As many of you will be aware the Guild of Blades recently opened a combined retail store / POD shop, stocking small runs of games on their shelves and printing others on demand from a catalogue.
As part of this opening they offered the chance for game designers to join their retail program, which means you give them a PDF of your game, they print a small run at their expense (so no cost to you) and then sell the games direct, with a cut going to you if they sell. I decided to sign up for this on the condition that I got one of the copies they printed.
So my GoB Solipsist arrived this week, and I have to say I have mixed feelings about it.
The Good
So the game has a nice feel to it. It's hefty and printed on good paper stock, without the flimsy feel that you get from LULU, which makes the book thick. The interior printing is also very nice, with dark black ink and a slight gloss to the print. It had a good fresh ink smell too :)
The Bad
The packaging was poor. It was wrapped in paper and sellotaped to a bit of card, rather than going in a proper shipping envelope. Now to be fair they are not in the business of shipping things right now, but it seemed like an awfully amateur way to do it.
The Ugly
And now we come to the cover. The cover was I'm sorry to say, awful. The printing and cardstock were fine, though a little brighter green than I'm used to from other printers, but the thing was mis-cut (it doesn't reach the bottom of the front cover) and glued on with so much glue that the spine is bowed, the cover creased front and back, and the glue visible from the top, bottom, and between the last page and cover. The spine appears not to have been pre-creased either, but just folded round the glue, which creates an irregular and ugly crease.
It looks hand-cut, hand-glued and badly done. I wouldn't sell this copy to a customer. I can only hope this was a symptom of somebody rushing, or maybe the worst copy going to me while better ones go on their shelves.
Pictures and GOB
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Thu, 11/12/2008 - 17:29.
Do you have any pictures?
Oh, and you've fed this back to GOB, right? What did they say about it?
No I've not fed it back yet
Submitted by David Donachie on Fri, 12/12/2008 - 15:12.
No I've not fed it back yet because it only just arrived :)
A picture .... good idea, I'll take one tonight if I can ever get out of work
http://www.solipsist-rpg.com/ - http://cubicle-7.com/starblazer/
Suggestion
Submitted by Gregor Hutton on Sat, 13/12/2008 - 18:44.
As a general rule I'd suggest contacting the printer before badmouthing their printed book online. It's at least more courteous and professional, and enables you to have the facts at your fingertips before posting for the world (well, internet) to see.
I'm sorry Gregor, but I
Submitted by David Donachie on Sun, 14/12/2008 - 17:37.
I'm sorry Gregor, but I don't think I am badmouthing them. I posted an analysis of what received because I thought it might be of interest.
For reference GOB tells me that their binding machine sometimes over-glues at the start of a binding run. They are now running blanks through the machine when it is started up to clear this issue.
http://www.solipsist-rpg.com/ - http://cubicle-7.com/starblazer/
My GOB Experience
Submitted by Iain McAllister on Mon, 15/12/2008 - 20:08.
I have to say that I have always found GOB to be very helpful and apologetic when things go wrong. Because I am ordering a 100 or so decks at a time and the process is not perfect, i have had decks arrive that I just can't sell. Ryan has always been willing to replace them in my next run, and I found him incredibly helpful during the setup of the company.
Interestingly GoB seem to be growing at quite a rate at the moment, having just opened up their first brick and mortar store that is selling game as well as providing a printing service.
I have no experience of their book printing at the moment, but I am sure Ryan will be willing to sort everything out.
Cheers
Iain
'The Giant Brain': 'Revenge of the B-Movie' out now!
Mob Justice now available!
Its challenging to get
Submitted by guildofblades on Tue, 16/12/2008 - 00:35.
Its challenging to get everything right all the time. Mistakes do happen. And with each piece of equipment, there is a learning curve to master it. So far I can say we've run into problems on three book runs we've done for folks. Two of those stem from the previous, outsourced, book binding service we had been using. For one of those, since a reprint of books bound wrong wasn't wanted, we worked out a partial refund for the portions of the run gone bad. In another case, we stripped down about 12 books and rebound them using the new binding that we bought, which does infinitly better on large books (his book was about 300 pages). The last problem we had is with a book that we have to print in sections. Two B&W sections and one color section. Its proved easier to print them in sections than work with the publisher to get the color profiles set up properly to play nice with our printer such that we could print B&W and color together all in one crack. As part of the alternate printing method we do for that book, we have a block of pages that end up printed in reverse order, which then must be
run through our book collator to reverse that order and make it correct. When we first began that, on the first run we hadn't realized that the collator wasn't exactly perfect and would occasionally snag two pages at once, thus putting a couple pages out of order. For that publisher we've had three books come in with page order problems, which we have replaced at our cost plus given a couple additional books for free to help the publisher offset the additional shipping fees they've taken on in handling replacements for their customers.
On the binding issue, we've elimiated the problem of too much glue on the binds of the first few books we run through the binder when gearing it up. We run a few blanks through first now. On the spine rounding, yeah, that happens a bit on books that are pretty thin. Haven't found a way around that with this binder. It happens to most any book under 100 pages or so. The spine ends up a bit roundish. Larger books don't have that problem and get nicely squared binding edges. But the good thing is the binder makes excellent and string binds, to such a degree that I have bound 700 pages and held the book open by a handful of pages and done the yank it up and down test, and still ended up with a perfectly strong bind
that was completely uneffected by the wear and tear of the test. On the grand scheme of things, we're pretty happy with the new binder.
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.guildofblades.com/retailgroup.php
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com
Yes Ryan, it certainly looks
Submitted by David Donachie on Tue, 16/12/2008 - 11:13.
Yes Ryan, it certainly looks strong! :)
http://www.solipsist-rpg.com/ - http://cubicle-7.com/starblazer/
When this is resolved...
Submitted by Graham W on Tue, 16/12/2008 - 22:00.
David, could you let us know how it is resolved? There are bound to be errors, so it's useful to know that mistakes occur, but even more useful to know how the printers respond when you're dissatisfied.
Basically, I'm more interested to know how Guild of Blades cope with these issues. Printers that cope with issues quickly are great.
Graham