Advice and tips for publishing work at Amazon, Drive Thru etc

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Toadmaster

Toadmaster

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I can't find a thread covering this, but I know we have some members with experience in this area. The past couple of years I've developed a lot of interest in writing, some game related some not. Wide variety of subjects from historical, to game rules / supplemental material and even a few short stories.

Trying to figure out how to make the leap to actually putting stuff out there for consumption. Problem I face is I don't even know what all I should be asking.


I use MS Word, should I be considering another program, or is Word sufficient.


Curious about working within an established open source game frame work like Chaosium's Miskatonic Repository vs going on your own when the material is game adjacent but not rule specific.

A lot of the stuff I've been working on is technology related, so would be of interest to Call of Cthulhu players, but could equally apply to any games set within the periods covered (mostly 1850-1950). Obviously having your stuff as part of a games 3rd party space should provide more views, but surely there are trade offs and possibly ways to still have your stuff suggested when people look at the appropriate kinds of games without going this route.



Feel free to use this thread as an open discussion related to the topic, a place to add advice, encouragement, discouragement and experiences you've had or ask questions of your own.
 
Toadmaster said:
I use MS Word, should I be considering another program, or is Word sufficient.
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I have used MS Word up to now and found it adequate. However, I had a lot of experience with it at work, producing illustrated technical reports which are essentially the same in terms of layout and content. It can be a bit temperamental for this purpose.

Once I have my current crop of manuscripts completed I'll be trying out the Affinity suite. That will entail a learning curve, of course. They currently have a deal for their version 2: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/affinity-pricing/ (I have version 1, which is an indicator of the speed at which I work ...).
 
Vile said:
I have used MS Word up to now and found it adequate. However, I had a lot of experience with it at work, producing illustrated technical reports which are essentially the same in terms of layout and content. It can be a bit temperamental for this purpose.

Once I have my current crop of manuscripts completed I'll be trying out the Affinity suite. That will entail a learning curve, of course. They currently have a deal for their version 2: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/affinity-pricing/ (I have version 1, which is an indicator of the speed at which I work ...).
Click to expand...
Version2. was just released so don't be too hard on yourself.

Affinity is a big learning curve for someone used to Word, no? It's much closer to InDesign. I love Affinity Publisher - especially as the new version works on iPad and means I can procrastinate about working anywhere!
 
What is the benefit to Affinity vs MS Office and graphics programs like Corel Draw, Painter, Photoshop etc?

The price is quite reasonable particularly if starting with nothing, but not sure the benefit of the learning curve if you have these other programs.
 
Toadmaster said:
What is the benefit to Affinity vs MS Office and graphics programs like Corel Draw, Painter, Photoshop etc?

The price is quite reasonable particularly if starting with nothing, but not sure the benefit of the learning curve if you have these other programs.
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If you have Word, sure, you don't need Affinity Publisher, but the latter gives you much more precise control over layout and typography.
If you have Draw, you don't need Affinity Designer.
If you have Photoshop, you don't need Affinity Photo.

I couldn't/wouldn't do layout in Word. For my small books I tend to use Pages (an apple thing) because it's conceptually very similar to the DTP program I started with (FrameMaker). Figure out what apps you like best and invest time, not just money.
 
Thankfully I have access to Indesign, so I use that for RPG creation.

Honestly I can't really imagine Word being very useful for doing professional layouts and placements of images. This kind of stuff really does need a higher level of software.
 
Yeti Spaghetti said:
Honestly I can't really imagine Word being very useful for doing professional layouts and placements of images. This kind of stuff really does need a higher level of software.
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It really depends on the complexity you're going for, and how familiar you are with the ins & outs of Word. Simple B&W pages with text and images like below (from my Prentice Rules) are fine in Word once you know a few tricks for image placement. But if you want to fully integrate the art and text, e.g. like some of the "punk" style books of late, you do need the more serious stuff (I'm told). One thing Word has going for it is tables. I've only toyed with InDesign in the past, and Affinity now so far, but tables seem more of a bother to do in those programs. I'll see how I get on when I try to do an actual full book in Affinity.

Both Lulu and DTRPG have templates and instructions on how to use them, so unless you already have a preferred software you can try those out first to see how you get on. In any case, you should read all their tutorials. BTW, you can publish to Amazon via Lulu (it does push the cost up, though, so you need to ramp up the price if you still want to make a profit).

06 Dragons s.jpg
 
I use affinity for my stuff, word is a good program for writing, I used to us adobe products before, and it is still the standard. Word to anything is often an easy pipeline, esp cut and paste. I find all tables have to be built natively. Though as an engineer, most people have commented that my stuff looks like engineering docs, which I am sure it does. I like the way I can switch between the various programs in the suite, and use the design and photo formats in the publisher doc.
 
I'm still in the very early stages of teaching myself to use Affinity. I know that the end result I'm looking for is beyond Word though, so it needs to be done. As far as the IP part goes, there's some comfort to be had working inside an existing IP, it gives you some direction and an estabished set of desired results. What you don't get is the space to do excatly as you like, so it's a trade off.
 
Toadmaster said:
I can't find a thread covering this, but I know we have some members with experience in this area. The past couple of years I've developed a lot of interest in writing, some game related some not. Wide variety of subjects from historical, to game rules / supplemental material and even a few short stories.

Trying to figure out how to make the leap to actually putting stuff out there for consumption. Problem I face is I don't even know what all I should be asking.


I use MS Word, should I be considering another program, or is Word sufficient.
Click to expand...
If you are just writing, word is the best program in my opinion. I am sure people have found alternatives that are workable.

If you want to publish you basically need to get Indesign at this point (I think there are some free alternatives too that can work, but places like Drivethru print through Lightning Source---I believe---and they keep narrowing the requirements of what type of PDFs can be accepted for printing). You want to look at the printing arrangements of the platform you intend to publish on and see what the file requirements are (or you can print things yourself making your own arrangements). But that is only if you have an interest in handling the publishing side as well.
 
dragoner said:
I use affinity for my stuff, word is a good program for writing, I used to us adobe products before, and it is still the standard. Word to anything is often an easy pipeline, esp cut and paste. I find all tables have to be built natively. Though as an engineer, most people have commented that my stuff looks like engineering docs, which I am sure it does. I like the way I can switch between the various programs in the suite, and use the design and photo formats in the publisher doc.
Click to expand...

To transfer anything from word to adobe Indesign, you want to make sure you remove any formatting (which can easily be done by pasting the word doc into a new word doc with no formatting). Tables are definitely harder. I make them in my word docs, but they have to be reconstructed in Indesign (there are ways apparently to format them so they transfer but I've never managed to make that work). One issue with removing formatting though is you lose all your italics, bolds, etc. Indesign has gotten better at handling formatting from word, but it is still messy. I played around with not removing formatting and there were some bizarre errors that were hard to catch (punctuation symbols in the middle of words for example).
 
Is Scribus the open source InDesign type software?
 
Thank you for the comments on Affinity. For all that it includes $90 is a great price when compared to buying Office, Photoshop, Draw etc which is well into several hundred dollars. It is just already having a good selection of office products and graphic design programs, and more importantly have invested significant time into using them I'm a bit leery of adding one more without good cause.

I'm pretty capable with word having used it a lot over the past 20 years (converted from Word Perfect in the late 90s), and have created fillable forms for work, hyperlinked documents, handouts with embedded images, tables etc.

It sounds like the major benefit to Affinity is doing layout and background effects on fancier documents, which are not an insignificant features. I probably can get by with what I've got, but giving it strong consideration.


Fenris-77 said:
I'm still in the very early stages of teaching myself to use Affinity. I know that the end result I'm looking for is beyond Word though, so it needs to be done. As far as the IP part goes, there's some comfort to be had working inside an existing IP, it gives you some direction and an estabished set of desired results. What you don't get is the space to do excatly as you like, so it's a trade off.
Click to expand...

I can certainly see the benefit of working inside an IP for anything the relates to rules. It also grants the use of some trademarks which again is very useful if using a specific game world. I do see that the Miskatonic Repository also offer tools that can be used like artwork and templates.

Most of the things I'm currently looking at are pretty system agnostic. CoC (Gaslight and 1920s) is an obvious target market, but it could be just as useful for any games set in these time periods so I'll have to give some thought to this and learn more about how DTRPG works as far as how to be found, tags etc.

BedrockBrendan said:
If you are just writing, word is the best program in my opinion. I am sure people have found alternatives that are workable.

If you want to publish you basically need to get Indesign at this point (I think there are some free alternatives too that can work, but places like Drivethru print through Lightning Source---I believe---and they keep narrowing the requirements of what type of PDFs can be accepted for printing). You want to look at the printing arrangements of the platform you intend to publish on and see what the file requirements are (or you can print things yourself making your own arrangements). But that is only if you have an interest in handling the publishing side as well.
Click to expand...

I despise subscription services which really turns me off of Adobe and I own a lot of older Adobe products so it is disappointing to see they have gone this route.

I don't currently have the intent of doing POD but it is a nice option to keep open so it certainly helps to ensure I that if I learn something new that it be accepted by the POD printers. I've been down that road of putting in the time to become proficient in a program only to find the program is inadequate for my needs and have to start over.
 
Toadmaster said:
I despise subscription services which really turns me off of Adobe and I own a lot of older Adobe products so it is disappointing to see they have gone this route.

I don't currently have the intent of doing POD but it is a nice option to keep open so it certainly helps to ensure I that if I learn something new that it be accepted by the POD printers. I've been down that road of putting in the time to become proficient in a program only to find the program is inadequate for my needs and have to start over.
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Believe me I share your feelings. I bought Adobe Indesign specifically for publishing so when they switched to a subscription service it was a little infuriating (especially because everything had become a nickel and dime subscription service where you just felt like you were being bled by all these companies). The old version though was like 800 bucks so it was super expensive. The one advantage of the subscription service is it is cheaper but its an annual fee.

If you decide to do offset printing that will really open up more possibilities for you in terms of what the books look like. Just keep in mind you want to research all the costs involved and a keep an eye on cashflow
 
Copying to publisher, I think it is best to paste without formatting and letting the style take over, then one can edit the whole style, linked text boxes and all. It is a drag having to learn over a new suite of software, though the benefit is really when they can all work together. Going to dtrpg they also have templates, for their pod too.

Using IP is not so much that as being part of that community and not having to build a presence otherwise, and then if that is successful, to use it as a springboard to a wider audience.
 
Since we're talking about all things TTRPG publishing, who has experience with setting up an Indesign layout for POD, particularly for Lulu? I was interested in going their route because they offer saddle stitching (DTRPG doesn't), but part of what kept me from them is what seems to be an overly complex set-up process for your file.

I went with a local publisher instead, who basically just made sure that my bleed settings were set the way he wanted them, and then we exported the same layout file I used for my online PDF on DTRPG, only this one as a print-quality "PDF 4" version. But every time I try to look at the Lulu set-up instructions for Indesign, I seriously can't make sense of them.

Partly for that reason, I decided just to print locally and charge for print copies on my own. Sure there's more labor involved, but at least someone is not taking a cut. The drawback is that I need to figure out shipping costs, and non-US buyers are forced to pay a bunch if they want copies.
 
Any advice for somebody starting out feel free to throw it out there. My initial question was on software and continued discussion is very welcome, but I want to make sure people know I don't mean to limit it to software and IP.

I don't know what I don't know, so it is hard to know what questions to ask. I am using the resources at DTRPG and Amazon as well as youtube videos (on writing and publishing in general) but it is always nice where there is some interaction with others than just sitting and watching a video.

Yeti Spaghetti said:
Since we're talking about all things TTRPG publishing, who has experience with setting up an Indesign layout for POD, particularly for Lulu? I was interested in going their route because they offer saddle stitching (DTRPG doesn't), but part of what kept me from them is what seems to be an overly complex set-up process for your file.

I went with a local publisher instead, who basically just made sure that my bleed settings were set the way he wanted them, and then we exported the same layout file I used for my online PDF on DTRPG, only this one as a print-quality "PDF 4" version. But every time I try to look at the Lulu set-up instructions for Indesign, I seriously can't make sense of them.

Partly for that reason, I decided just to print locally and charge for print copies on my own. Sure there's more labor involved, but at least someone is not taking a cut. The drawback is that I need to figure out shipping costs, and non-US buyers are forced to pay a bunch if they want copies.
Click to expand...

Are small scale printers now at a point where you can kind of do your own POD in small batches? I know in years past there was a pretty steep investment because you had to have a fairly large run made to be remotely affordable. If things are at a point where it is cost effective to do runs of 2 dozen or less it makes things a lot easier. I've heard stories of guys with hundreds of books that took decades to sell off. A couple dozen isn't going to put books in stores but there are many other ways to sell direct these days.
 
So let's step away from the DTP thing. In terms of what you want to write, you should write what interests you enough to write it. I personally, have used existing IPs to help get a leg up getting things out there, and writing for an existing audience definitely has its perks. I've written a bunch of stuff for Trophy, some for The Between, and rather a lot of vaguely OSR stuff. I have some of my own projects, but bespoke rules are a harder row to hoe.
 
Toadmaster said:
Are small scale printers now at a point where you can kind of do your own POD in small batches? I know in years past there was a pretty steep investment because you had to have a fairly large run made to be remotely affordable. If things are at a point where it is cost effective to do runs of 2 dozen or less it makes things a lot easier. I've heard stories of guys with hundreds of books that took decades to sell off. A couple dozen isn't going to put books in stores but there are many other ways to sell direct these days.
Click to expand...

I'll be running off 40 copies of my first module for an initial print run, and mostly to fulfill orders for Kickstarter backers It's costing me less than $250. It would be less but I requested coated paper, and my printer had to special order it because he didn't have any in stock.

I normally plan on selling these for $15/copy. I'm paying a little more than $6/copy for the print run.
 
If you want a practical cheat sheet download Sine Nomine's Exeplars and Eidolons. It's an actual game but written to be an example of how to layout a game. It has a pdf layer of comments about how he did it.
 
Yeti Spaghetti said:
I'll be running off 40 copies of my first module for an initial print run, and mostly to fulfill orders for Kickstarter backers It's costing me less than $250. It would be less but I requested coated paper, and my printer had to special order it because he didn't have any in stock.

I normally plan on selling these for $15/copy. I'm paying a little more than $6/copy for the print run.
Click to expand...

That is good to know. When I looked into it 20 years ago, "small" orders were generally in the hundreds of books range which required a far more substantial investment. Anything under 100 seems very workable. With the advances in technology this isn't really surprising, but not something I've thought about in some time.

Really kind of amazing how the tech has evolved just in the 55 years I've been on the planet. When I was a teenager (I'd guess this was about 1983) a friend of the family got into off set printing. The equipment filled a room in his house, but it was the "word processor" that got me, what a fabulous device. At that time all my game dabbling was hand written in note books or typed on a manual typewriter if I got fancy (the younger members may have to google what a typewriter is :wink: ). I dreamed of having access to something like that but didn't have a word processing program and printer until maybe 1995 or 1996.

Not game related but I've long been interested in doing a book on US Forest Service fire apparatus, but the market for that is fairly small. I don't think I would have any trouble off loading 50-100 copies though, so maybe time to revisit that idea.
 
Toadmaster said:
Not game related but I've long been interested in doing a book on US Forest Service fire apparatus, but the market for that is fairly small. I don't think I would have any trouble off loading 50-100 copies though, so maybe time to revisit that idea.
Click to expand...

Or if you're an expert on the subject, publish an article in a journal or magazine. You won't get paid for it, but it will get out there.
 
Toadmaster said:
I can't find a thread covering this, but I know we have some members with experience in this area. The past couple of years I've developed a lot of interest in writing, some game related some not. Wide variety of subjects from historical, to game rules / supplemental material and even a few short stories.

Trying to figure out how to make the leap to actually putting stuff out there for consumption. Problem I face is I don't even know what all I should be asking.

I use MS Word, should I be considering another program, or is Word sufficient.
Click to expand...

I was in a similar position several years ago -- I created my products in Word and exported them as PDFs, which I then shared on my website, but I wanted to take my work to the next level and start publishing and selling it. I wrote a series of blog posts about my experiences here which you may find of interest (they focus on my Savage Worlds setting but the same principle applies to other products).

For publishing on DriveThruRPG, their Publisher Knowledge Base gives advice and templates (and the staff provides support) for InDesign, Affinity Publisher, and Word. However, Word is not a desktop publishing program, and it is not a good choice for layout. DriveThruRPG used to support Scribus as well, but they no longer do -- you can still use Scribus (including for print-on-demand) but you're on your own if you run into problems.
 
Yeti Spaghetti said:
Or if you're an expert on the subject, publish an article in a journal or magazine. You won't get paid for it, but it will get out there.
Click to expand...

I've had a few short articles published for an antique fire apparatus association newsletter (probably 200 members state wide).
 
Up until now, I've used Word. I stupidly deleted Word thinking I still had the keycode, so now I'm using Libre office. I'm only looking at a simple two-column layout. I then convert it to PDF for upload to DriveThru. Word is fine for small projects (20 pages or so) but can become a bit of a ballache for larger projects. I find Drive Thru a bigger ballache than actually writing an adventure or whatever the project happens to be.
 
I went ahead and got the Affinity package, it is less than family pizza night x2 and even with a bit of overlap with existing program it is always easier to use programs that are integrated with each other.

I also look at it as encouragement, now I need to earn at least $99 so it wasn't wasted money. :wink:
 
Per the title of this thread, does anyone have experience selling/distributing print copies via Amazon?

I'm thinking of going this route in the future but I would like to know how cumbersome it is and if it's worth it.
 
Yeti Spaghetti said:
Were you pleased with the process?
Click to expand...
Yes. My observations are that the templates that dtrpg gives are good, and should be used, that I probably don't need premium color. There are a few images that need to be fixed, I am not surprised as the pdf was 189 pages, 267 mb, and 90% of that images, a lot of maps. I have some maps that have a black background for another book, and I am wondering is they will work, it might need gloss or semi-gloss paper. Images should be lightened up as much as possible. I was afraid that the 11pt font with 13 pt spacing would be too small, instead it looks huge, highly legible. Various other small changes I want to make, such as increasing brightness on cover pics, as well as increasing font size a bit. Overall, I like it, see few real mistakes, and hopefully I will get this down and be able to make books more quickly.
 
I just use Affinity for layout work after I'm done with the text. I use markdown for the most part - even in word, as Writage allows me to paste the markdown and get it formatted for word for my use for contract work.
 
I write a lot in word, and then I format in affinity, though I'll do editing in affinity also, so things do get written there.
 
BedrockBrendan said:
To transfer anything from word to adobe Indesign, you want to make sure you remove any formatting (which can easily be done by pasting the word doc into a new word doc with no formatting). Tables are definitely harder. I make them in my word docs, but they have to be reconstructed in Indesign (there are ways apparently to format them so they transfer but I've never managed to make that work). One issue with removing formatting though is you lose all your italics, bolds, etc. Indesign has gotten better at handling formatting from word, but it is still messy. I played around with not removing formatting and there were some bizarre errors that were hard to catch (punctuation symbols in the middle of words for example).
Click to expand...

Brendan, is there a reason you aren't using the Place function to insert your Word document text?

It isn't quite as good as it was way back when in Pagemaker but I find that plus Style Sheets the best way to handle laying out a lot of text with images in multi-page docs in InDesign.

As to the OP, I came up via Pagemaker, Quark and their lovechild InDesign and can never go back. I also hate the subscription model as I qualified for the education license via work back in the day and a InDesign disc could last you years back then.

Recently I tried to use Word to layout a simple report and found it very frustrating and time consuming. So I asked IT for a InDesign license, switched over and the same layout took like 1/4th the time.
 
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Voros said:
Brendan, is there a reason you aren't using the Place function to insert your Word document text?

It isn't quite as good as it was way back when in Pagemaker but I find that plus Style Sheets the best way to handle laying out a lot of text with images in multi-page docs in InDesign.

As to the OP, I came up via Pagemaker, Quark and their lovechild InDesign and can never go back. I also hate the subscription model as I qualified for the education license via work back in the day and a InDesign disc could last you years back then.

Recently I tried to use Word to layout a simple report and found it very frustrating and time consuming. So I asked IT for a InDesign license, switched over and the same layout took like 1/4th the time.
Click to expand...

It has been a long time since I did anything in Indesign, so I probably can't answer that very accurately. I don't layout my PDFs or print books anymore, so I am not sure how my layout guy does it, but I don't recall if I used place or not with the word document. The key thing I did do though was eliminate formatting from word because that tended to trip it up. It got better but we recently had a hiccup in a document because formatting wasn't removed. My memory is I just stripped out the formatting and then copied it into the text boxes. But it is possible I used place and don't remember (I'd have to lay out another file to remember what steps I followed)
 
One tiny thing that has been getting me with Indesign layout from Word lately is that Indesign seems to hate the percentage symbol now ("glyphs") and for every "%" in my stat blocs or elsewhere, I need to convert them all to an "object" (SHIFT-CONTROL O) in order for them to export to a PDF. Otherwise they never show up in the final documents. A little annoying and time consuming, something that Indesign didn't seem to do to me at first, but it has since developed this issue.

But yeah, I'll second the whole "Ask the IT guys for Indesign" route. Saved my life and saved me a TON of money in hiring a layout guy.
 
How do people go about converting to Epub? Affinity produces pdf, but not Epub format. I'm guessing Epub is of limited use for gaming material, but with Kindle now supporting it, it seems to b the preferred format for fiction.

I've found references to using Calibre, but for my first attempt I copied my word doc into Google Docs and saved as an Epub.

Worked ok, the title page with the cover is a little wonky on my Kindle, but looked good on my wife's Iphone with the Kindle app. I'm guessing more due to the size of screen, the Iphone being smaller than a Kindle. Looked really wonky on the computer screen in the Chrome E reader app, but I think that was simply setting up the e reader correctly, not so much an issue with the document.

Calibre looks like it may offer more features, Google Docs being more acceptable for one offs.

This was just a short story I wrote for my wife, but was a good excuse to test out the process and works a lot better for her than cut and paste into an email. Better format and easier for her to find to re-read.
 
Vile Traveller said:
I have used MS Word up to now and found it adequate. However, I had a lot of experience with it at work, producing illustrated technical reports which are essentially the same in terms of layout and content. It can be a bit temperamental for this purpose.

Once I have my current crop of manuscripts completed I'll be trying out the Affinity suite. That will entail a learning curve, of course. They currently have a deal for their version 2: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/affinity-pricing/ (I have version 1, which is an indicator of the speed at which I work ...).
Click to expand...

I've been fiddling around a bit with Affinity, more in Photo than Publisher so far, but really liking Photo. My Photoshop is about 10 years old, and although I'm dealing with a bit of a learning curve Affinity Photo is totally worth it. I'm finding it a lot easier to do more advanced photo manipulation like pulling things out of a photo and placing them into another. Combined with Corel Painter I've been able to do some pretty neat stuff. I expect Affinity Designer can do much the same as Painter, but one thing at a time.

I haven't got into Publisher too much yet, but have been watching videos and I can see the benefits vs using Word for anything but a simple document. Seems to be pretty easy to drag and drop a Word Doc into Publisher.

Anyway wanted to say thanks for recommending it.
 
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