10:49 PM

06.03.2013

I can tell I'm going to be awake for a while. Normally I go to bed around 10:00. Last night I was tired and zonked out probably before 10:00, and then I didn't want to get up when the alarm went off at 6:30, so I snoozed until around 8:00.

This evening I was out in the front yard digging up dead bushes that had the most determined root system I could have imagined. Then I filled the holes with decorative rocks from the back patio (once a nice place, now overgrown with weeds and some type of guard-cactus).

After that, I took a shower and read for a little while. I decided I was done reading when I wasn't really focusing on what I read and thought I would try and go to sleep.

After a half hour, I could tell that's not going to work. So instead of laying there and getting peeved I'm not sleepy, I'm going to do something else and see if I can get sleepy, since I really don't want to stay awake until 3:00 in the morning (which happened the last time I felt like this).

I just have no idea what that something is.

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Nesting

06.01.2013

I'm nesting. I've been nesting for a couple of weeks, but I'm just now admitting it. Granted, I'm not pregnant, but in roughly 2 months I should have gastric sleeve surgery to, god willing, help me get rid of this extra person worth of weight I'm lugging around. Knowing that I'll be home for (more than likely) 2 weeks, I like having everything in it's place more than normal.

Today I broke, or actually am breaking, in the new washer and dryer. After returning from the last beach trip with Gina, the 14 year old washer decided to flip the breaker. I don't know why, but I don't like it when things act broken. I had originally hoped the washer and dryer would last about 10 years, so I've been paranoid the last couple of years just waiting for one of them to break at the most inopportune time. Although the washer may have flipped the breaker due to a power surge that wasn't due to the washer at all, I was now paranoid and on the lookout for replacement(s). Plural, because the dryer is just as old and due to die any minute, too.

I was keeping an eye out for Memorial Day sales and Gina picked out the right washer and dryer for me. I'm used to a washer and dryer with one button each, which of course they don't make any more. Gina told me I didn't want a front load washer because of mold/smell problems if you keep the front door closed. There were certain brands I didn't want because of past experience with Indian customer service phone calls. Once everything was narrowed down, I wanted a pair from Maytag available at Lowes. The Memorial Day sale knocked 10% off, and using a Lowes credit card at the time saved another 5%. Wednesday everything was delivered and hooked up. This morning I went through the instruction manual and found the pages on what settings to use to wash and dry sheets, jeans, and everything else. Right now, the sheets are in the washer for an alleged 65 minutes. I've never used a fancy washer with digital read outs and lots of lights. I wonder if I can get 10 years out of this pair before something goes wonky? Let's hope so!

My main nesting activity has been cleaning up. I suddenly got tired of all the crap that's been sitting on shelves unused for years. If I haven't used something for 3, 5, or maybe even 10 years then why am I holding on to it? Time to purge. I started out in my storage building. 12'x16' that had gotten to the point where I could take a step in, but to move any farther I had to start shuffling stuff around. I began loading up the back of the car and then going to one of Gina's many useful jobs and transferring my crap to their dumpster. Over the course of 2 weeks I did this roughly 5 times. What really helped is that when the Lowe's delivery guys came to install the washer and dryer, I pawned off on them my old couch that's been sitting in the storage building for over a year - I warned them that there was no telling what was living in the couch now. Between the 5 trips to the trash and the couch getting hauled off, I could walk inside the storage building again!

This has also flowed over into getting rid of stuff that's been sitting around in both the house and the garage. The garage is still a work in progress, but I'm hoping that in the next week or so I'll have it cleaned up enough to call it done. At that point I've got some hobby (board game models, mainly) stuff to set up a work area for out there.

Yesterday /this morning I dug out the power washer I bought 2 (maybe 3) years ago and finally got around to cleaning the driveway and sidewalk. It was really just Round 1, because the slope of the driveway is just right so that everything pools near the sidewalk and whatever was power washed up will end up settling at least a little bit. Plus, there's no telling how much I actually missed on the first pass. Once everything dries I'll see how much those missed sections jump out to me.

So, I'm nesting. At least nesting leads to some productive cleaning.

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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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