Kwaidan---companion fiction for tMW

[timfire]

Hi everyone,

I'm putting together a companion book for The Mountain Witch---"Kwadain: Tales from Ghostly Japan". The will be a collection of traditional Japanese ghost stories, compiled from the books of Lafcadio Hearn. Timing is tight, but I should have the book available at GenCon.

I know others have had the idea of releasing fiction as a supplement for a game. Well, that's what this is. I'm not sure how well it will go over (aka sell), or how useful it will end up being for players. Time will tell, and I'll report back after GenCon and after I get feedback from players.

[timfire]

PS---Hearn's works are public domain. The book will also contain a number of "goblin poems" (poems written about spirits and whatnot, as you might guess).

[Jason Morningstar]

Tim, can you give us some information on format, printing specs, pricing, etc?  Are you using RPI, and if so, what sort of production window did they have for you?  How many copies are you printing?  Are you planning on marketing it with tMW as a "double set" deal?  So many questions.

[timfire]

Formatting will be 8.5 x 5.5, perfect-bound, the same as tMW. Design-wise, the book is going to match tMW. Joshua Newman is going to do the layout, using the same typography and whatnot. Don Flores will also be making the cover. There will be no interior art, other than the hand-done chapter headings and glyths. The book will be about the same length as tMW, possibly a couple pages longer. I'm looking at low to mid teens for a price. This will depend somewhat on printing cost, which I haven't gotten yet.

I'm going to use RPI again, I like their service. I'm trying to remember how long it took me to get tMW... They're pretty quick, I want to say it took me 3 weeks, maybe a couple days more. Right now I'm only going to print 100, maybe 150 copies. I'll see how they sell. Anything I don't sell at GenCon will be sold off IPR. If it takes me a year to sell them all, I probably won't bother with a second printing. But if I sell them in under 6 months, I probably will. I'm really not sure how this will sell, other than to say that supplements don't sell as well as main books.

At this point, I'm not sure if I'll offer a "double set" deal... I'll be thinking about it over the next couple of weeks. Kwaidan will be a print-only offering (no PDF).

[Thunder_God]

Did you consider selling and promoting it to non-roleplayers? Perchance to lure those who are interested to TMW?

In case you won't bother with another print, you could always put it up on a PoD service like Lulu.