Gareth – Page 109 – The Designer Monologues

February 9, 2012

ePublishing 101, Tales of the Far West & Sundry Updates

Back in 2006, Phil Reed (then the man behind Ronin Arts, and now Chief Operating Officer and Managing Editor of Steve Jackson Games) and I collaborated on a subscription-based series called ePublishing 101, a tutorial on every aspect of doing business as a PDF publisher in the hobby games industry, covering topics from planning and production to release and marketing, and everything in between. The hobby games industry was an early adopter of the digital publishing model, and Phil and I had been among the spearhead of that movement. In 2007, we assembled the various articles into a book, which we published in PDF and via Print-on-Demand on Lulu.

Of course, in the five years since we released the book version, things have changed. Considerably.

Since 2007, digital publishing has gone from a niche-market oddity to a revolution in the traditional publishing industry, up-ending entire business models and creating a viable alternative for independent creators. It has disrupted the entire industry, created new business models, and new success stories… in short, everything that it did in the hobby games industry, writ on a larger scale.

The early adopters have valuable lessons that we learned along the way — solutions to problems which the larger digital publishing world are only just encountering. In addition, the tools and methods available to digital publishers have changed (several times over) in the past five years. So, I’m pleased to announce that this Summer, I’ll be releasing a 2nd edition of ePublishing 101, expanded and revised to focus on more than just the hobby games niche. The still-applicable original materials from Phil and I will be annotated to reflect changes in technology and markets, and joined by tons of new material on every aspect of today’s digital publishing frontier.

Keep an eye out for further announcements.

In other news, TALES OF THE FAR WEST has been out now for about a week and a half. How is it doing? Well, setting aside the 700+ copies that went out to our Kickstarter backers, it’s selling really well for a first release from an independent. As of today, our numbers look like this:

Amazon Kindle: 83 copies
Amazon Print: 28 copies
Barnes & Noble Nook: 12 copies
DriveThruFiction: 71 copies
Far West webstore (digital): 6 copies
Far West webstore (print): 2 copies

And again, that’s not counting the 700+ Kickstarter backers. Not bad for less than 2 weeks. I am especially impressed by the performance of DriveThru (although, given the tie-in to the Adventure Game, I suppose I should’ve expected that). Overall, I’m very pleased.

One last thing: As a brief follow-up to yesterday’s blog post, where I mentioned the continued success of Kickstarter, citing Order of Stick’s half-million: How about a MILLION in a day? That appears to be where Double Fine Adventure is headed. The point-and-click adventure game launched yesterday, made it’s 400K goal in 8 hours, and is currently approaching 900K…. more than on-pace to hit one million dollars in its first day of funding. It still has over a month to go.

Today, Kickstarter congratulated the Elevation Dock as its first one-million-dollar project… and it’s looking like they’ll have TWO such projects before the day is out… and Double Fine will have only taken a day to reach that goal.

Somehow, the word “Amazing” doesn’t seem to do this justice.

So this is future. Pretty cool, all in all.

February 8, 2012

Insurgent Creative: Gaining Ground

The new year chugs along, bringing with it new developments. It seems as thought the Insurgent Creative life — truly making a living without going through the traditional creative-industry gatekeepers — is gaining more and more ground. It hasn’t quite broken mainstream yet — it still features largely as a “well have you EVER” human-interest story when it’s covered in mainstream media — but the anecdotal data continues to mount.

Today’s post in Techdirt has some nice analysis: The Rise of the ‘Professional Amateur’ and the Fall of Gated, Exclusionary ‘Clubs.’ The article quotes extensively from an article at GamesBrief, specifically talking about why it is so hard for creatives working with the traditional gatekeepers to fully embrace the new methods. Well worth a read.

In other news, despite constant hipster-dismissal of the “bubble” bursting, “jumping the shark”, etc., Kickstarter continues to grow and grow. Back in August, I was absolutely thrilled (and more than a little bit stunned) to make nearly 50K on our Far West project, 10 times the figure we had asked for. A lot of people considered this a fairly impressive achievement.

Well, stand back, because Order of the Stick, a gaming-centric webcomic, is currently putting that achievement to absolute shame. They asked for approximately $58K to fund reprints of the collected editions of the strip, and they’ve currently earned over HALF A MILLION DOLLARS… and they still have nearly two weeks remaining!

Holy shit.

Anybody at this point who denies that Kickstarter has completely revolutionized the entire funding-and-consumer-relationship model for creatives is completely and utterly mistaken. Kickstarter has funded so many graphic novel/comics alone that back in July, some pointed out that it qualified as the #3 graphic novel publisher in the US.

I don’t see a bubble popping any time soon — according to the 2011 stats, the number of visitors to the site went from 8.3 million in 2010 to over 30 million in 2011 — but in October, the site reached the milestone of its one millionth backer. So there is a ton of room for expansion of backers, even just from the visitor pool… and that’s not even considering increased visitors in 2012.

As more and more of this kind of data comes in, and more tools are released to enable the Insurgent Creative life, we’re finding ourselves in need for more varied language, because “game-changer” and “revolutionary” are quickly becoming too common. The list of excuses for not making the leap yourself is shrinking, too… so why not try?

January 22, 2012

Five Years

5 years cancer-free. Most recurrence occurs within those 5 years. I know, intellectually, that it’s not a magical switch that gets flipped, but I have to say that it kinda FEELS like it. When you spend that entire time waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop, and it doesn’t, it’s a palpable relief.

For posterity, here’s a link to the post that I wrote on my blog last year, where I gathered and quoted some old locked-journal posts that I had written while I was diagnosed and treated back in 2007. (Rather than just re-quoting them here.)

Had a great get-together last night, good friends, good food, an abundance of drink (seriously — I’m going to be on an alcohol-heavy diet for the next week or so, given the amount of stuff that was brought to the house that we didn’t manage to get to). And then, as a special gift, I found out that Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary, thereby ensuring the accelerated splintering of the Republican party, and most likely a landslide electoral defeat in November.

So, y’know: Good Times.

I’m actually going to do an unheard-of thing: take BOTH days off during a weekend. I think I’ve earned it.