Kobold Press CEO and Kobold-in-Chief, Wolfgang Baur, is here to give you some insight on the state of the industry!
One of the questions I hear from time to time is “Where should I print my tabletop RPG book?” This is a stumper, because my first reaction is, “it really depends,” and that’s not the answer anyone wants or needs. A more complete and perhaps-too-literal answer is, “you should print with the shop that gives you the best price for the print run you can sell.”
Why not recommend my own favorite printer? Because there’s no such thing as one-size-fits-all for printers. What’s right for Kobold Press might be very wrong for someone looking at a different kind of project. So I’m going to discuss printing for short-run RPGs this month, and I’ll talk about much larger-size print runs in a future State of Play.
Printer Quotes 101
Let me walk you through the learning curve on printed books, and steer you around the common pitfalls. I’ll scope your print run, and share the names of some printers that might be a good fit for new publishers, for weekend warriors, and for anyone worried about tariffs (see prior State of Play SPECIAL EDITION! Kobolds Hate Tariffs!).
The first question to ask yourself is: Am I printing dozens, hundred, thousands, or tens of thousands of copies of my book?
If you don’t know, here’s a litmus test. If your mailing list, Patreon, or (how quaint) blog has a readership in the dozens or hundreds or even 1,000 regulars, you are probably not in the market for a print run built around massive machines, semi-trucks, and container ships.
What you want is the best thing since Gutenberg and Linotype: you want a digital press. Small, fast, and only somewhat expensive.
Dozens or Hundreds of Copies? Print on Demand.
For a new publisher, the best printer is the one you can afford for a short print run, because you don’t expect to sell more than a few dozen copies, possibly up to the low hundreds for a small-press hit (for example, a small-but-successful Kickstarter).
You will probably sell them all directly to Patreon supporters and fans via direct sales. You don’t need wholesale, coast-to-coast coverage, because you don’t have a national audience like Stephen King or Sarah Maas.
You need someone who works at a smaller scale. That kind of press work requires print on demand (POD), or print to order, or a digital press. They’re all the same thing with different names.
Why is the traditional press no good for small press publishers? It boils down to unit costs. Traditional press burns images of your pages onto engraved plates. And each plate is pretty expensive. If you spend $1,000 on burning plates for a print run of 100 copies, you’re paying $10/book just on the plates—before you even begin to pay for paper, ink, covers, bindery, or labor yet. Not good.
The high cost of engraved plates means it makes no sense to make books that only spread out that cost over a small number of copies.
We’ll talk about that larger size of project another time, but let’s give POD a chance, because it’s the best thing that has happened to the small press in the last 25 years or so.
Digital Presses, Digital Success
Kobold Press ran its first print books via digital press at Lulu, and I still use the POD services of the good people at DriveThruRPG and Mixam, all based in the US.
There are other companies too, like Ingram and Amazon, who offer print on demand at varying levels of quality and price. However, those two require upfront proof that you are an existing publisher (say, with a business license or tax ID). If you don’t have that, they’re not good options. And of course, many local print shops can do decent booklets and zines with the same sort of machines that larger POD shops use.
The technology of POD is digital printing. It is essentially a very sophisticated laser printer for B&W, and a laser printer combined with lamination for color interiors or covers.
The weak point of POD used to be quality and bindery; the printing was blurry or the colors were thin. The binding was essentially a glued-together paperback or a stapled booklet. That’s plenty for a small book used for occasional lookups or a solo playthrough, but not great for a large hardcover book used for constant reference.
Fortunately, the technology has made huge strides in quality of printed pages and covers. You can get near-traditional ink coverage, a better selection of paper stocks, and even colored endpapers at some POD shops. The remaining weakness is that some spines and glues are clearly inferior, and some high-end treatments aren’t available (you won’t see embossing, foil stamps, or ribbon bookmarks at a POD shop). Gamers are hard on their books. Traditional sewn bindings cost more, but they last longer. At the moment, I don’t know of any POD shops that offer them.
It’s fair to say that some POD books fall apart faster than traditional books, despite costing more per unit. That unit cost is the only downside, but the upside is that you will not end up with a garage or warehouse full of unsellable games.
Why? Because with POD, the best strategy is to print to order. The first copy you produce costs the same as the last copy. So why would you ever over-order? If you sell out unexpectedly, digital presses stand ready for your reorder, and their turnaround time is much faster than a press in a whole other country. You can order a “reprint” of 5 copies for a convention booth, or 10 copies for a big convention, or 50 copies to keep you in stock for a year of sales. The minimum order is 1.
Why Digital Rules
The two main things to know about POD as a tool these days are 1) it has extremely low setup costs compared to a traditional press, and 2) the margins are much worse that a bigger print run on traditional press. This may seem like a contradiction, but it’s not.
The low setup costs are easy: print-on-demand shops are used to doing more hand-holding on exactly what files they need and what they can and cannot produce. They know that their customers are not necessarily pre-production print specialists, but rather someone with games to print and a copy of Adobe InDesign or a similar layout suite. They will give you exact templates for the cover and interior pages: follow them. They will make you review soft proofs instead of mailing physical ones: review them. If you take the helping hand that print-on-demand folks offer, you can teach yourself the rudiments of print pre-production and generating printer-ready files. That’s all you need.
Now, I’ll be blunt: If you use POD for any print run over 1,000 copies, you are a fool. I once did exactly that—I asked for a digital quote from a traditional printer, and realized the error when they gave me both the digital quote I asked for and the much better deal from traditional manufacturing that I actually needed.
The exact break point varies by size of book, paper, binding, and your retail price. Some might say 600 copies is the break point where you should move your project to a traditional press. There are too many variables to offer more precise advice here. All I can confidently say is that for a small run, a traditional press will cost you so much that your cover price will need to be eyewatering. That’s why people look at POD as a money-saver, and a way to make short-run gamebooks viable. Sure, you pay more per copy. But you don’t pay for anything you don’t need.
Even More Reasons to Love Digital
Not sold yet? Here’s two more reasons to use print on demand: minimum order quantity (MOQ) and restocks.
MOQ: Most traditional printers have a MOQ of 1,000 or more. If you get talked into printing with them for a book that has a worldwide audience of 200 copies, you then need to find space to store the other 800 copies. Depending on format, that’s about 2 pallets. Don’t do that. Go with print on demand, sell the 200, and move on to your next design, confident that your book has found its people.
Restocks: Once you’ve sold a few dozen or a few hundred books, you might have people asking you for more. Some POD places (such as DriveThruRPG) allow you to keep a title in print with them forever. Your price won’t change if you buy a bunch to keep in your hall closet. So let the printer handle the storage and keep selling them one at a time. It might not be more than a cup of coffee, but sales can add up over time.
At least one Kobold Press title has this treatment: Demon Cults & Secret Societies got a traditional print run for its first edition, but there was low demand for it after that, never enough to make a second large run viable. Happily, it exists to this day as a hardcover available on DriveThru—still in print, entirely thanks to the digital press.
The Power of Staples
I’ll detour briefly into one other option here: the ‘zine scene. Most of these are small, staple-bound, black-and-white items, things like the Warlock zines that editor Scott Gable helmed for about 5 years. Those are collector’s items now (the print run was always low hundreds at best). Zines are really the pure love part of small press, a category where you just want to make the thing without looking into major business deals—passion projects with weird indie vibes. No one makes rent money, but it sure can be fun.
If you want to dip you toe into the waters with this approach, you literally want to print it at your local FedEx Office, Minuteman Press, Joe Bob’s copy shop, or heck, on the giant corporate copy machine at your workplace after midnight. (If they don’t care too much about a ream of laser paper going missing, I won’t tell.)
Zines are small and cool items, and I buy them whenever I see them at cons, because sometimes they’re great. (Yes, sometimes they suck, but hey, it’s like $5).
Don’t get fancy with a zine. Warlock never did go full-color or big-time, and both the art and the writing were labors of love. Now those originals are scarce as hen’s teeth. (Sorry, collectors—it was a thing back in the teens.)
Ok, enough about the tiny press branch of the small press. I love zines. Maybe you will love making them, or use them as a springboard to something bigger, or just collect the really wild ones. Scott did this one about an elder mushroom godling at like CR 20. I need to look that up . . .
Until Next Time
Thanks for your attention to the details of what makes a small press print run possible. Next time, we’ll move up into the big leagues of traditional print runs with thousands and tens of thousands of copies. Bring your suit and tie, folks.