My Experiences with Infinity Publishing and SBRPG

Well, my roleplaying game, SBRPG, is finally out, after 5 long years of writing, testing, and proofing. I orginally wanted to go with a more upsacale PoD printer, such as Xlibris. Xlibris told me they could do a roleplaying game, but they couldn't accept PDFs, had trouble printing a book size I wanted, and the charge per in-book chart discouraged me from using them. Xlibris does all the layout themselves, you just submit the text, charts, and art, and they do they rest. That's not really what I wanted, so I kept looking.

So I tried Infinity Publishing. For my $500 setup fee, I got my a nice 530 page trade paperback book, full color glossy cover, ISBN, barcode, and (I hope soon for my intl. buyers) listing on Amazon and Barnes&Noble. The best part is, I don't have to keep any inventory at my house & ship myself, they sell my game through their online bookstore.

Infinity accepts PDFs, which was a great in my case, because I have charts galore and full page artwork in SBRPG. They also print 8.5x11" books (and some other novel sizes), up to 530 pages in length. The interiors are black & white (not a problem for me), and the print quality is good. As long as you leave enough margin space on your PDF (give them a call), you're fine.

The only problem their printing process has is with images or maps with a lot of black in them, images like these can leave blank toner streaks on the very next page. We had three images in SBRPG that needed to have their black saturation toned down a bit (sic) on the second print-proof. Once we did that, the streaks were gone, and the book was good to go. Once we made those changes, you can't tell the difference between the paper quality and print between their PoD process, and a premium book printer (it's very nice indeed).

I must admit, the people at Infinity were nice, and I was always able to get answers withing minutes of giving them a call. They will even give you the email/phone number of their pagesetter & layout guy if you need to ask questions about that sort of stuff. All in all, I'm happy I went with them. I also noticed a new d20 setting (A Player�s Guide to Deminar) being published on their site, so that gives them two roleplaying game books on their bookstore's games section.

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Well, I'm happy that our game is out finally, and you can read our FAQs at www.SBRPG.com. SBRPG is a setting-independent game, written for people who like to create their own roleplaying game worlds; and covers every genre from fantasy, to modern, to sci-fi. We have world, character, race, class, and power creation tools - which is cool because you create your own worlds. But anyways, I hope by sharing my publishing experiences it will help someone find a new avenue for publishing their games. It's both stressful and a lot of fun (at the same time), but you won't regret it when you're done.

If you have any questions about SBRPG or my experiences publishing it, feel free to drop me a line.

Darkgar