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.

Insurgent Creative: Gaining Ground

Insurgent Creative

Insurgent CreativeThe 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?

Insurgent Creative: The Makerbot Replicator

For our first Insurgent Creative entry for 2012, here’s some very exciting news coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: Makerbot, a company that creates and sells 3D printers, has released their newest consumer model, The Replicator.

The device prints from digital 3D files via a single or double printhead that lays down extruded plastic (either ABS — the same stuff that Lego is made from — or PLA, which is corn-based and biodegradable). The build area is roughly the size of a loaf of bread, which means you can build fairly large objects, and if you’re using the double printhead, you can do it in two colors.

The price is $1750 for the single-extruder or $2000 for the double, within the realm of possibility for any Insurgent Creative looking to make… well, anything, really: Toys, game pieces, action figures, art… the possibilities are endless. You can read the press release here at the Makerbot website, which also features this video:
 


 
In addition, Makerbot is relaunching the website Thingiverse.com, which (to quote the press release) “allows you to share your designs and download files for thousands of models turning your ideas into real, physical objects. It’s now easier than ever to share your digital designs! […] share designs faster with the ‘I Made One’ button and use the new ‘I Made a Derivative’ button to show off your mashups!”

Exciting times, Creatives. If you can dream it up, you can build it.

Thanks to Allen Varney for bringing this to my attention.