Art for the Secret Project

I’m currently working on a Secret Project. Its a very simple thing that I need to get done by the end of the month.

This is partially an exercise to prove to my wife that I can self-publish my writing. I foolishly explained about my free pdf downloadable adventures over at molad.org and she asked me If I could charge for them and I said yes. So she said get it done by the end of this month an she would believe it when she saw it.

Currently I have a zero pounds in the D101 games treasury, so I’m doing it all myself. Its going to be a pdf of around 30 pages that I’ll be putting on RPGnow for around $3-5. So as you can expect the art budget is very low, to zero. I could ask one of my uber-talented artist friends to do it at low cost, but I would still only be able to afford a cover and a couple of pieces. One of the principles I aim to stick to religously with this is that I always pay my artists on delivery of the art, so being cheeky and saying ‘oh I’ll pay you later when I get paid out of the profits’ isn’t an option. Also my deadline is uber tight. Two weeks kids! eeck!

With this in mind I was pleasantly surprised to find clipart.com which for a small subscription gives you access to the royalty free art.  So I spent a couple of hours trawling through finding bits of art that would fit in with the book. Its not going to be anywhere as good as if I got an artist with passion, but its good enough to be evocative and give me some experience of putting the text and art together using a Desk Top Publishing package. 

And it means that I’ll get it done before the wife’s deadline.

I was so tickled that I put together a mock up for the front cover and an LJ icon.

Published by

Newt

Games Designer, Publisher, Web Developer, Dad.

7 thoughts on “Art for the Secret Project”

  1. Cool. If you want a physical copy Lulu.com deal with indie comics – I wonder if they’d deal with indie rpg’s?

  2. Clipart = teh best.

    Looking forward to seeing this!

    What’s with the secret project idea tho? Make sure you talk about your projects in the open to generate buzz! That was my first big mistake in the self-publishing world … not self-publicising.

  3. Aye they do.

    And RPGNow is in partnership with them. So basically I list at RPGNow and my customers can by a dead tree version from LULU.

  4. Its secret because I don’t want to distract myself talking about it too much. I’ve publically talking about Monkey for ten years or so. Is it published (or even finished)? No.

    When its done, first draft, I’ll start pimping like a leetle beetch 🙂

    And you dear readers will be first to know.

  5. Hi Newt, wandered in from Collective Endeavour. I think we’ve met at Continuum (or whichever – I’ve played in a couple of your HQ games).

    Re print on demand: I suggest you set up your own Lulu account, which is pretty easy to do. Couple of reasons. You can set up a book so it’s only accessible to you, so you can get a proof copy to check before making it available to the public. You can then set it up at RPGNow as well if you want – but bear in mind that the POD feature is likely to get lost during the process of turning DriveThru and RPGNow into a single site, and it’s not clear whether they’re going to bring it back.

    Also, do have a look at the clipart packs at RPGNow – some good value for money if you can find something in the right style.

  6. Hi Tim

    Aye I remember you played in Hurt of the Land and Great Egg Hunt. I also remember you from the 1st Continuum ‘Independent publisher’ seminar (which was kinda a bit off post since apart from Marcus Rowland, the rest of the panel were 3rd party publishers for Cthulhu/Glorantha) we’re you asked some intelligent and thought provoking questions of the panel, esp regarding on the PDF vs traditional print. It must be said that I’ve been following your posts of RPG.net and now the Collective Endeavour with as much interest. You are definitely one of my inspirational figures as I put together my own games 🙂

    Thank you for your very useful advice. I didn’t know that getting Lulu account just to print of a couple of draft copies was an option.

    Just out of interest how widely known is end of the POD relationship between Lulu and the merged DriveThru/RPGnow ?

  7. Hey, I’m an inspirational figure! Must be all those biscuits. 😉

    The POD thing… It’s mainly from the private e-publisher forum that OBS vendors get access to, but it has spilled out on to places like the publishing forum at RPGnet. Nothing’s definite yet, and the outcry against losing the facility might have prompted them to reconsider, but personally I’m proceeding on the basis that I can’t rely on it being there in future, so for my most recent release I’ve been directing people to Lulu for the print version.

    Not everyone has been happy with the way things have been handled at OBS in recent months, and some of those people have decided that they’d rather make alternative provision, inc stores on their own sites and other sales venues like Your Games Now. But for a new, unknown publisher RPGNow is still pretty much where you need to go.

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