The price of self-publishing your own tabletop RPG
A couple of years ago I decided to publish an RPG. Tabletop RPGs have been my passion since I was nine. Over the years I played dozens of them, wrote two that were never published (I was young, and my friends were my whole audience) and bought a hundred or so, counting physical books only.
When I started to get serious about it I had no idea how much it would cost. I kinda had a number in mind, but no certainties. What I discovered since I started working on it with publication in mind might be useful for other designers: read forth for some context, or skip ahead if you care only about the cold figures.
A bit of context
Not all tabletop RPGs are the same. Mine belongs to the indie category, meaning that it’s not even trying to compete with the industry leaders (D&D and Pathfinder): first and foremost because I don’t have (and will never have) that kind of budget, and secondly because, in all honesty, I don’t even like that approach very much. I’m not saying they aren’t good games, it’s just not how I like to play my games. So here a few facts to keep in mind that will help you understand the numbers below.
- It’s not a book, it’s two. It started as a single book, but by the third public Beta we decided to split it into a generic system (MONAD System, click HERE to read the description in Italian) and the first official setting (Nostalgia: The Nomad Fleet, click HERE to read the description in Italian). The reason was simple: I asked around, and 100% of the respondants told me they would rather prefer the system and the setting to be separate things. This caught me a bit off guard, but in the long run it might end up being the right choice if the two products are even a bit successful.
- The game will be released for the Italian market first. 2017 is the year we (me and the other writers) want to launch the MONAD System and Nostalgia on the Italian market. The goal has always been to translate them into English, but writing the books in our native language first was easier. We will also use Italy as a “test market”, to learn the ropes of selling a tabletop game.
- I wanted good looking physical products. You can probably do this a bit cheaper, but this is a market dominated by collectors. PDFs piracy is rampant, so we just need to trust players will appreciate good looking books and support us with their wallet so that we can keep working on system and settings. Whenever there was a chance to improve the quality of the books or hiring a pro to make the books look nicer, we did.
- The MONAD System will release as an A5 hardcover b/w book. Page count should be around 240.
- Nostalgia will release as an A4 hardcover full color book. Page count is uncertain yet, but should be in the 120–160 range.
- All writers are working for free. Meaning that me, Luca Vanin and Enrico Pasotti are investing our own time to write this thing. No one gets a cent until we have a product to sell. Technically speaking our time has monetary value, but I feel this is the situation most indies have to operate in if they want to keep costs reasonable. So let’s pretend the thousands of hours we poured into this are worth zero.
- We’ve been working with people all around the world. We’ve been working with Swedes, Americans, Canadians, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Eastern Europeans and more. Prices, however, tend to follow an international standard, so it really didn’t matter much money-wise.
Budget breakdown
One of the reasons I wanted to write this article is because I often see online discussions on the costs of games. Players rarely understand the investments going into getting these books done.
In the space of a couple of years, this is what we spent, aggregated by category:
- Logo, font design: 350€ ($366)
This got us the Nostalgia logo and two custom fonts. Friendly price. - Illustrations, layouts: 8778€ ($9191)
This got us a variety of things. Images are not all the same, and prices vary greatly: from already made stuff you can simply license to very expensive custom pieces.
- 39 licensed color pieces (luckily for us, they were perfect for the setting)
- 19 original color pieces (some of these are not usable though)
- 6 characters portraits
- 2 covers
- full layout for both books
- 24 b/w illustrations (various size)
- 15 b/w spot illustrations
We’re gonna have some more, mostly as a favor from a friend.
- Hosting, website: 390€ ($408)
This includes everything we need to run the website, including theme, hosting, plugin licences, Google Suite, etc. The website could be faster, but it would kill our budget, so this is the best we can do for now. - Editing: 583€ ($613)
Friendly price. Beta revisions and some work for the final products. - Marketing: 300€ ($315)
This includes a couple of small social media campaigns we run after releasing the Betas, and a couple of banners we printed for our live debut later this year. - Accessories and other expenses: 179€ ($188)
We printed a small quantity of dice as a test. The price goes down as you increase quantity, but this was mostly to see if they looked nice or not (they do).
There’s still some smaller things missing from the list. To cut a long story short, let’s say the grand total to get to this point has been a bit over 11,000€ ($11 566). But we’re several months away from launch, and there’s still money to be spent.
What we haven’t paid for yet
I’m not 100% sure what expenses are still coming our way leading to launch, but if I had to guess I’d say:
- Printing the books: about €3000 ($3154)
This is the big one. Depending on choices of paper, UV coating etc. the price can go up or down, but the big issue here is that setup costs are about 80% of the price. Printing 200 copies of a book costs almost as much as printing 400. Quantity is something we have not settled on yet: price goes down steeply the more you print, but then you have to put hundreds of books somewhere, and we don’t have so much space for storage. Most definitely our spouses will not be happy with a ton of unsold books if something goes wrong.
Print on demand is an alternative, but not a very good one in Europe. Even without considering that the quality is sensibly different from offset printing, the only specialized option is DriveThruRPG, and shipping expenses from US are borderline prohibitive. - Extra illustrations: about €1200 ($1261)
These are not a must, but we have 3–4 subjects that could really use an illustration. We’ll try to squeeze this expense in. - Extra editing: €1000+ ($1051)
We just can’t publish that amount of text without an extra pair of eyes going through it. Our Editor Francesco is a pain in the ass but he improves our prose tenfold. A necessary evil :) - Marketing accessories (TBD)
We need some stuff for the live demonstration of the game. At least a couple of t-shirts for each member of the team, a few hundred leaflets with info, perhaps one or two extra banners. - Marketing push (TBD)
When the books are out we need to funnel people to our shop, or a partner’s shop. This is relatively cheap to do, but we’re still talking about hundreds of € in social media/google Ads campaigns. - Event Booths (TBD)
If we want to sell this stuff, we need a booth people can walk up to. Also, we probably need to rent the space from the event’s organizers. Or we could get a partner, but then we need to split incomes.
Conclusions
Can we make this profitable? Not sure yet, all I know is that we’re gonna try our best and even if things go awry we’ll be able to look back to these days with no regrets.
Hoepfully this piece is detailed enough to give wannabe designers an idea of what they’re getting into, and how much money they need to be ready to put on the table–and lose. We, of course, hope to at least break even, but we know it’s gonna take time and luck to get to that point.
Did you self-published a game? Feel free to chime and share your experience!
PS: I did write a follow up to this article. Find it here.
Also, I’ve put together a free mini-course on laying the right foundations for your crowdfunding campaign. I made a lot of mistakes with mine but you don’t have to. Learn more here.
You can follow the projects @theworldanvil or on Facebook.
You can find me at @tdebenetti.
