Hi Everyone,

Just got done updating the web pages for our Dropship, Retail and Wholesale programs for the Guild of Blades Retail Group. The details on each program can be found on the associated links located on:

http://www.guildofblades.com/pod.php

A generally summary of each plan:

1) Dropship.
Anyone that uses our POD printing services can opt to leave some or all of a print run with us to be warehouses. You pay an extra fee for each item stored (varies by item type). This fee covers final assembly (we'll box and shrink your card games, for instance), warehousing and pick and pack for boxing and mailing shipments. You establish a small shipping fund, then you send us orders to ship products to wherever you wish them shipped (and we can print and include invoices where desired as well). Your shipping fees are deducted from your shipping fund and your on hand quantity updated. You'll have an online account where you can login to check your Dropship stock levels and current shipping fund balance.

2) Retail Program.
We're going to offer to represent the products we POD print through our existing retail venues. For the moment that will include our e-commerce sites and our Retailer Dropship program. A bit later this year, that will also include our B&M retail store, with hopefully additional stores to sell through in the future. We'll print extra units of your game at our own cost to merchandise our sales venues. When your product sells, you get a cut of MSRP. If you are a POD client of ours, you would get 35% of MSRP for said sales. If you are not a POD client, you would get 30%. If you enroll in our Retail Program you will be given an online account where you can check your sales, account balance, and be given an accounting of which sales venues your sales happen through. We will also be considered enrollment of non POD printed merchandise that people wish to submit to us on a case by case basis.

3) Wholesale Program.
The Guild of Blades Retail Group will be venturing into the game distribution business. In essence, the Guild of Blades Publishing Group already does this with direct sales to retailers. We'll take your POD product that we print for you and add it to our wholesale catalog. Your product will be printed on-demand to fill orders for your product to our retail accounts. The great thing about this is, the savings involved with this program will allow us to offer your POD printed merchandise to retailers at traditional discount levels that retailers are accustom to receiving. Like with our Retail Program, you will have an online account where you can login to check sales activity and accounting of "where" your product was sold to. For each wholesale sale of your product, we pay you 20% of MSRP. The cost savings on this program should allow POD printed products that due to POD cost structures are often not fiscally viable to sell at wholesale discounts or are sold to retailers at less than traditional discounts, making it much more difficult to earn shelf space in B&M stores.

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Where GOB Retail stands at the moment.

We've got all of our new machines on order. When they all arrive, we're going to take a couple days to test them to make sure they are up to the quality we expect and good to go for production. All in all, estimated time to start our POD service is now about 2 weeks.

We continue to plug away at getting the Retail Group's web pages more complete and we are fervently working on developing the IT backbone for the Retail Group's business. When we are done, we expect our Dropship, Retail and Wholesale clients to have access to live data, as should our retail clients and the manufacturers we represent at wholesale. We fully intend to bring a level of data transparency to the fold that is sorely lacking elsewhere. Manufacturers will be able to see live data of warehouse stock levels and retailers will be able to order a product with confidence seeing that it is in stock, or a POD production with a 100% availability guarantee. Manufacturers will get to see WHO their products are sold to so they can more ably judge where to commit their retail support partnership and marketing dollars and where they need to give their products that "extra push".

As these things go, naturally, all of this is going to take some time to develop fully. But the ultimate goal here is more transparency of data for all of our clients. Since the time the Guild entered the hobby game market, we have seen a great many "assumptions" about the nature of the business, many based on little more than industry folk tale, and many a business charted a course with little viable data to base assumptions on. We're still a small player in the grand scheme of things, but the Guild of Blades Retail Group will strive to bring a little clarity to our little corner of the pond.

More updates as things progress.

And a final note: As a company that will soon be filling the shoes of a game manufacturer, POD printer, retailer and distributor, what have we missed? What services haven't we thought of that could be a value add to either or both of independent game manufacturers and retailers? We open to all ideas, even if they seem insane on the surface. You never know what we might be able to make work. We're at the ground breaking stages here, so now is the time to pipe in with your dream wish lists...

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.guildofblades.com/retailgroup.php
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com

Many links on the site seem to be broken. In particular, I'm interested in the "Book Layout Specifications & File Prep" page whose link is broken.

HI Illetizgerg,

Sorry about that. The Guild of Blades Retail Group web pages are still a work in progress. We got the POD Playing Card sections done first because of the pent up demand, then tackled the book section. We left the specifications page blank because we just took delivery of our new Xerox printer last week and we wanted to have time to fully understand what programmable functions it did and didn't have before putting up our layout specifications. We'll be working on getting those web pages up over the weekend.

However, I do know what those specifications are now, so feel free to give me a call and I can walk you through them if you are interested in getting a head start on your layout work.

Next up for the site will be the completion of the user logins and reporting features for our Dropship, Retail and Wholesale programs. Then after that we'll complete our other printing & service pages and will be working on getting the e-commerce store up and running. We're working on making it so it will have live inventory, so that's slowing things down a bit.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.guildofblades.com/retailgroup.php
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com

Hi Ryan. Unfortunately my games are still in the very early processes of creation, however I wanted to ask because my ultimate goal is to publish. I've also begun experimenting with all the programs in Creative Suite 3, and after reading various InDesign tutorials I'm very excited to be able to throw around words like "Bleed" and "Slug".

I am just curious what options are available when it comes to printing on demand. Is it possible to print very few copies just for myself and a couple friends? Do you support all standard sizes? Are there any problems printing graphics that end at the side of the page? Most importantly, if I were to prepare a document for printing, what kinds of electronic files do you accept, and which do you prefer?

I will not be ready to print for quite some time, so I don't need an answer anytime soon, however I am very interested in the entire process. Thank you for your response.

-Gregory Zitelli

Hi Gregory,

>>I am just curious what options are available when it comes to printing on demand. Is it possible to print very few copies just for myself and a couple friends?<<

Our minimum order for regular printing is 10 units. For games we accept into our retail and wholesale programs, we can do near to true POD, but the key there is while we may be producing one of this and one of that, we're still packaging and shipping group orders to the distributor or retailer so it works.

>>Do you support all standard sizes?<<

Yes. Plus we can do mini books. Ultimately we'll print and trim any size that fits on a sheet of paper.

>> Are there any problems printing graphics that end at the side of the page?<<

The book would have to be designed for full bleed trim then. And your edge of page graphics would need an additional bleed trim also. If you wanted a full bleed trim on a standard size book (ala, 8.5" x 11" which works out to be 8.375" x 10.875"), then we would have to print it on 12" x 18" paper rather than 11" x 17" paper so that would drive the per page price upwards.

>>Most importantly, if I were to prepare a document for printing, what kinds of electronic files do you accept, and which do you prefer?<<

We are only going to accept finished PDFs with all embedded fonts. No real reason in todays age why any publisher can't generate such a document. There are many freeware programs that can let them do that. I'm working on generating our file prep instructions page for POD books today and hope to have it online tonight.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.guildofblades.com/retailgroup.php
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com