Martin Shoemaker wrote:
>I don't know if most game stores use Ingram or not.
Most game stores do not. Many -- I'd venture to say almost all -- game
stores use a distributor that specializes in game products. (E.g.,
Alliance, Wargames West, Zocchi.) I suspect that the book distributors
(Ingram, BookWorld, etc.) offer different deals, and the game stores do
better with the smaller distributors.
So, if you were to use the iUniverse printing option, you would almost
certainly be blocking yourself out of the game stores -- likely to be your
best market. I know that when I go hunting for a game supplement, Border's
and B&N are the *last* places I check (and by then I'm more likely to have
special ordered the thing from my FLGS anyway).
>The up-front costs are so low because they don't do print runs. Instead,
>they use Lighnting printers for Print On Demand: print and bind and ship
>each copy when it is ordered.
Here's the other caveat. Lightning print is decent but not yet equivalent
quality to the mass-quantity printers. (SJ Games recently had occasion to
look into LP as an option, and we decided not to go with them yet precisely
for the quality reason.) The hope is that the printing will continue to
improve until LP is indistinguishable from other printing processes.
Of course, for a small guy who can't afford a huge print run, LP's
print-on-demand isn't a bad option; it's just not yet as good as it could
be.
One other thing to be cautious of with print-on-demand, though, is that
you'll be losing sales to people who assume that if they can't actually
pick up the book and get chocolate on the pages in the store, it's not
available. Someone using POD (to coin a TLA) will have an uphill battle to
educate the gamers that their product is special-order only -- actually,
that their product even *exists*. Further, since you're bypassing the game
distributors that most stores depend on, store owners may not be willing to
order the supplement (assuming they know of its existence and how to get in
touch with you).
Personally, there are enough problems with this approach that I don't think
it's a viable one, not at this stage. I'd love to be proved wrong, however.
--
Andrew Hackard /\ "My money and my
Promotional Writer /()\ [CENSORED] go to
Steve Jackson Games / \ Illuminati University"
[EMAIL PROTECTED] /______\
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