Is there anyway to publish without using a fulfillment house?

[Pramas]

Sure, it's possible. The industry didn't even have fulfilment houses for 20+ years. It means you take responsibility for solicitation, sales, and warehousing of your own products. Your biggest sales job will convincing distributors that it's worth their time to add you into their system. One reason they like fulfilment houses is that they cut down on the number of codes, invoices, and checks they need to deal with. It is entirely possible that if you approach distributors with a new d20 product in the current environment that they'll send you packing though. From their point of view, another d20 campaign setting isn't a must-have item.

I would encourage you to forget about color printing in the short term. It's expensive and really not worth doing for print runs of less than 3,000 copies. The cost of goods on a thousand run color job will be murderous.

 

[Justin D. Jacobson]

Thanks for the feedback.

As a related question, what would the considerations be for doing a soft-cover/color-interior as opposed to a hard-cover/b&w-interior? Which do you think the consumer would find more attractive. On a 256-page book, which would be more expensive and by what factor?

 

[philreed]

Thanks for the feedback.

As a related question, what would the considerations be for doing a soft-cover/color-interior as opposed to a hard-cover/b&w-interior? Which do you think the consumer would find more attractive. On a 256-page book, which would be more expensive and by what factor?

Color is a lot more expensive. To give you an idea, Ronin Arts is getting ready to print 2,000 copies of a 96-page 4/4 softcover. Gloss stock.

$8,000 in printing.

For what you're talking about, I'd be surprised if you came in under $15-$20/book.

 

[Paradigm]

You can certainly go without a fufillment house. Paradigm did for 3 years and we did well, we had no need to move to Osseum insofar as they would apply to distributors. But with a 3rd party handling our sales I have been able to invest the time I would have spent talking to buyers and selling into producing books.

Bear in mind that 2000 books of the kind you are refering to will take up a lot of space. You may need to have the book in hand for a month or more before you seen any revenue and you will have costs related to warehousing, and UPS / trucking companies will charge you more than they will charge a larger volume shipper.

To figure out what you would get from a fufillment house, figure on 31% of SRP after commission, fees and shipping costs. As a result, you should aim for 15% of SRP for per unit costs so that you only have to sell 50% through the chain to start seeing profit. If you have the ability to release a title with direct sales, each 3 books you sell for SRP will equate to more than 9 sales in the distribution chain and you will need that revenue to recover the cost invloved with exhibiting and marketing the product.

I would also advise that you avoid color interiors, the costs are too high for the print runs you are talking about.

 

[Justin D. Jacobson]

Thanks again. This thread has been very informative for me and hopefully some others.

To give you an idea, Ronin Arts is getting ready to print 2,000 copies of a 96-page 4/4 softcover. Gloss stock.

Not to hijack my own thread, but ... Motocaust?