It’s that time of year again, three months since the last crowdfunding campaign. I’m listening to Creeping of the Gods by The Intangible. It doesn’t matter, I just thought you should know that. I listened to someone very nice talk about game design, and none of it made sense. I tried painting a robot yellow and it came out chalky and orange.

I think I might be wrong. What I make is the only way it could be, and happens as the gods intend it. Every day is a gamble on whether that means anything. Consider: if people stopped buying my work, would I stop making it? How can I answer that question, it’s impossible.

When I’m 86 years old I’ll appear on a talk show. They’ll ask why I scratch my name in the dirt, and where I get my ideas. I’ll think “ah, finally” and die right there on the sofa.

Make a system every six months. Advice from the pros.

My business doesn’t hurt me, honest. It’s one of three things that keep me sane. This is the perfect number of things, the bare minimum for a functioning stool. The problems arise because of how integral all three of them are; if one suddenly falls off, then so do you. I love my business.

Like every time love comes up, you have to demand everyone stops and defines their terms. Love is? Can you love breathing or waking up every day? Maybe. If so, then I love my job. Remember, being good at waking up or breathing isn’t important or relevant to its essential nature.

Desire is the root of suffering. Opposites suggest the presence of each other. The opposite of fear is love, softness, impermanence.

You must not fear your work.

Whatever you do, do not invest in the future. As a publisher, you must go and find someone who is too sensible to engage in Kickstarters or handling books but has thousands of social media followers and 90% of a finished project. Slap some art and an editor on that baby and ship her off to mega bux town.

Do not engage new talent. Do not encourage new voices. Maybe once every few years toss a bone to some group or make a compilation that can be easily forgotten. Maybe. Don’t take risks! For Christ’s sake. You’ll only look like a mug when everyone else takes the road paved with zeros and leaves you with nothing but your dignity. That and £6.50 will buy you a small coffee, loser.

Just collect your money, tell yourself you’re working up to something, so you can actually make something cool and worthwhile one day, get rich, die.

When you stop to look at this business you might struggle not to panic. All the young prospective publishers, and people looking to leave a job behind to pursue it, they look at what this is and baulk. There is pride in being this bloody minded, this resilient, but should there be? It’s very easy to be annoyed at people taking easy ways in, cashing in an audience built with pedagogy and peanut gallery content, or being moneyed, or coming from a place of connections and marketing, or so on. It’s too hard doing it any other way, so how can you blame them. There is a reward, sneaking up from the basement, and that’s in people being very kind to you. It’s been a significant source of consolation in all honestly, but I’m a big boy, I think I could handle the scorn which comes with earning a living without constant fear of backsliding into destitution.

Yes, yes, I am aware the faults lay with me. You should be active in the community, you should plan way ahead, you should make connections, you should outsource, you should do more newsletters, you should make a killer app, you should write more, you should learn how Google marketing works, you should send those books to Amazon US, you should put your files on bits and mortar, you should chase those invoices, you should contact those youtubers, you should write more, you should make a youtube channel, you should post more on every social media platform, you should join mastodon, you should spend less on production quality, you should expect less, you should be happy that anyone cares, you should ignore how much money people are making, you should get someone else yo do the fulfilment for you, you should get someone else to answer emails, you should get someone else to contact retailers, you should get someone else to do accounting, you should organise events, you should conduct interviews, you should beg interviews, you should plan this next kickstarter, you should accept this is hard but for you not me, you should do more, but you should rest more, you should. On it. Being a writer, right?

This is overblown. This is borrowing grief from the future. The next book is one that, in the right hands would make a lot of money (and bring peace and security, for a while) and I am horrified at the probability that it might not. I’ll rip off the monsters mask to find it was me all along. No great revelation but who wants to deal with that? Yes yes, it’s my fault I don’t need to hear it, yea yes see above. The mind is willing but the body is weak, the hours in a day just suddenly stop, I already just work I don’t know where the other time can come from.

Message in a bottle, land on the shore of a benevolent general manager. Save me from this desert island for I will starve.

Business is a brutality to creative work. The apple tree has to hike up its roots to walk itself to market to sell the apples; the pig walks to the slaughter house on his day off; the golden goose is dead. The truth might be that you first agree on a price for your soul, make that transaction, and with whatever you have left you work with. Be the wise person and get a job that pays well and do the nice things on the weekend. It’s easier to beat yourself up about being a hack than it is to wave a torch on your doorstep every night to keep the wolves away. There is no dignity in death. Get a YouTube channel. You are a boat, a big fat trawler. Gather eyeballs, make friends, start a kickstarter and get them to drink the koolaid before they get distracted. Good will farmer.

Times have changed since the pandemic ‘ended’. Before then, everyone felt confident and rich, during it people were scared and bored, after it everyone was scared and outdoors. Two booms out of three periods isn’t too shabby. At one time we treated Kickstarter as an elaborate advert for an upcoming book, but as audiences become scared and risk averse we’re stuck needing Kickstarters to keep the lights on. A bigger publisher with a distribution network and money and partners would be able to create their own hype machine for new books but we all have to settle for Kickstarter. It’s too powerful, and all these other crowdfunding platforms have to contend with that fact. And it’s not a matter of function, like so many people seem to assume, but with confidence and recognition. Ask any blood sucking marketing agency and they’ll tell you that when you’re advertising your Kickstarter project you’re not targeting people who like your product, you’re targeting people who like Kickstarter that just so happen to also like your stuff. It’s Kickstarter first.

It is self evident that being poor is expensive, and also that this can be applied quite broadly. The process of not being time poor, energy poor, money poor, is to approach the speed of light or push two angry magnets together. There is only slog, friend, and you can push against the door infinitely until it’s opened from the other side and you fall face first into a plump cushion.

Which is to say.

It is necessary to draw your own lines. Put a limit on infinite, pull back from the hole and say “yea nah I’m good” so you can go back to living.

What is the feeling of finishing a book/film/series? Post partum depression? Separation anxiety? Le petite morte? Plain grief? Pain at the loss raw ripping disentangling of another world from your own. There are places I miss with inverse nostalgia, a going rather than returning. Numinous agape almost at your fingertips.

The feeling of putting your head out of a train window. Let go of understanding. There is understanding outside of the intellect accessible to us all if only we could let go. Let others fill the gaps and they’ll pour themselves in, untangling them is impossible. A lack of understanding is wilful, wisdom is the easy little death, allowing yourself to love is the only difficult step. Throw ourselves in the arms of stories and mythologise ourselves. Cover me in life.

The frustrating cry of playing games, “just love me love you”.

There is nothing the roleplaying book industry loves more than a good oxymoron. Concerns over accessible PDFs, for example, have been batted around for yonks with everyone pitching in on how to make the large, slow, text garbling format play gently with screen readers and phones. Compress the images! Hyperlink everything! Flow the text! It’s ok, we’ve all been there but it’s time to let PDFs be what they were intended to be. Hand them over to the printers and give us poor hard done by readers something we can actually use. Bring out the ePubs (&c)! It works on every device you care to think of, there are enough ePub retailers to allow a healthy market and treatment for sellers and buyers (hi DriveThru), you can feed it through a text to speech program without a load of faff, they’re small, they’re customisable, they’re searchable, and on and on. EPubs are neat.

I’ll concede there is one solitary point one could possibly give to the PDF and that is fidelity to the book. However, PDFs are not, never have been and never will be books. Much like a photo of a person is not that person neither is a PDF a book. The creation of a book is more than a convenience, a sensible place to store data, it is a tactile object with layers of choices in paper and typefaces and processes that are lost the moment you load the print document on your phone. Let things be things.

And yes that bush we’ve been beating around is obviously this: we’ve ditched PDFs and replaced them all with professionally made ePubs which are available from literally everywhere including your local library.

But why not have both? While it’s true we will continue to make PDFs anyway as part of the book design process we believe that to make a real change we need to be all in. Books will be books, ePubs will be ePubs, and we’ll all catch up with mainstream publishers one day.

Pay for things. Including:

• Warehousing (separate fulfilment and storage locations because they both work on different cost structures)
• Editing
• Layout
• Art
• Other writers
• Packing supplies running into the thousands
• Taxes

Understand how shipping works including:

• What is cheapest
• What is safest
• What unique special rules the USA has invented today
• What punitive measures the EU have put on us
• How to palatalise boxes
• Where to buy pallets
• How to watch videos on how to palatalise £10,000 of books
• How to pay taxes

Understand how distribution networks work. Not for you.

Understand ISBNs, where, how much, and why you need them.

Have people rely on you financially so that if you fail they fail. Also learn how to pay wages. And taxes

Have an intimate knowledge of book binding techniques and a good relationship with a bookbinding factory.

Learn how kickstarter really works

Learn how and pay for your own Facebook marketing

Learn how and pay for your own Google marketing

Get good at writing ad copy quickly

Do you know how and where to register new publications? Because you have to

Own and use photoshop and indesign or pay someone to do it for you

Learn about typography or pay someone to know it for you

Learn how to contact business2business businesses and how that works

Get an accountant, and learn how to keep accounts

Get good at web design or pay someone to be good for you

Understand project management or get someone else who does

Optional but recommended:

Be in or have access to the US

Write

You silly sillies threw chum (made books that are sincere and resonate) in the water (the rpg industry) and now the sharks (companies that don’t want to make a book, that just want to make something the funko pop loving public will buy, who have money and connections, who have just enough, the barest amount, of taste to hire people to make money for them, who claim indie credibility (whatever the shit that is), who throw tasty dog whistles in all directions to get the crowds, who are here to gentrify your shit) are circling.

I’m going to put my bid in on the rights to Rambo: The RPG before some indie darling gets there first.

Change this, don’t add that, remove that Oxford comma, you problematic bitch.

What if you just were. No refiners fires. No posh pricks with a hunger for smooth pain.

Have sword, will die.

Be important enough to be hated, be utterly unavoidable, my elephants got a fat arse, “how does he make you feel?” ’Orrible.

Hey, you can’t have folds, smooth it, SMOOTH IT YOU FUCK.

Just being. Just vibrating. Just hanging out. Just very important how dare you. Just how dare you. Just walk in to the sea. Just don’t you dare. Just be cool like me.

Smooth it. We’re all juicy little kumquats in a blender.