ACKS print on demand?

Dear Autarchs,

here: http://www.autarch.co/blog/adventurer-conqueror-king-release-date

you said that ACKS would be made available also on print-on-demand

it would be nice to have it at least on LULU (better also on Amazon), since I would love to have my HardBack/Softcover copy of the rules (without printing them myself), from gamesalute I can just buy the companion (+16$ to cover posting), maybe buying both book +16$ I could stay into it. My usual Italian rpg-store don’t seem to have it (we are friends so he went out of his way to look into it). I didn’t buy it last year since I was deep in other things… what now?

Thanks, Fabio :slight_smile:

Sorry for double post… it seems you cannot delete a post…

The magical administration fairy has taken care of it for you.

oh… praise to the administration fairy :slight_smile:

We have been having trouble keeping ACKS in stock. I'll discuss the idea of ACKS print-on-demand with Tavis, as this might be the best way for us to keep the game in consumer hands.

Good!

consider Lulu and Amazon create space

anyhow (I found my books at gamesalute by contacting them directly… a little pricy on spedition but ok)

I would buy them off lulu in a heartbeat. I live in Canada, and Gamesalute shipping for the players companion would have cost me $65 for the book and shipping. Then add in the core book. WAY too much. Lulu is sadly more reasonable than that (and they gouge shipping to Canada).

So as much as I want to play ACKS, I sadly won’t be (playing from PDF’s suck) as the cost to ship up here to Canada is just too much currently.

Game Salute is working on setting up international re-shipping, so that they can send one box overseas and then have agents there ship them at local rates. My impression is that the shipping rates are what they are; when you see someone who's able to offer lower international shipping it's because they're taking advantage of a reshipping arrangement like this. No word yet on when those will be in place, but I'm actively looking into all this stuff especially because it relates to predicting costs and reward levels on D@W.

I'm not sure whether Lulu reships or has overseas printers make the books and then sends them locally, which potentially would be the cheapest method of all. One reason we're interested in having the main D@W printing in softcover would be that it could take advantage of this local-POD option.

For international folks who've used Lulu:

- what country are you in?

- how much does Lulu charge to ship to you?

- is shipping cost or printing quality more important to you? (The main print run with McNaughton & Gunn will likely be using a traditional offset press, whereas if we did a local POD solution it'd be a digital press; some people can tell, or care about, the difference).

For myself, someone who games every other week, I DO appreciate well done printing and binding (Frog God Games, Shadows of Esteren come to mind), but for my players, they would rather have the book cheaper. I know they all like to have their own copies, so for me I can order form Lulu or RPGnow and get a set of books for my group as I have done for Labyrinth Lord, Other Dust, OSRIC, and a few others.

While I can tell the difference between POD and offset, POD may help get additional sales. For example, I want to order the ACKS Player Companion at $35. Game Salute tells me it will be another $30 in shipping (not bad to me personally, a little expensive from the US to Canada), but I know there are the silly customs/tariffs. My players would NEVER pay that, so that leaves me flipping the bill for an additional copy or two and personally that is my breaking point.

An order at Lulu of roughly the same amount dollarwise (Teratic Tome + Wilderness Alphabet) comes to $36.51. Their option to ship 4-8 days after printing costs $12.98 and my orders have always arrived in 5 days it seems (this is their cheapest option to me). There is then the annoying Ontario HST tacked on at $2.48. So I could get the same value dollarwise in product for $13 cheaper. Those two books combined are about the same page count as the ACKS Player Companion.

I understand that printing is not cheap by any means, my uncle had a printing business that he sold a few years back just outside of Toronto that he had run for years. But I will say this, if there was a POD option for the ACKS books, hardcover preferred, but it really doesn’t matter with a quality RPG like this, that there would be orders of 6 of each book from myself alone.

Thanks for taking the time to look at this, and keep up the good work.

Is shipping the PC from GS $30? I got the core book a few months ago and shipping was $10 (the discount for buying the pdf) to Canada. I haven’t checked what the PC is yet, I’m thinking my FLGS is going to be getting a copy in eventually, and I have no problem using the pdf for now.

International shipping rates increased in 2013 so that might make the difference between your experience with the ACKS book and others' with the PC.

Yeah, but 200% seems like a drastic increase.

Yikes, yeah it is $30 to ship. That’s kookoo, hopefully the FLGS gets a copy.

I got both books, from gamesalute (shipping to Italy)
40$+35$+23$(shipping)=98$ that is about 70 Euro… than another 20 euro (about 27$ in Italian taxes :frowning: )… it took less than 4 days

Print on Demand maybe would lower the price of the book and lower shipping

lulu is quite expensive on shipping but have hardcover/coil/softcover

amazon has cheap (and often free) shipping* but have only softcover perfect bound
*where it has POD (.com, .co.uk, .it, .fr, .es, .de)

GameSalute didn’t charge me that much money for shipping – I paid 15.00USD for both books. I suspect that the shipping difference might be if you had them use a courier (UPS?) to ship instead of USPS? Just a guess… that seems to me to be the usual difference in US shipping charges. I don’t get anything shipped to me form the US by courier if I avoid it – the base cost is always much more, and the “brokerage fees” are simply nuts.

I shop Lulu but I live in Scotland and they have a LULU UK. I imagine that would still be cheaper for Europeans than GS. Though Lulu is still high. Amazon would be amazing but I imagine there are other problems there.

We do have books in Amazon's inventory in the US, that could be an option as well. 

Does anyone know of a UK supplier? … I don’t want to pay shipping from the far side of the planet!

I know Leisure Games often has our books if that helps.