Sculptdude's page

All of this has been extremely helpful! I certainly appreciate all of the input because you guys have lots of experience in doing this. I'm basically just the InDesign guy just trying to package it in a cool looking wrapper.

I had brief discussion with the other guys last night and related a lot of what had been posted here. The general consensus is to stage out a series of PDFs for various new feats & skills / races & classes / powers and critters and such as suggested. These will likely be crunch-heavy with a slant to the intended setting fluff and will also feature just a couple of b&w designs and illustrations. If the individual PDFs prove popular, we will compile all of it into "book" form as a definitive PDF and then look at our print options.

I put the Savage North book together in about six months starting with about 50% content all while playtesting was going on. There are some things I learned on that project I would like to avoid. With this particular project, it is all in the concept phase so we are looking at what output we want to shoot for to tailor our work to that end.

There are four of us in the group, three are writers two are artists and we have another individual who we will be paying for art by the piece for the PDFs. We are all basically doing it for free as a time investment to see if it will crawl.

Patrick
The Sculptdude's Website

Companies that do the best with their settings have been selling products, gaining followers, and proving that their material is as balanced and imaginative as Paizo (or WotC, back in the 3.5 days). You could do spells of your setting, monsters of your setting, feats of your setting, ... all as PDFs. These will fund your book printing efforts.

Without wanting to appear to get the "cart before the horse" this whole project is still in the proof-of-concept stage. The projected release on it is July 2012. So all of the foot pounding is to determine if we even want to bother doing the thing in the first place. There is a marketing campaign planned including the areas you mentioned as well as print and web ads, viral marketing, etc. which should launch in the first quarter. Anyway, the suggestion to piecemeal out PDFs is really a terrific idea I hadn't even considered. It will certainly give us a gauge to see if compiling it all into a printed volume would be worthwhile. It would also be great to offer the new classes/races, feats & skills, equipment and so forth as its own supplement at a lower price-point PDF. Genius!

We use CreateSpace, an Amazon affiliate. It's significantly less expensive than Lulu and has great production quality. In the years we've been using them, we've had maybe 10 bad copies out of thousands.

I had looked at CreateSpace years ago for a graphic novel project. It may be worthwhile to check them out again. Thanks for the suggestion!

The guys I'm working with have also worked on Reaper's Warlord: Savage North book and West Wind's Secrets of the Third Reich. We are essentially planning to publishing an all new alternate setting book for the PF rules along with a couple of adventure modules (not related in any way to the afore-mentioned IPs). The format we decided on was an initial 96 page setting guide/gazetteer thing.

We are hoping to fund the project through kickstarter. I have some contacts to some of the industry's top artists so reproducing their work in color seems ideal. The trouble is the math. For the number of the initial print run we anticipate, the printing cost alone from Lulu would be around $20 per copy. We were shooting for a cover price on it to be around that, so that's a bit too high. We're just looking for a less expensive printing solution.

It may come down to just making it all up as a PDF first (which we'd have to do anyway) and then rolling it out to print after building an audience later.

We at 4 Winds Fantasy Gaming never did print runs like that. When we were handling the printing ourselves, we did small print runs via print-on-demand sources (using Lulu) as the orders came in. Now, Studio 2 Publishing handles our printing for us, and even though they do much larger print runs than we ever did on our own, they still use print-on-demand (via Lightning Source).

Lulu seemed a little pricey on what wanted for a cover price for a full color book. We are anticipating spending quite a bit to get some top notch art and wanted a book to showcase that.

I checked out the S2P site a while back and that sounded very appealing since they also handled all of the distribution channel aspect of it as well. I understand that for any start-up it is very difficult to get product into Alliance Game Distribution. They may certainly be the way to go.

Patrick
The Sculptdude's Website

After reviewing this older topic about A Day in the Life of . . . I noticed there were references to printers in Asia but there were no specific companies mentioned. The game development group I belong to is looking for a good printer that can turn out a color 96 to 100+ page supplement similar to the Companion books published by Paizo. In order to weigh all of our output possibilities, we would like to get some quotes from some overseas printers. Can anyone recommend or provide links for printers to contact?

Thanks!
Patrick
The Sculptdude's Website

This is currently on my workbench and I expect to get it to Reaper for moldmaking by the end of June.

Patrick
The Sculptdude

Sounds like the picture on page 52 of the CoT adventure "What lies in dust" (the beginning of "Treasures of the Pathfinders" article). I guess i'll have to go back to hoping that the inner sea guide Pathfinder will be turned into a mini.

That is it, sir!!! Thank you for tagging that. I knew I'd seen it somewhere but could not remember. This is the art reference that was assigned to me to sculpt. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to shoot pics of this one before I turned it in, so we are at the mercy of the Reaper Photography Division for the release.

The art for the Pathfinder in the ISG book would be a cool figure as well. We'll have to see if the "powers that be" also feel as such.

I just turned in the sculpt for this piece at ReaperCon this weekend. The art I received is a dynamic running blonde female figure in what looks like leather armor holding a glowing skull. I have not been able to find this art in any of my books nor online and it may, as yet, be unpublished.