So...you're a publisher now?

 

Ruckus! What news?

I have been writing Ruckus, my medieval skirmish wargame, for about four and a half years, and I have been very fortunate to have had Wargames Illustrated adopt my game and publish a précised version in 2023. It did well and now my game is played in countries all over the world. The plan was that Wi would publish my much bigger more complete version of the game. Well after giving it a lot of thought I have decided to publish my game independently

Working with Wi was fun, they made it all look so easy and indeed for them it is! It is what they Do after all and they do have a whole team to do it, and they are very practiced at it, and they do have all the resources, a big studio, expensive cameras, tons of great looking terrain and backdrops, thousands of well painted figures and the expertise to use all these resources to produce an excellent product.

They also have a publisher, a distributer and lots of connections…

I have gained some insight to the process from working with them however I never realised how big an operation it really was. Well who would have thought that getting a game published could be so much work?

On the plus side the text of the book is already written and has been for about two and half years so there is that…

Yes… but it turns out that the writing is only one part of the business of writing a book and only a small part of designing a game. There is the editing, the overall design, the layout (so important), the artwork, the printing, the pricing, the costing, the distribution, creating a website. All of which has to be affordable on a retired nurse’s pension! Where to even begin?

The writing was easy, the game practically writes itself on the table and you just put it into words…editing is a whole different story. Editing is what shapes the game and gives it form. The thing about editing is you should never edit your own work, it should always be done by another pair or pairs of eyes, something with which I heartily concur however there is only me…

The works that make up the whole book of Ruckus have been edited separately by James Griffiths sub editor at Wi and Dan Faulkenbridge, the bossman and Editor in Chief at the mag. Each is very experienced and each has a different style. James is excellent at proofreading and always has ideas about how to embellish the text. Dan is very forthright and likes concise, compact and simple writing.

Between the two of them they have edited everything I have written and now when it comes to compiling all the separate parts and rewriting them into one whole cohesive tome I find myself using the ideas that I learnt from them and, adopting a middle way between their very different styles, which means I have pretty well rewritten the whole thing! The content hasn’t changed, just the style and the presentation.

And that it seems was the easy part.

Making it work

Where do you begin? How much does it cost? What do we need? How do you do it? Do I have the skills?

To be honest I nearly gave up, after all my friends and I have a game we all enjoy, why put myself through it? However, my wife, the fantastic Brum, had no doubt that I would publish and prompted me to go for it.

The project

No that I am no longer with Wi I can have free reign and print the book that I want to create, no longer tied to page count or a number of editions or the whims of the editor. With Wi, I knew that I would get one shot of a limited production run and so I threw everything into it, crammed all my ideas into one magnificent huge volume. However that is no longer the case, I can republish and print to order, and I do not need to have all my ideas in one volume because if  the first one is successful I can do a second and even a third…

So the project then is to create a book of the game in 200pp or thereabouts of the highest production values we can achieve.

Costing

How much will it all cost ? How much do we need up front? How do I keep track of the money?

I opened another current account, this one would be just for the project. My daughter , Lucy got involved she created a spreadsheet, ah I said more of your newfangled magic ways. She showed me how to use it, and I think it will prove to be an invaluable tool. You can use it to do projections…

I need a plan, an achievable affordable plan. I have assets, my family and my friends. Between us we have quite a few resources and not a few skills. So break it down , what do we actually need?  

The cover One thing I knew for sure… I knew I needed a cover and that I needed an artist to create it. I had one name in mind Marco Capparoni! Marco is a household name for wargamers, his art graces the covers of many wargames rules and magazines and his is the box art on many manufacturers’ kits. He has great talent, there is nothing he can’t paint or draw. His pictures are always accurate and lifelike. They are bright almost cheerful depictions, but I had examined Marcos profile and I found other pics there of dwarves and demons and darker things. I wondered if I could persuade Marco to give me something from the darker side.

I messaged him, he said he would be pleased to help, and we discussed what a Ruckus cover should look like. Marco is a true professional and great to work with, he makes that part of the process easy and fun.

Marco's rough sketches based on the ideas I gave him

I wanted a deep and doomy dramatic picture but my daughter, Katie, persuaded me otherwise. “Your game is fun Dad, the cover should reflect that!”

And of course she was right…

So the cover will have a deep and doomy theme but also be fun.

Marco sent me a selection of sketches based on my initial brief, I considered and then chose one, but which one? You will have to wait and see.

Ok, the cover is on its way what next?

 

Pics

I need lots of top quality, high resolution photos, that’s something I can do! I use my 1 phone 8 pro, which is a bit old now but has an excellent camera. I have a few tripods, a remote blue tooth button (avoids camera shake) and half a dozen cheap LED lights that I have bought on offer.

I have an attic where I can lay out a scene and my figures and some various bits of terrain. I was spoiled by Wi, my collection of scenery and backdrops is very limited in comparison. Ah well, I shall just have to use it in imaginative ways!

Nice pic but is it good enough? Nope, not quite, it doesn’t go in!

Wi achieve excellent results when taking pictures, they use the very best technology, cameras of course, but also excellent lighting. Lighting is very important. So I have bought every reasonably priced, middle of the road quality LED light that I can find, most of them on offer. None of them are particularly powerful so I use them all, there is barely room for me to squeeze in and get the pic!

They ensure that every pic looks bright and each figure and piece of terrain stands out and is in focus. This is actually an impossible standard to attain as even with the best of cameras there is no way you can get everything in focus, no camera, no lens can produce a sufficient depth of field. So how do you achieve it?

They cheat that’s how! They use photo stacking. This is where you take several images and photoshop them together to create a final picture with all the bits you want, the focused bits, and lose the bits that you don’t want, the fuzzy bits.

So I use another resource, my son, who is a photoshop wizard, I take the pics then it’s over to you Frankie. I have sent him dozens of them and so far he has  not complained…

The Art

Another aspect of this production was that there was to be no AI generated art, and I wanted to avoid using big corporations and established names so I enlisted family and friends wherever I could. I asked my oldest daughter, Katie, if she would like to do some illustrations for the pages, she is a very talented illustrator and to my delight she agreed.

I wanted her to use medieval marginalia and creatures from Ye Bestiary. Once she had done some research and realised what these were she was well up for it! She loves anything fantastical, magical, strange. I downloaded a few images I liked from the net and asked her to do them “Why would I just copy them? You don’t need an illustrator to do that!”

And so the inside of the book shall be festooned with original marginalia! Fantastic!

The Layout I also need to have a book lay out. I had a mad idea about getting the necessary software and doing the layout myself, but I soon realised that is actually a process that requires certain skills and a working knowledge of Adobe InDesign. I might well be able to achieve this myself after a six week course and a lot of mental sweating, but I would still be slow and spending most of my time correcting mistakes!

I had no idea but then it occurred to me that I have friends who do have an idea. Geoff Solomon-Sims had been publishing his own books for a decade. His game the Woods, is well loved by  gamers and is played all over the world.

We met, we had a chat Geoff agreed to do the layout “I love doing layouts!” he said. “Hooray” said I.

Geoff also has the insider knowledge about printing, what paper to use, how to go about it , and a number of good publishers that he has used himself.

How do you publish a book?

Don’t ask me, I am clueless! How much does it cost? Again no idea, so I investigated. You can get anything published by Amazon. They use Print on Demand. Every order they get- they print a book. You set the price and they take a commission. Simple right? Well yes, anybody can order a copy anywhere and it will be printed and sent to you but there is no quality control. The publisher will be a local one to the customer and from what I hear the quality is variable and can be very poor. And I want a product with high production values.

After some investigations, mostly googling and asking friends in the know (Geoff) I discovered there are several ways that you might self-publish a book. One way is to create a pdf and sell it through Wargames Vault, this is actually quite hassle free. Its PoD again but the quality is assured as they only use one publisher that is available in all the countries that they cover. This is great news for me as quite a few Ruckus players live in the US, Australia and Europe, this will do away with expensive Postage charges.  

For the Uk tho, I want a printed book of the best possible, affordable quality.

I asked for quotes from several companies. I wanted affordable of course, but not at any cost. That ruled out China which is shame as you can get excellent quality books published ever so cheaply, so cheaply in fact that even after adding in shipping they are still a reasonable buy.

I finally settled on Biddles, a small, publisher in Kings Lynn. I wanted the book to have the highest possible production values that I could afford-top quality paper of a reasonable thickness, strong soft covers, pictures that POP and well bound so it’s tough enough to stand frequent handling.

The Extras

Ruckus is a tabletop wargame that uses cards. The cards are expensive to print and as the game has been out for some time a lot of players already own the cards, therefore I decided that we would not print the cards to begin with. They will be available for free as a download form the game website. If there is enough demand and we sell enough copies of the book then I will consider printing the cards, it will be an opportunity to update them and use real human created art to replace the AI that is currently on them.

We will also create a QRS which will be a free download.

How many is too many?

How many do we print? I have not a clue! I struggled for while considering how much money I would need to order 500 copies and wondering how I would afford it and what would happen if we didn’t sell them all and what would happen if we sold all of them and people wanted more…

 This seemingly insoluble conundrum really foxed me, and I really did not know what to do for the best. Some friends had mentioned Kick Starters, but this is another whole world of unknowns for me and something I thought I did not want to get into.

And so I did some investigating and then James Griffiths of Wi called for a chat, and he knows all about Kick Starters and eventually the penny dropped, you put no money up front with a Kick Starter. He gave me some good advice, and I constructed a plan for our KS Campaign.

We will launch the Kick Starter in February 2027.