My first game that I decided to take from homebrew to self-publishing was C’est la Guerre which I posted on Wargamevault.com (a sister website of DriveThruRPG aimed at wargamers) in August of 2013 in PDF format. After several years of struggling I managed to put it in the proper format for paperback publishing on that website. My big problem was producing the cover and back page which needed to meet some very specific guidelines. In those days the folks at DriveThruRPG/Wargamevault were incredibly helpful and walked me through the process while tactfully avoiding commenting on the fact that I knew nothing about book formatting and was a total putz. To this day I thank them immensely for their patience and tact!

Since that initial foray into self-publishing on the DriveThruRPG system I have posted a number of other games on the website, most in a beta state, and some that ended up being ‘finished’. All of these were in PDF format.

I also post very early stage games on my website under Experimental Games. These are all very rough ideas in PDF formats at most. Some are just meandering ideas posted on my webpage.

Lately, I have become better at formatting my work to the point that the game is not just a word processor document printed out to PDF; there is a decent cover page, title page, working table of contents, page numbering that actually works, etc. I have also learned how to use GIMP to format images for the cover and the work itself so that it is not just endless words with large white spaces. This may all seem very rudimentary to some, but for me it was a great leap forward! As the formatting of my games became a little better I decided to try to turn some of them into paperback format. I began on DriveThruRPG, and I am sad to say that their open and helpful attitude towards amateurs (and hacks like me) has changed. Instead of silently smirking at the fact that I use a word process to format my work, they point out that I should get with the times and use a fully fledged publishing program and come back when I figure out what I was doing (or perhaps hire someone who could do the job for me). I downloaded a few of these publishing programs and could not make anything work. In fact what I produced using these publishing programs looked much worse than the product of my word processor.

Frustrated, I turned to Amazon publishing and found that it was much more user friendly. If you have a work that is in a suitable properly sized PDF format the Amazon system will set it up for you. And if you are unable to create your own cover and back pages using some fancy publishing program, Amazon offers a system that will help the most inept self-publisher create a completed project using some simple but attractive templates. As I became better at creating my own covers with my dowdy little word processor, the Amazon system made it very easy for me to drop these finished covers into the online project software. And when I got those messages from the proofreading part of the program that informed me that my work did not meet the printing guidelines it also explained why it did not meet the guidelines and how to fix it. Very helpful indeed!

I still love DriveThruRPG, but I now only use it to post my PDFs in final or beta version. Paperback versions go to Amazon, and my very experimental games get posted on my webpage open to universal scorn and derision. Feel free to look them over and tell me how much they suck!

Do you have a game that is in some stage of development? Do you have something you would like to publish, but you don’t think it will ever justify hiring a professional formatter to give it that professional look? Do not despair! Self-publishing may never be more than a hobby for us, but that does not mean we cannot work to improve the look and feel of our final product!