So, experimenting with microgame publishing, I've put Conquer the Horizon into a tiny (5.5" x 4" profile) format that can probably fit into your back jeans pocket.  The registration of the upper and lower pages is still pissing me off, and will be fixed as soon as I get around to it, but that may be weeks.  So here's the file now:

Download Conquer the Horizon!
(Some assembly required)

The format is specifically not geared for retail sale, but instead as a give-away advertisement deal.  You'll notice my soon-to-be website is plastered on every spread, on the back cover, and in the inside cover.  The last spread is blank -- that will be adspace for other products, mine or other folks'.  I figure I will publish a new version for each con I attend / have a booth at, giving a booth number for where I (and my actual retail products) are at, and advertising whatever I or other folks have for sale at the Con.

I'll be able to turn out a ton of these for cheap, and make a good effort to saturate the con with little CtH books.  Obviously specific Cons may have different regulations on what you can hand out where, but at those who allow it I expect to hand these out at 'choke points' of traffic like doors into the show floor.  I can leave a basket labelled 'free' at booths run by friends and acquaintances.  If I feel like spending money, I can probably get these into the schwag bags handed out to attendees as they enter the Con itself. They can then come to the booth or go home and go to the website -- either way it should increase exposure.

Admittedly, this thread isn't so much about asking for specific feedback as sharing what I'm doing.  If any of y'all have questions, comments, warnings, or whatever, though, feel free to comment!

The question that occurred to me is "Is this game/marketing campaign part of a larger project?"

Putting out any game is a lot of work. If you only want to do one game then that doesn't matter but if you want to do more than one game it is useful to plot a strategy that links the two. three or how ever many games made, together so you don't have to reinvent the wheel each time.

This will involve stopping and reflecting on your long term goal - but I think the time would be well spent.

I've got a lot of games in the can that I plan on rolling out over the next three years that build on one another. By the end of that time I'd like "Engle Matrix Games" and "Hamster Press" to have some brand recognition.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

I've only got one RPG project, Full Light Full Steam, which I'm shooting to release at GenCon SoCal 2006.  I also have a card game, Dynasty, that I may or may not self-publish.  Good cards require a much larger outlay of cash to start up, so I may find it more cost-effective to just sell or license the rights to somebody who already has that infrastructure.  While I've registered kallistipress.com and all that jazz, I have no specific long-term plans; I want to see if FLFS flies or not first.  If I only ever publish the one title and decide it's not worth my time to pursue more titles, I'll still be quite happy with the one.

That said, there's no reason why I can't use CtH to promote FLFS sales, not to mention other Indie RPGs.  I can easily see putting the Forge Booth number on these, for instance -- especially if I'm at the Forge booth, but even if I'm not.  Hell, if this thing works I can put together the file for cons I'm not even going to if somebody else who is going wants to use it to advertise their booth and game.  On a more basic level, CtH can also serve as a sort of proof-of-concept thing to demonstrate that a RPG doesn't need to come in two dozen supplements to be any fun, which may help shift focus from the "Industry" leaders and put the one-book Forge games in a better light.

So this little booklet isn't the centerpiece of my attempt to build a publishing powerhouse, no.  It's more of a test balloon, to see if this could even be used as a building block for something greater.

Good, you have a big picture plan. This perspective will help you gage how much effort to put in it.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

Joshua wrote:
So, experimenting with microgame publishing, I've put Conquer the Horizon into a tiny (5.5" x 4" profile) format that can probably fit into your back jeans pocket. 

Local print shop (not Kinkos) should be able to do it real easy.  There's always a few somewhere around your local soulless business district.  The better ones can do simple bindery as well.

Yeah, that's what I came up with, too. And that means carrying stock. Thanks!

Dude, stock of this stuff is like, a box.  I can fit very literally thousands in one paper box.  No big deal there.  Not to mention, I'll only be making these for Cons and printing a run specifically for the Con, and not bringing them back afterwards.

I've found that printing ten or no more than twenty games this way works. More than that and you end up with extras at the end of the con. I've stored far too many unsold game under the dinning room table over the years.

Print shops can at best do coil or comb binding. This is fine for a game you sell at your table but not much more. And of course no one has to use Kinkos. I live near a college town so there are lots of copy shops I've used over the years.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

MatrixGamer wrote: Print shops can at best do coil or comb binding.

I've never found a local place that will do perfect binding in number of less than ~500.

Lulu, of course, will, but then you have to go with their sizes.

It all has to do with volume.

Oh: tape binding. Lots of places to tape binding. It's kinda like perfect binding, but it's much cheaper. It uses a piece of fabric tape on the spine. It looks nice, but disintegrates really easily. Just a warning from one who knows.

Joshua, what kind of binding are you using?

These little things are just a folio, so they get a pair of staples.

I'll probably do perfect binding on FLFS (and yeah, order a run of 500), although I haven't yet determined format.  I may go with a smaller profile and do something else.  Tangentially, it's so strange to go from my workplace, where we make textbooks like bricks with wire stitching, tough paper, and solid covers, and then go home to my own publishing where durability isn't of such prime concern.

Joshua wrote:
Given, building hardcover books in industrial numbers is beyond the range of everyone but the few book builders on the continent, but I'd hazard that those services aren't really necessary for our purposes 90% of the time.

Sounds fascinating, Chris.  I used to do book repair, so I can imagine what large chunks of your process must look like.

I'm curious what your per-page costs are if you're using a color copier to produce pages.  I'm guessing a press is far more efficient (potentially by an order of magnitude), but requires a larger run to acheive that efficiency.

Guild of Blades clued me in to Digital Duplicators which drop black white print costs to 1/3rd of a cent per side for print runs of 100. Lazer printer costs about 3 cents a side. Color lazer 10 cents a side. I can't say what a color copier will be but possibly less because it might allow for refilling the dry ink by hand (rather than sticking a cartridge in like you do with computer pirnters.

For black white interiors on 28lb paper it is affordable to make books this way. I can't do glossy interiors. That will take more planning. It might only be doable with an offset press - something I'm not ready to get into yet.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engel Matrix Games

Our color copier runs about $.04 a page, but only because we are always bargain hunting for cheaper toner. If bought at regular prices, it would be about $.065 per page.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com

Hmm. We sell games smaller than that at The Forge booth.

At GenCon, IIRC, they were giving away what was essentially small copies of Vampire: the Requiem, that had rules enough to play, sample characters, and a sample scenario to go with. They were crippleware in that they didn't include chargen rules - most importantly the splatty parts. But otherwise it was a full game in color, saddlestitched like you plan, and about the same size.

All of which is to say that I think that if you have a game like VTR to sell and are planning on selling many thousands of copies of a large book and lots of supplement material, that the cost of something like this might be justified. And then again, it might not be either - I don't know how well that game is doing. My point is that I think it's of dubious usefulness as a marketing tool. I'm never going to purchase VTR, and I've read that little book thoroughly. It's even more dubious to me that it makes sense as a marketing tool for an indie game.

Again, why not sell it? Just seems too small? We sell stuff like that all the time.

Mike

I really need to get some hard numbers so I can start throwing them around.

The idea is that these would cost me pennies to make each copy, and that people at GenCon leave the Con, go to their hotel rooms, and then try and figure out what to do next.  If they've got this cute little game already at hand, hey, why not play that?  And if they do that, how likely might they be to visit the booth the next day?  As I've got it now, CtH is all about traffic management at the Con.  Maybe they go home and go to the website, and that's nice, but hits do not equal sales.  So I lay out forty, fifty bucks for a thousand copies, and expect fifty or so visitors to the booth, and a handful of book sales.  But 'a handful of book sales' is enough profit to justify the forty-fifty bucks on the Microgame.  (Even if it doesn't work out, forty-fifty bucks spent to find out that that doesn't work is not a big loss.)

Contrast that with the VtR handout thing that White Wolf produces, which I assure you is more than pennies a copy (glossy color, I'm assuming).  These are designed to go home with you and build brand for White Wolf.  They're designed to make you want to buy in to the Vampire product line that day, the next day, and weeks later, based on the production values of the handout (gee, is it black with red type?) rather than the actual play of the game.  Is anybody going to play the VtR handout in their hotel room that night?  The appeal of encyclopaedic games like that is the immersion and fetishized memorization of the big gothy world; the VtR handout cannot offer that, and I sincerely doubt anybody would play the anemic version.  Which is not to say that the handout won't work for White Wolf; it's just not going to work by being played.  It implies the big gothy world and expects sales on the basis of that appeal.  They'll spend a few hundred dollars on their handouts, get ten or twenty new fans of the line, and expect to see a return on that over the next few years as their new fans buy multiple books in the line (and hope for a pyramid-scheme effect as playgroups buy multiple copies of fatsplats).  Costs justify again.

You touch here on something I'm considering with Shock:: A free little book with a completely built world in it that you can play. Then, at the end, it says, "There are rules for building this stuff. Go buy them!"

I'm not certain this is a good idea, though. First off, promotional materials have to be perfect. That means that they have to leap into the hands of passersby, and that means excellent graphic design, color, and sleek professionalism, all of which cost money and/or time. Ironically, folks will pay a little bit for something that's not professionally made, but they won't even pick up something that's free if it doesn't look good. Something about it not being worth anything to anyone, then. Or, worse, like they'd be doing you a favor by picking up what is obviously a promotional item for your product, and they're leery of what they'll have to trade you when you appear to be asking nothing.

Nonetheless, I'm very, very interested in what you produce and its success. I'd love to see that I'm wrong about this.

Agreed, Josh.  That's why I went with a very basic, streamlined, sort of "Danish Modern" look for the CtH booklet.  Given my manufacturing plans (xerox or laser printing at best) I didn't dare put in photo or art that had difficult greyscales, and kept the cover to simple vector art.

For your Shock: booklet, would you be including characters (and therefore not the matrix)?  Maybe space to scribble down minutae?  Perhaps in your case it would be most useful to make the booklet functional and consumable, so playing it has the players filling it out and using it up?

It's been not only my observation, but that of others, that free handouts of anything do not generate any play. That is, you hand out 1000 of these thingies, and you get 0 return. No matter how cheap they are, it doesn't matter, even when they're the expensive glossy things they don't do any good.

OTOH, if you sell them, then they do some good. Yes, I'm saying that 1000 free copies will generate zero play likely. While if you sell 30 copies at $4 a throw, you make some money, people will play the game, and people do come back for your other products.

Now, I could be wrong. But shoving free stuff into people's hands at GenCon seems pretty useless from everything I've ever seen. Basically makes work for the convention hall workers who have to drag bags of the stuff to the dumpsters each day. Can anyone give me the stats on Kat's "War Stories?" What was that, to photocopied pages stapled to each other?

Mike

You may very well be right, Mike, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was the case.  Assigning a cost-point to a product can increase its perception of value.  If I do this and it falls on its face, I'll be sure to post a follow-up here, and we can "settle" the matter one way or the other.

Yeah, please do, Joshua.

That's probably the best strategy. Seeing as you were intending to sink the costs anyhow (and they're not tremendous).

Mike