There are also alternatives to traditional publishing.
1) Publishing your book electronically
This still hasn't been sorted out that much, but the technolology does
exist to sell electronic books.
www.hyperbooks.com is an example. Also, Hasbro/WOTC sells some of
their books like that (not just old books, but some brand new ones for
Alternity). I believe Adobe also has an example of how selling a PDF
works on their web site. (Much better than the method Hasbro/WOTC
uses...)
Another example is Marcus something or other and his game Forgotten
Futures. I believe he originally distributed electronically and either
sold it as shareware or selling addition material on a cd-rom.
2) Getting a decent quality laser printer, printing the product
yourself, and selling direct/mail order.
3) Like above, but use the local copy center to make copies for you.
Not that expensive for small (say 30 page) books. More like Fanzine
quality....
4) Like above, but use a cheap type of printing from a professional
printer. For intstance, the style used in the original D&D books, or
Traveller.
5) There used to be a small game company, I can't remember the name,
that had basically a vanity press type deal. You give them the text
of the book, some art, and a fairly large but not indecent amount of
money and they'd come up with a finished book for you, including ISBN
number, etc.
Obviously, none of these will make you rich, but most those options
won't lose you much money either. A friend of mine started her own
romance magazine using method 4. It doesn't make much money, but she
has a lot of fun doing it. And it's helped her hone her skills to
sell her stuff to the bigger/real magazines.
