Brackish Draught

Dawn of the Orcs Development Log 3 – Low-Risk Printing and Shipping

In Development Log 2: From a Game To A Book I chronicled how Dawn of the Orcs went from a set of playable rules to an actual printable book. Now I’m going to get into the logistics side.

As usual, this is a novice’s journal and not an expert’s advice – I’m recording my first time doing this, not speaking from a position of authority. That said, I’m going to try to keep this post more concise and less narrative, because I think even a veteran game designer could find it a useful case study in the beginner’s experience.

Some context: Dawn of the Orcs is 52 pages, A5 size (the international equivalent of digest), and black and white with a color cover. I started to plan printing around August 2024 and finished Kickstarter fulfillment in March 2025.

For printing and shipping, my first goal was to minimize my personal risk, and my second goal was to minimize environmental impact. I was not trying to make a living as an RPG writer. I was trying to make sure I didn’t lose money from publishing my game, and didn’t make myself so miserable it impacted my day job. I think there’s a decent number of other indie TTRPG creators with the same situation. I am lucky enough to have a steady day job and a small amount of savings, so I could afford to invest money that wouldn’t see a return for several months. I know this isn’t the case for everyone who makes RPGs.

Of course, print on demand is the ultimate lowest-risk option, but POD books have limited quality control, almost no profit per volume, and I didn’t find a printer that had the paper options I wanted. That meant a conventional print run, finding a place to store books, and finding a way to package and ship them to customers.

I did a bit of research into sustainable printing, consulting people I knew in the industry, as well as soliciting advice from Hinokodo, an RPG creator who has a reputation as environmentally-friendly. I wish I had done more research, because I don’t have any citeable sources to back these claims up, but this was the common wisdom I found:

If I do another printing project, I’m going to spend time looking for research papers so I can try to have a more calculated approach. This time around, I was rushed by the need to have a printing plan in place before launching the Kickstarter.

I started with a small test printing of Dawn of the Orcs. I used Mixam, which is known for being user friendly for beginners. Dawn is 52 pages long, black and white, with a color cover – not a lot of color, but enough to count as color for printing rates. A single copy would have cost a little over $50. I paid a little over $200 for 50 copies in the test run, or around $4 a copy. From those 50, I could send one to everyone involved in art and layout for review, have plenty to give out as review copies before the Kickstarter, and use some as barter in zine swaps. There was a risk that the test copies would have too many problems to use as review copies. In retrospect, doing separate test and promotional runs might have been slightly less risky, but it worked out this time and was much cheaper than doing two small runs.

I was happy with the test print, but I spent some time looking for alternatives to Mixam. I started with the small local print shops around me. Normally I’d be all about buying local, but I don’t think I’ll ever look at a local print shop again. All of the ones near me had high prices, none or almost none of the sustainability options I wanted, and terrible customer service. The one closest to me was very happy to talk about my project but never got around to sending the quote they promised; it’s been over half a year. I’ve talked to other RPG designers who have worse horror stories. I think printing is one of the industries that really runs better at scale.

I found larger printers who looked promising, but ultimately I settled on Mixam again. There’s an old saying – faster, better, cheaper, pick two. Mixam’s model is to pick better and cheaper, which is exactly what I needed. Mixam print runs can take a week or two longer than their competitors, but at the time I wasn’t able to find another printer that charged less per unit and still had a good reputation. Mixam had most of the sustainability options I wanted – they use vegetable inks by default, they offer uncoated, 100% recycled paper at a decent price, and they at least make an effort to run their presses on renewable power. The price calculator on their website is incredibly convenient for estimating orders, and there’s no practical limit on how small or large of a print run they can do.

I’d encourage other creators to see this as a starting point, not a recommendation. Since printing Dawn, I’ve seen other creators find better prices and more interesting binding options with other print services – but at least for now, Mixam is a nice baseline for comparison.

Since my game is written in English, I expected the majority of my customers to be in the US, followed by Canada and the UK, with at least a few in other parts of the world. This turned out to be true. To minimize shipping distances and costs, I originally planned to do a US print run for fulfillment to the Americas, and a UK print run for fulfillment to Europe and Africa, figuring out Asian and Australian shipping as it came. I found out that it was much cheaper to ship from the UK than ship from the US for any destination in the world outside the US, including Mexico and Canada. I used Mixam UK for convenience, and they charged about half the price per book to print in the UK vs the US, even with a print run half the size. This meant that splitting the print run ultimately saved money.

A game designer could save even more by doing the whole print run in the UK or an even cheaper country, and people do all the time, but that would have meant shipping the majority of the print run internationally, and it would have exposed me to risk from new tariffs and import issues. As far as I’m concerned, the less my books have to cross international borders, the better.

The rule of thumb I heard for total print run size is to do 2-3 times the number of copies ordered in the Kickstarter; this will cover about a year of post-Kickstarter sales. It hasn’t been a year yet so I don’t know if it will hold true, but it was definitely an affordable run size with the Kickstarter funds raised.

After printing comes fulfillment – turning a box of printed books into individually packaged, addressed books and shipping them to the homes of backers. Lots of indie creators do this in their own living rooms, but I needed to use a fulfillment service for the UK print run, and I chose to use one for the US as well. I’d encourage anyone else who doesn’t enjoy working with packing tape to consider the same. It does come at a cost, but the money I would have saved by spending hours doing packaging is less than I would have made using the same amount of time to do any minimum-wage job. Fulfillment professionals can bulk order their packing materials, use their experience to do the same amount of packing in much less time, know how to find the best shipping rates, and are less likely to make costly mistakes.

For the US, I went with Indie Press Revolution. A lot of my favorite RPG authors have used them and had only good things to say, so it was an easy choice. For the UK, I asked around on Discords I’m on, and got a recommendation for Peregrine Coast Press, a very competent two-person operation in Leeds. Both of them double as distributors, so they could hang on to the rest of the print run, selling books to game stores and to customers online.

On the US side, the rest was simple. Mixam printed the books and sent them to IPR. I sent the addresses of backers to IPR, and IPR sent the books to the backers. Mixam lets you split deliveries, so I had 70 copies from the print run delivered to my home address for local deliveries and selling at events; I had fun traveling around my city by bus with a backpack full of books to drop off at different houses.

On the international side, there were complications. First, GSPR laws went into effect, setting new safety labeling standards for all goods imported into the EU. They were vague and nobody really knew how they would be enforced or what they specifically required from a TTRPG book. After a couple weeks of people across (more or less) the entire RPG industry trying to figure out what to do, Peregrine Coast found a solution to cover all their clients. They advised me on the text that needed to be added to the front of Dawn, they found someone in the EU who could serve as a contact for all their products, and they printed up cards with contact info that could be included with any product shipped to the UK.

Then I ran afoul of the UK tax code. When I submitted the final files for Dawn to Mixam UK, they informed me that, per VAT Notice 701/10 of His Majesty's Revenue and Customs, there is a 20% tax on any book that contains more than 25% blank space for writing in (with exceptions). Dawn has an Orc Chronicle at the back for players to record their game in. I suspect that the tax shouldn’t apply to Dawn because the VAT notice refers to total area, and much less than 25% of Dawn’s total area is for writing, but it would have cost more for a few hours of a lawyer’s time than my total profits from international fulfillment. Paying the VAT would have had ripple effects on the cost of shipping and importing the books to other countries. The cheapest solution ended up being to add 8 additional pages to the book, so that even by page count it wasn’t 25% blank space. At first, I had a lot of fun ideas about humorous things to throw in there, but eventually I kept it serious and added some tables, optional rules, and a rewritten version of an earlier blog post about orcs. I also put the extra content online for free, so US customers wouldn’t be left out.

I’m still a big believer in digital distribution, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever print another book again, but if I do, I’ll probably take a similar approach. I’ll shop around a little more for printers, but doing separate US/UK print runs worked out, and I’m very happy with IPR and PCP. I might use an EU-based printer and distributor to make it easier to comply with future EU regulations; I’ve also heard that EU printers tend to be very skilled, and offer high quality printing at inexpensive rates. I’ll still use recycled, uncoated paper and vegetable inks. Without a doubt, the best resource for me was the Atopia Discord, where I was able to get useful, specific advice at every step of the project. I talk with people about game design in many places, but Atopia provided the most help with actually getting a book printed and shipped.

If reading this had made you curious about Dawn of the Orcs, you can find it on IPR, PCP, or digitally only at Itch.io.