Guy Fullerton on Publishing

If you have any interest in publishing your own game material, then you need to read this series of articles on how to do it right, by Guy Fullerton of Chaotic Henchmen Productions. Others have tackled this subject before, but few have done it this well. I wish that such a series had existed in 1981, when I started working at TSR as an editor. We figured it all out by trial and error, too, the same as Guy and countless other publishers between then and now.

With a few notable exceptions, the RPG business is an amateur playground. Thanks to the magical combination of the internet, desktop publishing, print on demand, and the lingua franca of PDFs, roleplayers are enjoying a bounty of unfettered publishing. If you have dreams of jumping into the pool, too, read Guy's advice first. It won't push you away with discouraging anecdotes; that's not the point at all. It's a straightforward primer on how to avoid the common, painful mistakes everyone makes during the transition from amateur to professional. Even if you have no desire to publish anything, you'll gain a better appreciation for the tremendous effort behind those third-party gaming products that folk devour so blithely.