The Mongoose news:
You may have heard mention, on our forums, of a new printing facility that Mongoose is currently putting together. From April onwards, all our printing will be done in the UK rather than China, as has become the norm in our industry.
So, we are currently surrounded by all sorts of weird and wonderful looking machines, and we are gradually learning how to use them properly. Some more equipment is due over the next week or so, and then we will be ready to take on the world with our books, not only written and designed in-house, but produced by our own hands too!
All very exciting for us, you may think, but what benefits will you chaps see? Well, for a start, we will no longer be bound by the traditional pricing structure of another printer - this is what leads RPG books to be of a certain size because, for example, a 160 page book might actually be cheaper to print than a 152 page book. This leads you to certain formats of books - such as the 96 page hardback that has started to sprout up across the market. Aside from content, the cost to us to actually produce, say, a 104 page book instead of a 96 page one is minimal, whereas in the past it might have amounted to a thousand Dollars or more.
This means our books can now be led directly by content, rather than having that content constrained by an artificial barrier imposed on us by a third party. And that has to be good. Other benefits include;
* Much sharper artwork reproduction than you have ever seen.
* The ability to do short run editions that we would never otherwise consider - a 1,000 page compilation, say, of all the supplements of an older RPG would never even be considered by traditional printing methods. But we can now produce such a thing relatively easily.
* Personalised printing runs are a possibility if, say, we were to do a competition with the first 100 winners getting their name printed on the Contents page. Or the front cover ('This is Mike's Book - Hands Off!').
* Signs & Portents can, in theory, also be produced as a print edition once more. . .
All of this, of course, is going to take some time for us to figure out, and we have yet to even guess the true flexibility this system now gives us. It is clear, however, that the next five years are going to be very, very interesting ones.
Matthew Sprange
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
