Kobold Press CEO and Kobold-in-Chief, Wolfgang Baur, is here to give you some insight on the state of the industry!

In this glorious age of digital publishing, desktop tools, and lightspeed distribution to highly connected, worldwide audience, why do publishing houses even exist anymore? Why don’t authors and game designers simply write their thing, put it on the internet or a site like DriveThruRPG, and call it good? Readers will flock! Words will fly around the globe. Death to the middleman!

Seriously, why are publishing houses even a THING anymore? No one wears monocles or sends telegrams these days (unless they are extremely serious about their steampunk cosplay).

It’s a worthwhile question, so I’ll get into a tiny bit of history and then make the case that these companies are still vital.

A Brief History of Publishing

It’s true that publishing houses are elegant relics of a more civilized time. The first almost-modern one belonged to Johannes Gutenberg, who revolutionized books with the printing press and movable type in Mainz, Germany, around 1440. In literature, there’s pretty much Before Gutenberg and After Gutenberg bodies of work. Thank you Johannes, for changing the world. His publishing house was a literal house where he kept the presses, and it is the grandfather of Kobold Press.

Next came the automatic typesetting machine known as Linotype, the brainchild of another German, Ottmar Mergenthaler, in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1886. Generations later, the digital publishing revolution started in the 1970s with Xerox PARC. Then it really really took off with 1980s desktop layout software like PageMaker. The PDF file arrived in 1993. You can see where this is going . . .

The PDF that underpins so many tabletop RPGs arrived more than 30 years ago. The Web has since conquered paper media as a new hub of literacy and culture. Surely by now, no one needs typesetters, type cases full of ligatures and boilerplate, or printer’s devils.

Publishers once served as the manufacturers and sellers of books. The modern digital book in all its astounding variety is relatively straightforward to print, collate, bind, and ship around the world. Or publish in Kindle format. Or get it done with print-on-demand. What’s left for a separate publisher to do?

What Publishers Still Do

Publishing houses offer two things that are vital for authors and game designers alike. First, they provide specialized skills other than manufacturing. Second, they provide a ready-made audience for creators.

Specialized Skills

Robert Heinlein famously said that “specialization is for insects,” by which he meant that being human involves having a wide range of skills, from war to cookery, from engineering to child rearing, and so on. I’d agree with him that being too focused on one skill to the exclusion of all others is unhealthy.

However, the reality is that bringing a game book to the market requires a vast range of specialized skills. I’m not going into the details, but to get any hardcover from a good idea to the Kobold Press Store requires a designer, cover artist, editor, layout expert, printer, and shipper. And while this isn’t in the production pipeline, at some point getting a book to market requires a sales person, an accountant, and a tax preparer.

I used to do every one of those jobs for Kobold Press, except cover artist. I was wildly unspecialized! Witness me, Robert Heinlein! And let me tell you, doing all those things really, really, really ate into my writing time.

Most self-publishing game designers produce less work for their players, and self-pubbed novelists produce fewer novels, because they’re wearing about five or six hats. They edit their own work, do their best with layout, send out review copies or ask a friend to talk it up, pay for that print run at FedEx Office or they figure out POD or warehousing. It all eats time and requires more effort than any writer knows until they try it. (Ahem. I thought I was founding Kobold Press as a self-publishing venture. For about 1 year.)

All those steps help a creator’s game, their prose, their creative work go out into the world with a chance of being discovered by readers. Which brings us to the audience portion of our program.

A Ready-Made Audience

While the days of ink-stained work and huge reams of paper may be gone for a publishing house, connecting publishers with readers is still a task worth undertaking. I’m happy to say that Kobold Press is here with new writers and old favorites, and will continue to deliver the books and games and PDFs we love to readers who will also love them. We hope to earn your trust by finding and encouraging new writers (with projects like the design challenge I mentioned last month).

And that’s a big part of what we do—what a publisher does these days—finding the right game material and serving it up in the best shape for the right audience. Designers get to spend their time writing, while Kobolds scurry around playing audience matchmaker.

When you think about any publishing house, from Tor Books to Wizards of the Coast to Ravensburger to Kobold Press and Lazy Wolf Studio, you know what sort of book or game they make. They have a catalog of past releases. They curate their next ones carefully. Sometimes they take a chance on some new hot designer or they branch out into a new category (Non-fiction! Periodicals! Virtual tabletop wombats!).

Publishers cherry-pick, shepherd, and streamline the unruly world of possible game books into a few choice holiday titles (such as this one and also this majestic one). If you love a certain flavor, there’s a publisher looking to deliver it.

All for You. Maybe a Little Bit for Us.

I appreciate each reader, player, and customer to the tips of my scaly little snout. The Kobold effort to make something surprising, something new, something lively, is the goal of the house. We’re hunting and trapping feral game designers for our benefit, but also for yours.

Until next time!

Since we’re here, the newest Midgard release is Midgard Lineages & Heritages. It’s a wonderful set that opens up bearfolk, trollkin, and more, perfect for any campaign.
Step right this way!