WHAT HAPPENED
Wow. This was a beating. I just spent all day trying to get “Mine” ready for physical print, and I kept getting kicked in the face. No matter what I did, the upload bot over at DTRPG kept telling me I had a bleed error. I checked and double-checked and even triple-checked, and the bleed was set to 0.125″ on all three outside edges. I must’ve spent hours just trying different uploads – making 18-page test files and suchlike, but it all kept failing. Even other text blocks would get rejected. This led me to believe that something was wrong with the bot. I broke out the old email program and furiously typed a polite letter to some nameless person and was about to hit send, when I noticed the trim size selected on the website.
8.25 x 11.00
That’s not right. That’s the AMAZON trim size, not LightningSource! Of course it was getting rejected, because that trim line was all fucky by about an eighth of an inch all around. I’d forgotten I’d picked it.
You may be wondering why I did such a silly thing, and that’s because I had hoped to do a single layout for DTRPG and Amazon and save myself some work. Well, we all know how that worked out for me. Besides, Amazon likely has their own templates and press requirements, and I’ll most likely have to reconfigure the layout anyway. Again, laziness cost me far more time than it saved.
Physical copies will be available soon! 😀
COVER FILES
Now let’s talk about something that is decidedly NOT my fault. For some reason, FOR SOME FUCKING REASON, DTRPG won’t allow you to upload – for transmission to LightningSource – a template from LightningSource to allow for printing on the inside of the cover. It will get rejected every. single. time. This is stupid. I could send the files to LS myself, but then DTRPG wouldn’t sell the goddamned books in their store. And I know better than to talk to them about it, because it’s “policy” and would require some measure of effort on their part. I might write that letter one day, but not today. I’ve got too much to do right now. Frozen Tracks is tonight and I don’t have anything like a game ready for those guys, so I’d better start buffing something up to a moderate shine ASAP. I’ve also got to deliver the new Player’s Guides I’ve got here to Eclectic Geekery.
BOOK PRICING
Speaking of books, I was unable to get the Player’s Guide into the local game shop (The Foundry, of you were wondering), because of pricing issues. They cost me $29.18 as of this writing to print. Then shipping weighs in, adding another $5.00 or so per book. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s $34.18 just to get it in my hands. I still haven’t made any money on this. I’d need to charge another ten bucks (at least), to make it worthwhile. My problem here is that I’ve listed the book at $44.95 right on the cover. That’s fine for me to sell them, but for The Foundry to carry it, that’s not enough. They weren’t willing to change the price of the book, and weren’t willing to sell it for more than “everybody else” does. They told me they could only pay me about $25.00 per copy, which means I’d be losing money hand-over-fist.
My options are to either raise the price of the book to get it stores, or just take a loss. I don’t like either of these options. If I charge too much, the book is just going to sit there and collect dust. It’s a quandary. Future me will look back on this and laugh because he’s figured it out by now.
CONCLUSION
Your laziness factor is the amount of work you avoid, minus the amount of work you do to avoid the work you avoid. …and Capitalism is hard.
I love my job.
-Alan