[Ustio] Looking for help/suggestions/discussion - moving towards printing

[Scott "DensityMan" Chevalier]

First off, I love the fact that there is a forum for game designers to share their experiences, resources and pitfalls. Hope we can help some as well as absorb the stored knowledge here.

For some background, we've been taking the slow route to printing and have been play-testing locally for years now. At this point our text is about 98%, our system is finished, we're abusing our artist(s) by applying vast pressure for fill-in pieces and we're looking for help through the end-stages of the project: getting to print.  We're a partnership of 3 designers and will be self-editing (got lucky in that one of our partners is an English major).

If nothing else, I'd just like to talk about getting to print and make some connections in the industry, especially with GenCon looming.  We'll be at GenCon again this year and have two great people running games for us while we man the booth and give short system demos.  While our game won't be ready for sale by GenCon, we will have binders of the book and will be using the con as a marketing drive to perhaps increase name recognition.

I'm certain we've made mistakes along the way and aren't finished making them, but we would like to cut down the occurrence of such instances.This post may become a bit overwhelming with requests, but I'm excited and just want to cover a great deal of ground in one place.

So for starter questions:

- Are there resource lists established for printers and layout (asked about layout already in a Publishing forum thread)? We've talked initially with a printer in Canada, a few years back, but at that point we were looking for soft-bound B&W.  Currently we may be looking to print in full-color hard-bound.

- We've skimmed over DeviantArt and several other places for fill-in artists (with little luck as most seem to be using that resource as a showcase for already established artists) are there resources/listings of these talented folk out there somewhere?  We're lucky in that we have a close friend who also happens to be a very talented artist, we're just afraid we're going to kill him with our never-ending requests.

- We also just recently ran across the GPA.  Are many of you members of that organization?  Do you find it helpful?

- Are there any kind of 'industry standard' price-points we should know about?  When we started (prematurely) looking into this topic we were told, for instance, that the book printing should have a price-point of $2 several years ago.

So anyway, hope this didn't become too confusing or unwieldy, just trying to get out many of these questions to start some discussion. Hope to meet many of you at GenCon and get a chance to talk in person as well as here electronically.

Cheers,

Scott