It’s been a whirlwind of learning new things, getting myself integrated with my co-workers — many I already knew, of course, since I’ve been using DriveThruRPG as a publisher since 2004 — and meeting and interacting with a ton of publishers already.

I’m still running Posthuman Studios, of course. Our business has been adapting along with the changes that COVID has brought the industry, especially the impact to the supply chain. Our print run of Condensed Player’s Guides for Eclipse Phase to arrive and then I’ve been working on shipping out those pre-orders, which is a good feeling!

It’s going to a busy year, and I’m looking forward to it.

Currently there are renovations happening in the shipping office, so while the Atlas-fulfilled stuff is active, the rest of the store is unavailable until the office is finished and I can move back in, do updated inventory counts, and all that fun stuff. A bit of downtime gives me the chance to reflect on things I’ve learned, mistakes I’ve made, and ways that I could improve operations over the next year-and-a-half!

So here’s some things I’ve learned so far, with more to come later this month. You’ll see that I frequently say “take notes” — make yourself a living document on how the store operates.

Inventory Everything

Beyond your stock, keep an inventory of everything else: all of your shipping supplies, mailing labels, the bonus things you throw into orders, etc. Sometimes this can be very simple — for example, I order mailing labels in quantities of 12 rolls, so I order another set when I place the second-last roll in my printer.

Take notes on when you should re-order items and in the case of envelopes/boxes/etc, notes on what/how much you can fit in each type of packaging. Stocking more types of packaging means more investment up-front, but being able to efficiently ship things in the least packaging as possible can save money in the long run.

Have a Backup of Everything

In an ideal situation, no piece of missing/lost/out-of-stock equipment/supplies shuts you down.

I don’t own two label printers: but if my Dymo dies I can print out labels on a regular printer and tape them to envelopes (this was how I started out, but the math on how long it took vs. how long a label printer takes is very favorable towards a label printer!) If my good knife goes missing, I can use another knife and a pair of scissors, but the good knife was inexpensive so I bought two. Take some time to sketch out your “backup plan” and in those notes, include links to re-ordering items if you need to..

Make Friends with your Postal Worker

Whether you’re dropping stuff off or your postal worker picks things up for you, get to know them a little bit! If you’re dropping packages off, it can help to ask them what a slow time of day typically is. If they’re picking up, ask them if they have a day of the week that’s normally less stressful, and check if there’s anything specific you can do to help them. I was told that scheduling pickups (it’s free with USPS as long as your regular worker picks them up!) helps my postal worker plan their day. A little gift around the holidays won’t hurt, either!

If you leave packages out for multiple services, label them even if only one of them is out per day. I use milk crates for leaving groups of packages outside, one for USPS and one for UPS. Milk crates are useful for all sorts of storage, and you probably already have some kicking around that you can repurpose. These fancy collapsable ones have caught my eye.

Organize According to Your Needs

Your workspace and storage space will likely be close together, so think about how they interact. It may be tempting to store all your envelopes and boxes on the same shelf, but if you have a certain envelope that you only use to send a particular item, you may be best off storing them right next to each other! Filter your orders down to orders for those items only, pick and pack them, then move onto more complex orders. We use these bubble mailers only for USB drives and enamel pins, so the open pack of mailers lives in the same box!

Experiment with different ways of picking/sorting/packing to find one that’s right for you. Personally I prefer doing as many simple orders as possible before tackling more complex ones. Seeing the number of orders to fulfill going down makes me want to keep on trucking through them, and there’s less chance of error when you’re printing off a bunch of labels and packing slips for identical packages.

Document these procedures. A flow chart is great especially if someone helps you pack orders.

You will Make Mistakes

You’ll pack items incorrectly. You’ll damage some books. You’ll lose track of an order and ship it weeks late. You’ll charge someone way too much or way too little shipping.

Tell people that you’re sorry, admit that you made a mistake, fix it, and move on. There are new mistakes to discover, so don’t dwell in the past!

The question came up: “So they could download the files, then cancel their backing, and I’d get nothing?”

And the answer is yes. But what’s the worst that happens in that situation? Someone gets your digital books for free. In my experience, a small number of people who pledge at that sort of level do it.

The realm of positive outcomes is much larger, though: at the least, they just bought something from you.

What’s an even more positive outcome? They play your game. They read your book before your Kickstarter campaign ends, up their pledge level, and get a bunch of your new stuff. Or they go back and buy a bunch more things from your back catalog.

A single one of those positive results outweighs any number of people who pledge-download-cancel. Throw your trust behind your (potential) backers, and you’ll all get rewarded.

I transposed the front and back cover on a book I just printed, Xenovore.

TLDR: The problem is fixed now, and all Xenovore pre-orders have been shipped out.

The printer I used — which is excellent and I have no complaints about! — has a web-based interface where you can drag and drop pages to change their order. While uploading a correction, I must have swapped the front and back cover.

The books arrived, and I eagerly opened the first box to find the front cover on the back, and vice-versa. "Damn! That’s fucking weird!" I thought, and I looked at the second book in the box. It was identical. "That’s a heck of a binding mistake to make twice. I’ll open another box and see what it’s like."

Then I snapped into reality: the cover wasn’t upside down, which it would be if this was a binding mistake.

I opened the web interface, and confirmed: the front cover was the back cover, the back cover was the front cover, and I had hit the big ole "Approve!" checkbox. It was my fault; which means it’s up to me to fix it.

Reprint the whole thing? Well, that doubles our costs, and produces a lot of waste. That’s not punk.

I fired off an email to the printer: "Can you reprint me just the covers?" "No." "Can you print me a booklet and not staple the covers on?" "No." This printer’s automated systems are great, but not that flexible.

Thankfully, we’d just completed our fourth Nano Op: All That Glitters. I packed it with the first three Nano Ops to make an 8 page zine. I put the Xenovore cover on that zine in the correct order and triple checked it. I sent it to press, with overnight shipping. This is project Xenovore Cover Fix. Then I ordered myself a stapler, 5000 staples, and several staple removers.

10 days later …

A few days after that, I had shipped all of the Xenovore pre-orders! My workflow:

1. Remove the staples from several hundred copies of Xenovore, storing them interior down with the covers not yet fully removed. These are Good Interiors.
2. Remove the staples from several hundred copies of Xenovore Cover Fix. These covers were piled up, as were the 8 page Nano Op ‘zines. These are Good Covers.
3. Stack up a ton of the Good Covers, then one-by-one take a Good Interior, slide it into place, flip the whole arrangement over and staple it twice. Flip it over again and fold it closed more tightly, then put it in the Fixed Books box.
4. When I had enough Fixed Books to cover all of the single-book pre-orders, I set up to pack them up and get them shipped out. Getting a bunch of them out the door would improve my mood a lot, not to mention cleaning my workspace up!
5. After this I looped back to #3, building enough books for all the multi-book/mixed-book orders, and also a batch to send on to Atlas Games to cover copies they will ship out in the near future.

I’m not finished yet. I have a stack of books still to re-bind, and at some point I’ll print round of project Xenovore Cover Fix — with a different ‘zine interior — to handle them.

I’d appreciate you checking out Xenovore. It’s a great adventure, and I worked extra-hard on it.

Last night I flipped over to the preferences in the iOS version:

You see?

I would love if more iOS applications adopted this. Preferences being scattered around is one of the most frustrating parts of iOS, and while it shouldn’t be up to application developers to fix this problem, this solution is elegant. I hope Apple notices.

There are varying reward tiers depending on your support level and the type of supporter you are (gamer, publisher, etc.)
When I started publishing on DriveThruRPG, this was how the Publisher Tools section worked: you emailed a zip file of your games to them and they did the work to put them online. I think there were about 40 publishers on DriveThruRPG when it launched, and by my rough math between 5 and 6% of total titles were ones that I personally uploaded!

Times have changed. There are thousands of publisher accounts and hundreds of active publishers. Print on demand has come to books, cards, and other cardstock items. The varied Community Content programs have brought even more content to the storefront.

There’s a lot to take in, a lot to learn. Part of being a publisher — as opposed to someone who just “makes stuff” — is dealing with these systems, whether it means learning them yourselves or hiring someone to handle that aspect of the business for you. If you’re the learning it yourself type, here are five six things that you should do to start out!

If you haven’t made a Publisher Account yet

Make your publisher account under a different email address than your personal account. This makes all sorts of testing easier, as you can send your personal account complimentary copies, for example.

Know the difference between the Account and Publisher sections

You’ll need to use both of these sections to get stuff done. Under account are tools that are available to anyone using DriveThruRPG, even if they aren’t publishers.

As a publisher, the My Orders section of the Account page is where you can find ordering information for your print proofs.

Also, Community Content interface is in the Account section — so if you publish material on DMsGuild and DriveThruRPG, remember that you will use the Account tab for DMsGuld, and Publish for DriveThruRPG.com

Subscribe to the Publisher Email Newsletter

As a new publisher, you should be auto-subscribed to this newsletter. You can check if you are at this link. This is a monthly + important events newsletter, and you should read it when it comes out and archive it. It talks about upcoming sales, changes to the site, signups for charity bundles, and other stuff.

Explore the Publisher Tools section

The Publisher Tools section has a lot going on. I recommend exploring them in the following order:

1. Accounting — there are some oddball things in here that aren’t quite accounting, but more like “acccount management.” For example, you can change your publisher logo under Publisher Account and Payment Settings, as well as configure what kind of notification emails the system sends you. You use this section to configure how and when you’re paid, which is important!
2. Promotions — again, this section covers a lot of ground. Early on, you’ll want to explore Manage publisher page appearance, Opt in or out of site-wide sales, Send complimentary copies, and Report PPP spent and received.
3. Title Management — this category covers some extremely nitty-gritty stuff (the individual settings for each of your title listings), and also big picture things, like categories and footers. Learn those big picture things and implement them earlier, and it will be much easier to keep up with them, as opposed to starting them from scratch down the road.
4. Sales Reports — if you don’t have any sales yet, this tool is not very interesting. Over time, you’ll want to master filtering your sales, making CSV files, and then manipulating those CSV files in a spreadsheet application.
5. Book Printing.
6. Card Printing.

You can ignore Book Printing and Card Printing if you don’t think it’s in your short term plans, but knowing the basics of them will help you make titles that convert smoothly to the formats necessary for printing.

The top section of Publisher Tools also contains recent news, such as COVID-19 shipping status, tax season news, etc.

Read the Publisher Knowledge Base

The Publisher Knowledge Base is available for anyone to read, Publisher or not. It will answer a lot of your questions. However, be warned that sometimes it’s not 100% in sync with the Publisher Tools section, if those tools have recently changed. If you see a contradiction, let your publisher rep know.

Who is your publisher rep? If you’re new to the site, you’ll be assigned a rep, and you can always reach them at publisherservice@onebookshelf.com. If you have any questions, especially those that involve information that you’d rather not share in public, get in touch with them! Be clear and concise, but include all the relevant details.

Opt in or Out of Sidewide Sales

I already mentioned this in Promotions section, but I think this bears mentioning twice. DriveThruRPG hosts many sales throughout the year, and this Medium blog post goes over their basics and the general time of year each occurs.

Your strategy with Sitewide Sales can vary wildly. If you have few titles, I’d suggest being conservative; if you have a lot of lower-priced titles, these sales may be of more benefit. The sales have different themes, so some of them will work better for the type of titles you make. Of course, the number one way to make these sales work for you is to promote them before and when they happen!

On the Horizon

DriveThruRPG has been previewing their new site redesign recently, and changes will surely come to the publisher interface when it hits. I’ll update this article when that happens, but in the meantime, spend some time exploring parts of their system that you haven’t yet!

What’s your Top Tip?

Drop your favorite DriveThruRPG publishing tip in the comments, or tweet it to me @adamjury!

Nice Things the Organleggers Left Behind is on both DriveThruRPG and itch.io as a 4-page PDF.

What is Freon Skies?

I like cyberpunk-genre stuff, both the modern more transhumanist takes on the genre, and the more traditional 80s-style. And I’ve worked on a … bit … of cyberpunk material in the past, but always in other universes. I loved it, but working in-and-amongst a large amount of canon material is different from starting from scratch, laying down some core concepts, and then seeing what happens when you Just Write. Freon Skies includes optional Mutants & Magic themes — one of my inspirations was the idea of “Cyberpunk Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles.”

Beyond that, I wanted to make cyberpunk material that set aside or twisted the cyberpunk concepts that no longer resonate — the prime one being that body/mind modifications make a person “less human” or “disconnected from reality” in any way. That trope can stay in the 80s.

Freon Skies releases will be intermittent at first, some in the style of a little bit of source material + a big random list, and others being more source material focused. There is, as of now, no canon Freon Skies setting. The supplements are designed to be dropped into other cyberpunk-genre games, and their material can also find a home in urban fantasy and some modern-day campaigns as well!

1. I’ve been working on a lot of Eclipse Phase adventures, and trying hard to evolve their presentation to make them easier to absorb when first reading and easier to run at the table without a ton of page-flipping — especially page-flipping that requires leaving one book for another. Shameless plug: we just released Overrun which is the first adventure where we really took extra development time to address these things. (Print Pre-Order + PDF • PDF)
2. I’ve been running a D&D5e game for family via Roll20, which is my first time DMing D&D5e and my first time using Roll20. I’ve started out (We actually have two different games going, one started last year when we were visiting Lake Geneva — it seemed appropriate!) using Wizards’ introductory boxed set stuff and the Stranger Things boxed set. I absolutely do not have time to build my own adventures right now for D&D, and I’m not particularly interested in diving deeply into any one particular setting.
3. DMsGuild is doing a promotion until May 17th where creators are getting 100% royalties, which is a great deal for creators as the normal royalty at DMsGuild is 50% to them.

So I put out a call on Twitter for DMsGuild adventures that have a unique presentation or break the norm in some ways — part research, part fun — and a slew of titles were recommended to me.

This is what I’ve bought, with a short description as to why! Everything is based on the page on DMsGuild and the previews the creator shared.

• Flight of the Magpies: An Ebberon Adventure — I would have passed this by if I had been scrolling, based on the cover. But author Marco Michelutto has used the preview function to show the entire book and the inside is much nicer than the cover. A quick glance shows some rough edges but after peeking the inside I eagerly added it to my cart.
• Keep of the Kobold Queen — I turned 40 this year. 8-bit retro sprites? Yes please. The graphic design is totally in-line with the art. This was a snap-add plus hollerin’ at the creator on twitter about how awesome it looks.
• Weekend at Strahd’s — Awesome 80s vibe. One player plays Strahd’s corpse. I think I know just the guy.
• AE01-01 Fired & Forgotten — This came well-recommended, and looked to have some nice DM helpers even though some of the presentation threw me off initially.
• The Princess Project — nine adventures about twisting fairytale tropes and dethroning the patriarchy? I wasn’t planning on picking up larger anthology-style titles, but this one is the exception.
• Amarune’s Adventures: The Ghosts of the Glimmersea — This feels like a somewhat standard "adventure with a point and a lot of sandbox" from a quick skim but it seemed very concise for the breadth of ground covered.
• Murder on the Eberron Express — this adventure’s title made me laugh because of the Eclipse Phase adventures we’re working on, one starts with "Murder" and another ends with "On the $Spoiler Express" (they’re unrelated to each other.) I like the idea of running a train mystery whodonuit in D&D, especially for my family, who are into that trope.
• Myriad, City of Tiers — higher level than I was looking for, but the oversized landscape layout on this book is interesting at first glance. Myriad has a lot of praise for being cross-referenced/hyperlinked, which is interesting to me as I consider that "standard" for a PDF RPG book — but I suspect it’s less common on DMsGuild. I’m picking it up based on the visual concept and quality, but I sure wish the preview included more information about the adventure itself, and not the mechanical bits that go with the adventure.
• The Secrets of Skyhorn Lighthouse — This title is free, and otherwise I wouldn’t be picking it up, as there’s no PDF preview and I see a few red flags to me in the images used as the preview. But it’s free, has a ton of positive reviews, and there are giant hunter sharks!
• The Magister’s Tomb — This two-page adventure features the whole thing in the preview. Deciding how to preview small books is difficult, so I’m rewarding them with a purchase. The adventure looks very sandboxy and, obviously, concise.
• Good Country Dyin’ — another title that made me laugh. The preview is the whole book, and I liked the use of photographs. Is this going to be D&D Hinterkaifeck?

Eleven titles in the first batch. I’ve got some reading — and DMing! — to do. Drop me a line on twitter @adamjury if you have any other titles to recommend!

There are varying reward tiers depending on your support level and the type of supporter you are (gamer, publisher, etc.)

There are varying reward tiers depending on your support level and the type of supporter you are (gamer, publisher, etc.)

I’ve been noodling around with Affinity Publisher over the last month or so. I say noodling because I’ve produced no finished work. After almost twenty years using InDesign and ten years of Posthuman, there is no situation where I could reasonably migrate away from it in even five years, especially as Affinity doesn’t (yet?) import InDesign or IDML documents.

But the introductory pricing for Publisher was too good to pass up, and I expect that micro and small RPG publishers will be migrating to it, so I need to learn the basics.

One of the basic questions for me is: "How do I save and access all the various PDF Export settings I need?" — I have specific settings for exporting color and B&W print on demand interiors, covers, 3-page-covers to spreads, and of course, PDF files for distribution and sale.

The file that Publisher saves all of your Export Presets (for every file format, not just PDF) to is file_export_options.dat and it’s located in the following path depending on your OS. Sadly, there’s no granular way to move profiles, and the file is not human-readable:

macOS — /Users/<username>Library/Application Support/Affinity Publisher/user/
Windows 10 — \Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Publisher\1.0\user\

My experiments show that you can copy the file_export_options.dat between computers — even between macOS and Windows — to move all export presets from one installation to another. Of course, keep a copy of that file backed up somewhere safe!

I tested this with Affinity Publisher 1.7.2 and 1.7.3, between macOS Mojave, macOS Catalina, and Windows 10.

Potential B&W Preset for Lightning Source