As some of you know I'm working on a game that's planned on being sold as an online download for you to print yourself. My game in particular is basically just a book, with 'cut-out' pages for all of the game pieces.
Recently someone turned me onto CafePress.com, which will print and bind and ship your book to the buyers. Their base cost for my particular book, of (currently) 168 pages is about 13 bucks. So if I sold it at 25 (What most of my buyers say is a fair price if they were to buy it at a store), I'd still be making the same profit as I was selling it as a download. The drawback is that they don't print in color, except for the cover.
So I started poking around and I found http://www.lulu.com , which seems to offer the same service. You upload your book to them, they print, bind, sell, etc. However, they only charge 20% of the price as royalty to themselves. This means I can sell the book for less and make more profit. I don't have to deal with distribution or shipping or anything like that, and I could be making roughly 20 bucks per book sold.
Does this sound like a good situation to get into? lulu.com says they keep no rights to the book, and I can delete the book from the online store and never have it be sold there again. It sounds like a good deal, but I'm still wondering if there's some sort of catch.
lulu.com also offers, for 35 bucks, a Basic ISBN service. With this, they'll put a scannable barcode on the back of the book, and if you pay 150 bucks, you'll get benefits like being able to sell your book through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders.
Has anyone out there published their game this way? It seems like a great way to go for me since my game is basically just a book (like an RPG or whatever). What do you all think? Is it a venture I should take?
The biggest drawback for my game is that people may not want to buy a game online and print it themselves, though some people actually do prefer this method, because they get to duplicate game pieces and you can get it right away. With lulu.com, however, I can do both, and get many more people interested in the game, and make good profit in the meantime.
Any feedback at all is welcome on this, cause this could be pivotal in my 'career' as a game designer. Also if anyone out there knows of other places like lulu.com, please share some info. Thanks!
I think I read something wrong. I'm still checking through the site to see how it really works. Where did you find the cost per page?
edit: Okay I just found the info. It seems that even if I want to make a 200 page book of 170 pages black and white and 30 pages of color, I'd still be charged the color price for all of the 200 pages.
This does change things but I'm still interested in doing this, so any other input would be helpful.