The only things I have published this year, that I created for myself have been the Cut Up Solo booklets in January and the Dungeon World adventures in March. Both of those are very easy to create.
The Cut Up books are the product of Project Gutenberg texts going in, some increasingly complex macros to process the texts, and a pretty standard template to lay them out. An entire book took about 12hrs, maybe a little less.
The Dungeon World adventures are the product of my own solo playing, written up. My go-to tool for roleplaying is the post-it note. If you look at the layout of one of those DW adventures, you can almost see how what you are looking at is a map plus about 15 post-it notes laid out to look pretty. These are also almost books for no time, as I am putting out stuff I was making anyway. Also with a pretty standardized template.
Beyond those, all my real time investment has been on solo rules made to order. Wicked Ones, ApoCthulhu, DG, and now Dungeon Crawl Classics.
This is really satisfying. There is a lot of worrying you are on your own in this game. When you start out you probably have no one on your mailing lists, no regular site visitors, no social media following. Even now, my ‘reach’ is pretty small, just over 700 twitter followers, 300 on my blog contact list, 230-ish YouTube subscriber, 100 or so on Instagram, and 59 Facebook followers. These are all small numbers.
To get any sort of feedback is welcome, to get someone say “I liked X, could you write Z?” really makes my day. It is reassuring that I am not just talking to myself, even if when I am solo playing, that is often what I am doing!
Print On Demand
My plan for March 2021 – March 2022 was to get as many of my solo booklets into print, using print on demand, as I could. Some cannot be done this way, such as anything in most of the Community Content Programmes. We just don’t have permission to set up print titles.
So far I have done:
- Troika Cards (Troika)
- Players Guide to Solo Roleplaying (Cepheus System/Traveller)
- Alone in the Dark (Blades in the Dark)
- OSR Solo (0D&D/B/X)
- Solo Adventures (Stars Without Number)
I think that is 5 down from about 40 or so.
Of those 5 titles, I have sold 41 copies since the start of March. The SWN and Troika titles are the oldest, so they make up the bulk of those numbers.
It certainly pays for itself, and over time I expect them to make a significant contribution to my business. What those numbers don’t reflect is that I now also have a growing presence on Amazon and Lulu.
I also set out to have print books on my own store. That turned into something much more complicated than I anticipated but I did it. It feels like the hard work is done, the remaining 35 titles are just ‘more of the same’.
The next part will be getting oracle card decks done for all of those titles, and working out how to sell card decks from my site. I know that is not planned until after I have laid out all the books, but I have already done a lot of the research, and I have a ‘Plan A’.
So that is it for this catch up, now I am back to reading Dungeon Crawl Classics.