zombie Mall. A couple of days later I received the following:

Thanks for uploading a new product at DriveThruRPG.com. I have reviewed 'Zombie Mall,' and I wanted to touch base about a couple of things before we take it live on our site.

-----

Pricing

Currently, you have everything marked as free. Using free products to garner attention or to buoy sales of other products is a legitimate and proven tactic. However, giving everything away for free comes with a set of risks, not to mention it does nothing for your profit margin (and I'm not speaking from base greed here – for me, greater profit means greater ability to offer more & better products down the line).

That said, we are, to be blunt, a business who's entire purpose is to help others to sell game products, not to give them all away for free. :)

Where marginal costs are low (as in PDF production), "free" is a great launching strategy to reach the largest possible audience. However, setting a price point in the beginning is also about perceived value and expectation (and then later about customer acquisition and retention). Studies show that if you give away something for free, particularly for more than a short-term window, and then later start charging for it (or for newer versions of it), you will run the risk of alienating established customers.

Worse yet, you establish a perceived value or "reference price" for the product that is very hard to change thereafter – customers will always expect it (and your other products) to be given away rather than be sold.

There are proven alternative strategies for using "free" to generate revenue, such as making one version available for free, while another version, either with premium features or targeted at a particular audience, has a price tag associated. This premium version can be launched simultaneously or shortly afterward, but shouldn't be left too long, or customer awareness of the product can die off.

Card Products

Are you familiar with our new site, www.DriveThruCards.com? The cards site will be launching officially in about a week's time, although it has actually been active in a sort of public beta for a couple of months now. In any case, DTCards will soon be the home for all card and board game products, and we will be moving them off of RPGNow and DTRPG so that those sites can focus, as they were originally intended, on RPG products.

In any case, 'Zombie Mall' seems like a perfect product for treatment as a print-on-demand card product (rather than a downloadable 'print-and-play'). The essence, though, is that there is no cost to you up front, save the printing cost of ordering one proof copy. Once the title is available for sale, you get your royalty cut just as you would for a wholly digital product.

So, thanks for your submission. You need to charge something for it. Why don't you sell it through our POD site?

Since there was more to the email that said I could email back with any questions, I did so. I explained that I actually had a pricing strategy following how In-App purchases work - give away the base game, charge for add-ons. I've even got the first 3 expansions lined up, yet not complete and ready for publication. I followed this up with some questions about their POD service.

That was over two weeks ago. Have not heard a damn thing back.

Unfettered, I decided to try their POD service. I had made the Zombie Mall Map Tiles compatible with the DriveThruCards 6"x6" card, which I've subsequently seen a few other people use as map tiles. I followed their formatting directions and uploaded my 47 images and was able to order a proof copy (although not available for public sale, I can order a copy to make sure everything's laid out correctly). After shipping the total for the cards was right around $17, which isn't bad considering that a 54 card deck from Hong Kong is $12 + shipping, which usually drives the price over $20 if there are no coupons. A week later I received the cards, and they look pretty darn good. There's something about getting custom printed cards in the mail that I just giggle about - it's so cool!.

Drive Thru Cards/RPG offers a book printing service, and I was also wanting to get a bound & printed version of my rulebooks. I wasn't too sure how lucky I would be in getting something else from them since I still hadn't heard anything back from my first email to them, so I looked into Amazon's POD service CreateSpace. They had most of the same options as everyone else I ended up looking at for POD printing. I decided (eventually) to opt for a 6"x9" format and started to re-format the layouts for the basic rules and walkthru that I had made. With CreateSpace you upload your interior pages, then upload a cover. They have online tools for checking things out before submitting for review by an actual person. Once it goes to a person, you hear something back in 24 hours.

My initial submission was a pain. I had a Word 2010 document that I converted into PDF for uploading. I've got a nice legal version of both Word and the whole Adobe CS suite, so I thought things would go smoothly. But noooooo.

I had lots of graphics in my rules, and CreateSpace was complaining that my images were not the preferred 300DPI they asked for, but 179DPI and these may appear blurry. I was confused as I had made everything 300DPI. This led me on a few days of Googling and forum searching where I learned:

• Don't copy/paste images into Word.
• Don't drag & drop images in Word.
• To insert images, go to Insert > Picture.
• Don't ever, ever resize the picture in Word. In fact, don't do anything but move it around.
• In Word, go to File > Options > Advanced and make sure images aren't compressed.
• (my favorite!) In Word, go to Save As > Tools (next to the "Save" button) > Compress Pictures and make sure pictures aren't compressed.

After all of that I was still getting an error that my images were 179DPI once I uploaded them. I was confused beyond bounds. I eventually remembered that if you rename a .docx file to .zip, you can extract everything and see how the Word file is put together. I did this, and found that the images I inserted were still at 300DPI. Flummoxed!

It was down to a problem with the PDF creation. I went into Adobe and turned off every compression I could find. Still I got 179DPI images in the PDF. I went and used the free PDF print driver I've been using for 5+ years, and suddenly I have 300DPI images. WTF? Adobe CS 6 doesn't make what I want, but a free, 5 year old app does. I wish I had known that 4 days ago.

I submit files to CreateSpace again and hear back the next day: Everything's ok, but we had to re-size your cover because it was too big. Although everything looked ok, I guess I should have left off the bleed area of the image I uploaded. Not a problem, as I can cut off the bleed and try again. While looking at the files they approved, I noticed my bottom margin of my walkthru was too tall, but at least an inch. I went to see if the basic rules had the same problem, and they did! The exact same problem. In fact, I had uploaded the same file as both the basic rules and the walkthru, but still managed to put the right cover on each. Well there's something else for me to fix.

Next came another day of formatting with tweaking margins, footer space, and ample use of page breaks. I got everything (better) laid out and managed to cut a couple of pages off the total count. I resubmitted everything again and passed the automated check with no problem. The next day I got the reply from the person that checks things: the title you entered for your book and the title on the cover do not match.

I shook my head some more, since I didn't change the cover and it was ok yesterday. Technically the title I entered was "Zombie Mall Walkthru", and the cover has "Zombie Mall" in the font I've been using at the top, with "Zombie Mall Sample Walkthru and Tutorial" below. This time I went back to check out the CreateSpace page used when setting up your book. You can have Title, Subtitle, Volume Number. I decided to fill all of this in and resubmit. I'll find out tomorrow if this worked good enough.

After submitting the above, I got to looking at my content in more detail and noticed I wasn't consistent in some things. Sometimes I would list a dice roll result in bold, sometimes I wouldn't. Sometimes I called the dice a d10, sometimes a D10. That bugged me enough that I went through and changed everything to be consistent. Then I made sure things were consistent between the rules and the walkthru.

While I'm waiting to first hear back about the walkthru title so I can re-submit my edited files (you can't change anything once it's been submitted to a person for review), I'm filling in a template for counters to get them semi-professionally produced by Andrew. If I'm going to this much trouble to get everything else printed, I can spend a couple of bucks to get some good chipboard counters.

So what else is left? Yesterday I ordered from Amazon a nice little wooden box that will be the Deluxe Collector's Premium Edition box. I need to tweak my Player Stat Card (maybe make it into a 6"x6" card?) as it's got too much wasted space on it now. At that point, I think I'll be finished.

Oh, and I figured up how much a Deluxe Collector's Premium Edition Game would cost based on just the components to put in the box:

• 162 cards (from Hong Kong still)
• 47 Map Tiles (from Drive Thru Cards)
• Basic Rulebook
• Walkthru Guide
• Enough Tokens for a 4-player game (~700, which is overkill but gets the job done)
• 100 zombie minis
• 6 player minis
• Dice
• The box it all goes in

$140.46 if I've added everything right. Or free if you want to print and cut everything yourself.

Permalink zombie mall

Note to Self

05.11.2013

This is a note to myself, because I'm going to forget what rock molds I'm looking for next time I'm at Hobby Lobby with my 40% off coupon.

Don't get:

• C1230
• C1232
• C1233
• C1243 (have 2 already)

What would I do without a web-browsable phone?

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ATZ:FFO

05.06.2013

I've had the previous version of All Things Zombie for about a year thanks to Vampifan's scenery and battle reports, but bever really looked at it. This is the first review I've seen that does a really good job of explaining how combat works.

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*unch

05.03.2013

This post will be of absolutely no interest to Jerry, as he knows all of this.

Today I had lunch with Jerry & Keith, except we don't call it "lunch". At some point in the past couple of years, we developed a short-hand for asking if anyone was available/wanted to go to lunch. We couldn't say "Anyone want to go to lunch on Thursday at the Wendy's on University? Maybe at 11:30?". We instead say "Thunch HOR 1130".

The first part is combining "Lunch" with the day of the week. So "Monday" + "Lunch" becomes "Munch". "Tuesday" + "Lunch" becomes "Tunch". "Thursday" + "Lunch" is "Thunch". Friday is an odd hold out, as it it "Frunch" instead of "Funch". I have no idea why.

The second part is location. "HOR" became the Wendy's on University thanks to the belligerant drink refill lady offering refills seemingly before we would sit down. Thanks to her, the Wendy's became the "House of Refills" which was shortened to "HOR" when texting. No other eatery has garnered an abbreviation, but we've been eating at the Chic-Fil-A on Airport enough that it deserves a special name. I'm thinking "CFAirport", but it just doesn't feel right.

I like our little lunches. They seem to pop up every 2 weeks or so (although invitations may be more frequent). We somehow manage not to talk about computers & programming the entire time.

It doesn't take much to be the social highlight of my week.

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