OK, I received an e-mail from someone keen to develop and publish their game. I wrote back to them but figured this was good advice generally for putting on the forum. So here it is.

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My advice is that Publishing is (a) easy and (b) there are no big secrets.

Which is hard to believe when it is a complete unknown.

To be honest, all that you have to do to publish a book is...

* Complete it to your own satisfaction. (Whether that involves paying for art, or clip art, or no art; whether that involves laying it out yourself or asking someone to do it for you, or paying someone to do it for you; whether that involves asking friends to read it or, or doing the editing yourself, or paying for editing... is up to you).

*Then make a PDF. I can help you check your PDF if you are worried about that.

*Sell the PDF directly with a PayPal button (get a free website or blog to host it) and/or via a website like RPGnow/DriveThruRPG (which costs $40 to join) and/or LULU (free).

*LULU also allows you to sell print copies.

*If you want then a short-run digital printer could print you 50 or 100 copies of your book. I would recommend that you do a short run with LULU initially, as you will want to make changes after seeing it in print.

That's it.

Later on you can worry about being on "stores". In fact, you can find an outlet locally by visiting your local games shop with books and so on.

But, at the moment you are at the stage of completing it "to your satisfaction", as part of that I would recommend posting Actual Play on places like the Forge (and here) and asking others if they want to playtest it for you too. The best way to elicit this mutual help is to help people with their designs and comment on their APs.

I'm super-interested in seeing your game published so I'll help out as much as I can.
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Now, I think a lot of publishers like to swagger about like they're a cut above. And a lot of unpublished people figure that there must be something exotic about it.

Well, no, there isn't. Guys like Scott Dorward are a cut above and he hasn't published a game at all. He's way above because of his running games and having fun. No games idiot who's published a (terrible) game (badly) that I've seen over the years in the "scene" is even remotely on a par with him.

So, if you have an idea and you want to publish it then you should... as long as... you do so sensibly (is it worth doing this? how much am I going to need to invest in this? time? money? emotion?) ... and critically (is my game actually shit? should I be publishing this? for money? for free? what are my goals?).

The world doesn't need more crap games, I'm afraid, so don't publish just to publish. But just because you're currently unpublished and someone else has a (silver-spoon funded) games company doesn't mean your game will a priori be any better/worse than theirs.