Party Fowl On Kickstarter

Party Fowl is Live!

Well, some parties start a little earlier than others. Caleb got more than a little overzealous and launched Party Fowl early, so here we are! The game you've heard so much about is now live!

Check out the game now!

RM Update #10: Like Mad Men, but With Much Cheaper Drinks

A couple of weeks ago, that was me back there,
sending up a flare for proofreaders

Ad copy...

So. Much. Ad copy...

If you aren't aware, ad copy is all the writing for the game that has no demonstrable benefit the quality of the game. In order to sell the product, you have to describe the product. And in order to do that, you have to both include enough information that the customer actually knows what they're getting, while simultaneously condensing ideas down into the shortest of possible statements to compensate for the human attention span.

This means you end up writing the same damned thing, over-and-over, bouncing back and forth across a spectrum of drafts that can range from Russian-novel long to something that is no more than screaming the name of the game (RED MARKETS!...so how many can I put you down for?). And you never know where it needs to be cut or where it needs to be expanded...ugh.

Anyway, that's how I'd describe the last few weeks of writing: ugh. I'm very glad I don't have to do advertising every day for a living. It's awful. Combine the impossible task with my tragically Midwestern allergy to self-promotion and makes for a rough month.

But it's over!

The ad copy is done, or as done as it is going to get. I'd rather give Medusa an eye exam than look at those paragraphs again. The trailer has been scripted and recorded. I've got all the art over to Ross, who is kind enough to be making the trailer. As of now, I'm just waiting on the video and some art assets for the text (stretch goal banners, fancier heading, etc). The press list is assembled, and the whole campaign is built. If I didn't mind going up without some fancy visuals, I could launch the campaign today.

Not that I'm eager to get started or anything...

I'm so far along on my end that, aside from building a Facebook page for the game, all that's really left to do is to wait for the calendar to hit May 23rd. So this week I finally got around doing my complete rewrite of the Negotiation rules. What started out being my most dreaded revision from the beta playtest has quickly turned into welcome relief. I forgot how much more enjoyable it was to make a thing instead of describing how you plan to make that thing.

I'm not fooling myself here. I know keeping the word circulating about the Kickstarter will be no easy task, and I know I'll be trading financial anxiety for fulfillment hell if we're lucky enough to fund. But even acknowledging how long the road ahead is going to be, it's a relief to think about a time in the near future when there is nothing to focus on save getting the book done. No more constantly promoting it. No more waiting long, quiet months for more feedback to roll in. No more seeing how much money I can skim off my paycheck next month to pay for art. I might soon have a bank account dedicated to Red Markets, with the funds ready to hire out whatever work I need. All my time not spent on staying alive or on the day job can be solely dedicated to getting the game done.

God, that sounds nice.

So, to sum up, the last few weeks have been all about promotion, but I've finally hacked away enough at it that I can get back to the real task at hand. The pre-KS hasn't been all bad though. I've done a lot really fun podcast interviews lately: Misdirected Mark, Insert Quest Here, and Legends of Tabletop, to name a few. I look forward to the many more I have scheduled.

But talking on a microphone isn't words on the page, and that's the only metric that ultimately matters. I better get back to it then.

Thanks for following along with the updates. I hope to see you on Kickstarter May 23rd!

RM Update #9: The Return of RPPR, So Many Spreadsheets, and a Kickstarter Date

Not shown: The part where the marker runs past the whiteboard
and the figures slowly morph into the yellow sign.

"Are...are you hunting a serial killer?" asks the student.

"No." I reply, taking a swig from my third energy drink with the desperation of a man lost in the desert. "Mr. Stokes is just planning his Kickstarter. I'm fine." I crush the empty can in my fist. "Everything. Is. Fine."

"OOOooookay," she says. "Want me to get some red yarn from Home Ec. so you can string it across the room until the pattern appears?"

"...Yes. Yes I do."

We're all about the spreadsheets here at Hebanon Games of late. I got the last price quote I needed; now it's time to plan the campaign. You lay out all your quotes, scale them down to minimum viable product, scale them up "beyond your wildest dreams," fill in the gaps between, and then decide where the stretch goals go. At least that's what the first couple of hits on Google told me to do.

Don't look at me like that. I'm a professional.

So while the cogs of game writing have ground to a halt, I've pulled the starting cord on the business engine. It's mathematical smoke, black with overlapping figures and furious cyphering, chokes the atmosphere out of my every waking breath. I can no longer remember what the air tastes like without its stink; I fear I will be poisoned if I leave the cloud's inky embrace.

Caleb: "Sadly, I can't yet afford the rent on a crazy conspiracy bunker.
Assistant! Add it to the list of stretch goals!"
Assistant: ... (assistant still does not exist)
Caleb: "You dissapoint me."

The Kickstarter Cometh

With all this preparation being done, I'm ready to gamble on a Kickstarter announcement: the Red Markets Kickstarter will launch no later the Monday, May 23rd. I'll have been off school a week then, giving me time for last minute troubleshooting. It's theoretically possible we might launch sooner than that: the auspices of Kickstarter statistics suggest that the closer you can get to the beginning of May, the better your chance of success. If we do go a little earlier, it won't be more than a week, and I will be shouting it on every piece of social media I possess.

But going early presumes everyone finishes preparations early, and everything goes perfectly with the timing. This, I doubt.

Any later than the third week in May and we risk closing too soon to GenCon. It's possible to run a successful KS at GenCon, but the probabilities are not on the side of a new IP. So if we delay past that date, we'll have to push the campaign to next school year. But I don't think it will come to that. There's still plenty of wiggle room in the schedule, and I'm about as committed to the May 23rd date as one can be.

RPPR Re-animates

We'll be talking more about the KS planning on RPPR's Game Designer's Workshop. Our most recent episode, dealing with project management for publishers, just dropped yesterday.

If you've been following the site, you may know that RPPR has experienced technical difficulties in the extreme of late. You can listen to an update about the Sisyphean nightmare that is web-hosting here, but suffice it to say the snafu is finally figured out. Now that the site's back up, the RM Kickstarter has it's main promotional platform back and we can move forward. Plus, everyone that's yet to hear the good word can catch up on their APs of The Brutalists campaign.

And So It Begins...

That's where we are at. And now I've got to get back to work. There's no cutting corners or "letting the Market work it out" on this one. The next few weeks will determine whether the last four years of my life were tragedy or comedy, so I'm off to triple check the math and agonize over ad copy. Wish me luck, and thanks for your continued support of Red Markets. Here's hoping to see you on the 23rd!

RM #5

This week's lack of progress is brought to you by Death and Taxes: specifically, because I feel like the former (flu) and had to do the latter.

Taxes are a bit of a nightmare for me. I make wages that could best be described as "rock-bottom middle class." When my freelancing work provides extra income, it typically has to go out the door the instant arrives; as an example of what I'm talking about, go read the entire book I wrote to pay for a single trip to the ER. You can't really setup auto-deduct for 1099-MISC freelancing checks, so you end up having to pay dearly for all that RPG work at the end of the year. This makes taxes really expensive and annoying, as you're scrambling through boxes of receipts so you can deduct your home office and anything else you use to run your "business" of one employee.

Still, I got some writing, podcasting, and art direction done...just not to really warrant an announcement. In the meantime, you should go read Laura B's blog. Laura's the editor of Red Markets ("God knows he needs one" says everyone who read the beta). She's also working on really great projects of her own, novelizing some of RPPR's more popular games. She introduced herself at GenCon by handing me a beautiful self-published edition of Wages of Sin, and now she's into her third draft of a novel based on The Dangers of Fraternization. Go give the lady some traffic. Her work deserves it.

Learning to POD

So blogging, huh? That's a thing I used to do :-)

Anyway, as I hope everyone knows by now, No Security is finally out. Go buy a copy...or fifty.

Since our company's PR philosophy is increasingly turning out to be "run through the minefield first and let everyone else watch," I thought I'd talk for a bit about adapting the No Security PDFs for print. I'm sure we'll eventually do a RPPR Game Designer's Workshop episode over this subject as well, but since our release schedule for that podcast is tied to the production of Red Markets, we are WAY off from talking about that.

Lesson #1: Don't ADAPT things for print when you can MAKE them for print

Not even counting correspondence with Ean via email, I must have spent 60 hours over the past few months over at Ross Payton's house trying to figure out how to make the PDFs into a book. My buddy was kind enough to work for food (mmmm...Freddy's), but without his years of experience in InDesign I'd have been completely screwed. Issues with the borders, the gutters, the bleeds, and the pagination came up in adapting the PDFs -- issues that would have never occurred if we'd designed for print in the first place. Many of the issues Ross hadn't even seen before, so a lot of our process was "What if we click this button this time? ...Nope. That causes the file to explode. Revert to backup and try again."

I don't regret starting with ransomed PDF's. Hell, we never reached the print stretch goal and just decided to do it anyway. But I have learned the hard way that it is infinitely easier to design for print from the start and make an electronic release later rather than the other way around.

Lesson #2: I am NOT a graphic designer

There's a reason graphic designers are paid money for what they do. I thought it was because they could perform the tasks of layout faster and with more style than a layman. I was wrong. They can do that, but they can also do it AT ALL, which is a bigger hurdle than I expected.

InDesign is the most baffling piece of software I've ever had the displeasure to work with (this is coming from a guy with training in AUTOCAD, a professional drafting software for mechanical engineers). No matter how simplistic, common, and necessary a command may be, InDesign seems determined to hide it in the least intuitive submenu-of-a-submenu possible.

I'm sure a lot of the struggle came from my lack of formal training and inexperience. I hope that one day I can get to the level of Ean and Ross: "Oh, you just need to quintingle the whatz-it! Just go to the flibberterfur menu, simultaneously hold down FQ and ^, then say "The swallow is separated from the flock" three times, and it's fixed!" But I'm definitely not there yet, and I shudder to think how much more time it will take to get there.

Which is why, whenever the next KS is ready to launch, I'm factoring a pro graphic designer into the budget. If I don't make enough money, I'll have no choice but to hack through the process myself, but I could write another book in the amount of time it takes me to figure out the simplest task in InDesign. I spent 7 HOURS one day trying to get the border to stop overlapping the page number on a single page. Take that inefficiency and spread it over the course of an entire book; there are few prices that wouldn't be worth avoiding that pain in the ass.

Lesson #3: Hire an editor

I knew this already. Your writing is never as good when it's produced in a vacuum. Certain errors are invisible to the author that made them. But between being an English teacher and the generous reviews performed by friends, I thought I had a pretty good handle on things. I did not.

I'd had enough time between completing the last scenario and putting the book together to see a LOT of errors I'd made in the PDFs (I'm embarrassed and sorry just thinking about it). I still attest that the quality was better than many others in the RPG industry in terms of clean prose, but I was nowhere near the professional quality I'd fooled myself into thinking I'd reached.

Again, I think I'll be trying to get the Red Markets KS to fund hiring a professional copy editor with a good turnover time. If we don't clear that much, I can do it myself and feel more comfortable than if I have to do layout on my own. But I realize now that it's going to seriously slow down production; I need to take more time to agonize over every word next time...especially since I don't plan on "soft releasing" as much as the material online next time around.

Lesson #4: You will not see the problems coming

Here's some pictures of the first proof copies I ordered:

Alright! The B+W and the color versions are looking comparable despite coming from different print houses. Things are looking good so far.

Okay: here's some of those editing issues I missed in the PDF's. The page number isn't bolded where it needs to be, and the spacing is inconsistent with the rest of the book. I can fix that.

Uh...what?

No, seriously. Stop. This isn't funny anymore.

The mysterious let's-just-black-out-entire-pages-of-text problem took the better part of a week to figure out. And in fixing it, I caused a whole slew of issues involving the gutters and borders that took another week to figure out. Keep in mind that this was just an issue with the color version, not the B+W. That version had it's own set of problems.

Writing and art can be hard. Sometimes inspiration doesn't come like it should and slogging your way past it doesn't work like you hope. Day job concerns start intruding and production starts falling behind. But those instances are rarer than this kind of finicky technical crap. It's my feeling that messing around with this annoying nonsense is what makes so many books in the RPG industry late. It certainly held me back more than anything else.

Lesson #5: Using multiple POD services sucks, but it might be worth it

I have two versions of No Security. The color version is through DTRPG and their printer: Lightning Source. The B+W version is through CreateSpace. Color runs for $20 and B+W runs for $15.99. 

Both companies have different requirements for printing. That means I was essentially building two different book files, each meeting different technical specs for the interior and cover image. This was an enormous pain, and a lot of people have been asking me why I did it this way.

Well, my first concern was experimentation. I'd seen good sales with DTRPG but never used their print option before. Meanwhile, CreateSpace blows away their price per book (sometimes by as much as 60% cheaper, depending on the publication's specs). Furthermore, Ross was very familiar with CreateSpace and knew nothing about how Lightning Source operated. Since he was my only real mentor through the process, I had to play to his strengths. I thought by using two houses I could basically shop around and find out which one I wanted to use exclusively for Red Markets. 

But I may end up splitting between two houses again in the future. My CreateSpace version isn't doing very well in sales, and it's association with Amazon means that I lose a bigger cut than I do from DTRPG. However, that Amazon money means international shipping goes down by about $25 for anybody buying the book in Europe. International shipping is the biggest bane facing KS products today, and since CreateSpace's massive infrastructure means they can print across the pond rather than shipping there, I think it's a good way to offer international rewards in a KS when so many other projects are having to charge a $30 "you're foreign" tax or leave out international backers altogether.

If it can get more international backers on board for the KS, I'll probably adapt book files to multiple POD houses in the future. It's a huge pain, but if it clears me enough extra start up cash to hire a full-time layout person, then it's their problem. I can keep productivity up on my end with the writing/promotion side of things, and we'll just end up making more sales in the long run.

So how is it doing?

Not bad. Not great. As of the moment I write this, I've sold 15 copies on DTRPG and 2 on CreateSpace in about a week. That's 17 towards the magic 70 we need to break even on costs. As I said in this post, we need twice that to fund the initial art for the next KS. With the PWYW scenarios still pulling in some money, the 4 copies I sold to a local gamestore, and some convention appearances (hopefully), I'm confident the book will still prove to be worthwhile financially as well as in terms of experience. But I don't think it's going to fund the upfront costs of a Red Markets campaign. It looks like I'm going to need to find a better day job before then.

Hooray... I get to write out my address again because
you disabled copy + paste on your "e-application." Oh joy.

In Conclusion...

So that's the state of Hebanon Games in this post-book-release world. 

In other news, I'm about halfway done with the alpha playtest rules for Red Markets. Once I finish this temp gig I'm currently working until the end of January, I'll be nose to the grindstone until I finish the first campaign book for Arc Dream's Better Angels (it's about half-way done already). Then, assuming status quo is maintained, we should be ass-deep in playtesting and writing Red Markets, recording RPPR Game Designer's Workshop episodes, and designing a KS campaign. Finally, God and finances willing, I'll be headed to GenCon with the RPPR and IGDN crews, building another year's worth of things to do.

Money Talk: A Look Inside a Completed Kickstarter

I've been putting this post off for too long, and considering the confusion I created with my little DTRPG mistake, I suppose I can do so no longer. Here's how the finances of the No Security Kickstarter played out, and how they're informing my decisions in pricing the upcoming print version.

Why Am I Letting People Look Into My Wallet?

Well, the intention of Hebanon Games is to make easily available, professional quality gaming products. Largely, I think we succeed on that front, but the fact of the matter is that with exception of Ross Payton and other friendly mentors like the members of IGDN, I'm working without a safety net here. Tabletop Gaming is such a cottage industry that it's never really evolved beyond the Do-It-Yourself education model. While that makes the industry appealingly "punk rock" and original in some ways, it also means that people make mistakes a lot more often, as evidenced by my previous post. There aren't any traditional classes specific to this medium available, and instructional methods I could adapt into publication know-how (classes in marketing, technical writing, business, etc) are no longer available to me due to finances and time.

I think the quality of No Security is stellar considering the sheer amount of things that can go wrong. But experience remains my primary teacher, and despite commonly held opinions, experience is a TERRIBLE teacher. I know I wouldn't send my kids to a school that hired teachers dedicated to giving the test first, punishing inevitable problems with pain, refusing to use assessment to alter the "lesson" in any way, then giving the same damned test again. That's the educational ethos of a SAW movie, and errors are bound to occur.

So since I can't be perfect yet, at least I can be well-intentioned. The whole point of the RPPR Game Designer's Workshop series is to take the sting off experience's lessons for other noob creators, and I can be doing work on this blog to the same effect. While it might lose me some customers to lay my financial decision-making bare, Hebanon Games is about transparency even when people might disagree.

And if it ends up tanking the line? Well, that's just another lesson learned for the next iteration, right?

"Would you like to learn something?"

The Kickstarter

I'm not going to break out line-by-line receipts here for the sake of brevity (plus, I don't have the gas to make it to my storage unit aka Mom's house). Suffice it say that the KS money is LONG gone. After the 9% cut given to Amazon and Kickstarter, No Security made roughly $6,100. The pool of money generated by our generous backers went to fund the following.

• Art and layout: $3,000 plus and worth every penny. This includes everything in the original PDFs from Ean, Steff, and Chris, in addition to the commissioned sketch rewards.
• Printing the miniatures: $300 or so
• Shipping miniature rewards: $400 plus...I  remember being shocked it was more than making the damned things. Keep in mind this was before the international rate hike of earlier this year. I shudder to think of the cost had we had to wait a little longer to ship.
• Designing and printing postcards: $300
• Moniker domain name: $30 or so for the past two years
• Webhosting: First year was free, second year was roughly $150, and it was a total waste of money. Sorry, but I couldn't predict the fact that Eastern European muslim terrorist groups would love hijacking my site so damn much. THANK GOD we never built an online store. Bullet dodged.
• Increased Bandwidth: $50 during the months we distributed the preview actual plays. The original contract was for the minimum package and it didn't cover the downloads we were getting on the reward audio.
• Skype headset: $25 or so. I had actually never Skyped before the first online game, believe it or not. 
• Taxes: $500 plus. Sadly, the money from the KS jumped me a tax bracket last year since I still had a job at the time. As the lady at H+R Block was older than dirt and thought a "Ransom Kickstarter" meant I was holding a motorcycle engine hostage, I'm still not entirely sure I didn't get screwed on this deal.

So let's call the total $4,755, leaving $1,345 or there about for ole' Caleb. I freely admit to spending that money on luxuries like food and shelter. To put the number in some context, freelancing rates in the RPG industry usually land somewhere between .03 to .06 cents per word. Including the reward scenario Lover in the Ice and the reward short stories "To Bright Boy" and "A Cult of Two," that equals roughly 97,000 words. If we assume the minimum of .03 cents per word, an industry rate for that much writing would run about $2,910. I cleared less than half that, which I don't think is too bad a deal for customers taking a chance on a new creator. Considering that I didn't ask for that money in the first place (it was generously donated above the $1,500 funding goal) and much of it went to funding stretch goals, I have a hard time feeling like a profiteer for using that money to stay alive. 

But if after reading all that you still equate me to some Gordon Gecko-esque shark akin to the creator of The Doom That Came to Atlantic City, allow me one last retort. To distribute $1,500 across the hours it actually takes to write, edit, playtest, and revise 97,000 words is to be paid a pennies per hour. 

In short, my goal of buying the S.S. Hebanon and retiring to the Bahamas is a LONG way off. I assure you we're playing for the love the game over here, and I'd urge anyone thinking about getting into RPG publishing to aspire to nothing greater.

Behold the decadence of a thousandaire

The Pay-What-You-Want Model

The plan was to get on DTRPG and sister sites far sooner than we actually did. A lost email meant that reformatting the logo to fit their requirements took Ean 5 months instead of 5 minutes, but we finally got the page live in July. The goal was to merely increase our exposure; at the time we were planning to get a Hebanon Games page on their network, OneBookShelf Inc. didn't even offer a PWYW model. The scenarios were all placed as free with the exception of Lover in the Ice. It costs $1.99 because A.) it helps maintain some of the exclusivity of the backer reward and B.) the adventure includes some mature content that, while I'm not ashamed of, feels more comfortable behind a paywall and after a disclaimer (there's something to be said about the can o' worms opened up whenever sexuality is brought up in the horror genre and gaming in general, but that learning experience is best left for another post).

A few weeks after the set-up though, DTRPG and its sister sites started testing a Pay What You Want option. Since we had a few more scenarios to release (Revelations and The Wives of March were still in development at the time) and I was already considering how to fund Hebanon Games' next project, I reformatted the $0.00 to PWYW. 

The response was very positive and generous. Things only got better when, the week of GenCon, those beautiful bastards at at DTRPG featured Revelations as their featured free product. Plugging Hebanon during the week everyone has gaming on the brain increased our exposure massively and resulted in a lot of donations. By the time Wives went live, sheer luck had secured us a fanbase much larger than our original 250 backers.

Roughly five months after signing up with DTRPG, the products of Hebanon Games have been downloaded a combined 4001 times. We've made more than $800 from donations. The distribution deal we have with DTRPG dictates that we get 65% of sales after printing costs. Factoring in other processing fees, that leaves us with a little over $500 in profit (note: I don't include an exact amount here because it could potentially be used in a hack of the payment services used to distribute royalties).

If I promise to put the image of a terrorist in every post,
will you please stop hacking my games website,
anonymous jihadists? Please?

The POD Version

As my last post suggests, making a POD version of No Security has not been without challenge. I approached the endeavor for a number of reasons.

1. I was always a little sad that we never hit the print stretch goal. It's a writer's dream to hold his own book in his hands. I want to experience that for purely selfish reasons.
2. I got numerous requests from people asking for a print version. The messages trickled in regularly over the course of the whole year the project was underway.
3. I want Hebanon Games to succeed in the long term, and that means building a stable of varied print publications.
4. The added funds from the PWYW model helped us reach the stretch goal after the fact, so why not?
5. If the book was successful, it could fund the upfront cost of the next Kickstarter, allowing me to pay artists for their skilled and important work rather than dropping some lame line about compensating them in "exposure."
6. I would never make enough money to pay someone to redo all the layout for a print version, but I needed to learn Adobe InDesign anyway and I thought adapting pre-existing PDF's for print would be a good tutorial (note: this was a FANTASTICALLY stupid idea).

So that profit from the PWYW releases? Yeah, that's all gone too. I spent $600 to pay for art from Chris and Ean's cover design; I'll let you ask the artists for their exact rates because it's not my place to quote prices for them. The money from the PWYW customers and some personal donations on my part (read: plasma donations) are making the print version possible.

Plasma donation: like crowdfunding for hemophiliacs

Pricing

Here's where things get risky: I'm telling you the profit margins I'm planning for a product that doesn't yet exist. The print PDFs have yet to be approved for print by their respective publication houses, and the book is not yet for sale. People that disagree with my margins could very well not buy the book as a result. While that disappoints me, it will be a business lesson hard learned from that cruel bastard of a sensai, Experience. At least I will have been honest with the people kind enough to take a passing interest in my work.

Honesty is edible, right?

The plan is to have TWO versions of the book. The DTRPG and sister sites version will be a standard color, softcover priced at $20.00. If it is successful, we'll consider doing a deluxe version that is hardcover with glossy color pages, but the price will likely jump into the $30 range for those interested in the fancy option. We'll cross that bridge when we cliche it.

I also hope to have a CreateSpace version. The CreateSpace version of the book will also be a softcover, but it will have a Black and White interior. This is because CreateSpace has A.) more expensive color printing rates for B.) inferior color fidelity, in my opinion. The B+W version will be priced at $15.99. I include the CreateSpace version for international backers because they've all reported to me that DTRPG products are very hard to get due to shipping costs. CreateSpace has a more international presence, so hopefully this will make the book more available to fans outside the United States.

With both titles, I've set my profit margin to a little under ten dollars per book after taxes, printing costs, and distributor cuts (again, I don't include the exact rates for the security purposes; security questions for e-commerce sites often ask for the exact amount of the last transaction). Copies purchased through Amazon will earn a little less than half that, but my hope is that the increased exposure will even things out.

I've actually given this thought. The margin is informed by the following concerns:

1. It's comparable. For example, The Final Revelation by Pelgrane Press (great book, btw) retails for $22.99. It has more art than my book and is printed on glossy paper, but it's 20 pages shorter and entirely sepia toned. In my estimation, this adds up to a wash in terms of production value and the books are similar in tone and subject matter.
2. The scenarios remain free online. I'm not taking down the PWYW scenarios, so I can't expect the kind of numbers I would get if the adventures were exclusively available in print.
3. At the current margin and using only POD distribution, the book can break even if it sells 70 copies. If it sells another 70 copies, it funds the estimated cost of preliminary art and previews for the next Hebanon Games project, Red Markets. I think 140 copies is a pretty rosy estimate for a book made up of content already available online, but it's not outside the realm of possibility
4. If by some fluke the book is popular enough to sell way more than 140 copies, the excess can be used to fund a traditional print run for "brick and mortar" distribution and purchasing ISBNs. I've had some generous offers already, but the $3000 or more it would take to make the initial run is beyond my means. I'd be lucky to make 1/4 of my profit margin using traditional distribution, but at the current rate it would remain worthwile to pursue if I could fund the initial cost of wholesaling copies to game shops without going into debt. Setting the profit margin lower would mean that brick and mortar copies would make me pennies per book and still require an enormous investment on the front end. The current margin is fair, in my estimation, and it doesn't exclude other options in the future.

Now I just need to figure out how to get the gutter margin
to f***ing 3.75 inches and we'll be good to go.
Just give me a few more months....

Conclusion

So that's the past, present, and future of Hebanon Games' finances. Hopefully, my disclosure hasn't sparked any outrage, and if it has, I apologize and look forward to the trolling in the comments (as if my permission were needed). More importantly, I'd love to hear from any aspiring new publishers that have questions based on this post. If I can't come up with an answer, I'll do my best to find someone that can.

I hope to feel your watchful eyes when the print versions are finally ready and I announce them here. As always, thanks for your interest in Hebanon Games.