So I’ve talked about POD before and how it’s been a great choice for us, and yet the current implementations leave a lot to be desired if you happen to get popular. In particular, the role-playing game world suffers and as it’s a tiny niche, it’s not likely to get serviced by the big guys.

Here’s the problem. I want to sell you books. I don’t want to warehouse books and I don’t want to do fulfillment and all that. I just want to create a book as an electronic entity and sell it to you as a real, physical, and ideally beautiful, book. What’s cool is that for the most part you want to buy this book. So it seems like we’re all good here. Enter the niche.

My best choice for this sort of riskless sale is Lulu. I just send them the data and sit back. They sell you books and send me a cheque. Problem is, Lulu customers are not mostly about role-playing games or even games in general. They are mostly about fiction. So it doesn’t seem to be the case that there is a lot of browsing going on at Lulu that ends up in a sale of my book, and that’s a problem — if I can only sell to people who already know they want my book, then I’m missing what I expect is a crapton of “opportunity sales”. That is, sales to people who know they want to buy something but don’t know exactly what. In a perfect world they stumble around in a place rich with possibilities and spot my book and buy it. Lulu is not this place.

A partial solution here is to supply to vendors. The downside of this is that now I have to get involved in pre-printing and fulfillment. First in small quantities to the small number of vendors who are willing to buy in volumes that make it worth my while (my margins are tight). Then maybe large volumes to a third party (like IPR, say) who can supply to vendors in a more appealing fashion (it still pays for them to buy in volume but they don’t have to absorb the risk of buying ten of my book — they can buy two of mine and two of another and two of yet another, and so on). Anyway, that’s all part of the business I am not interested in.

Enter RPG Now (Drivethru RPG, One Bookshelf, etc.) and their POD service. This is finally a real POD service. Real for me, anyway. The fact that it doesn’t quite exist yet does not bother me. Here’s what they are promising to do that no one else does, and that makes me very happy indeed.

They are promising high quality. As they will be printing through Lightning Source (a self-proclaimed POD service, but very much a first-generation one that has no storefront for authors and a clear preference for dealing with “real” publishers), a company that has very high quality standards, I am confident they can achieve this. We’ll be getting draft copies to verify this quality so we’ll know for sure soon enough. But I have high confidence. So far this is ground already covered by Lulu.

They are promising that the product will be a first-class product at RPG Now. That means that it will be part of the same publisher’s infrastructure there and that’s cool because it is super powerful — not only is the reporting to the author good, but also the capacity to bundle is there (and isn’t at Lulu, and that’s a big deal). So I can offer book + PDF at a bargain. I can offer all my books. I can offer all my books by a certain author. I can bundle with other vendors (one day there could be an “all FATE hardcover” bundle, say). Awesome.

They are promising that they will be able to offer vendor pricing to vendor accounts. This puts them in direct competition with IPR for this sort of item — if a vendor can browse and pick and choose in a way that might include my book, I am ecstatic. This will satisfy a very large number of vendors that I cannot satisfy right now. This is a new market.

RPG Now already has a reputation amongst gamers — it’s already a place that gamers go to browse. So this opens up my hardcopy to opportunity sales in two ways (site browsing as well as increased brick and mortar presence).

All of this smells too good to be true, but the fact is that most of this is just a user interface improvement over what Lulu does and so RPG Now seems to be aiming at taking the same (or less) out of the margin between print cost and sale that Lulu does. So for me, the publisher, the margin remains roughly the same. Selling to vendors can be similarly no different than, say, IPR as far as margin goes, assuming I pre-printed stock through Lightning Source or somewhere similarly inexpensive.

Okay so RPG Now wants to do all the work that I don’t want to do and they want to get paid such that I make the same margin I ever did. At the same time they want to vastly improve my options for bundling and make everything I publish available to an existing browsing audience. They have basically taken my IPR and Lulu defect list and made it their feature list.

Sign me up.

–BMurray