First of all, unlike Kindle’s Digital Text Platform, it’s not as easy as going to a website and uploading an HTML file. Where Kindle is relatively open and “anybody” can publish there, Apple only allows a small number of “certified content aggregators” to publish to iBooks. Most of these are big publishing houses, but also in the list are Lulu and Smashwords, both of which are self-publishing outfits. So if you want to publish to the iBookstore and you don’t want to submit your manuscript, deal with house editors, get a book contract, and all that mess, you’ll be using one of these two options.

My first choice was Lulu, which I had worked with before and which accepts files in ePub, an open format useful for other applications. However, Lulu’s process does not, at this time, seem to work. Their ePub validation fails to validate files that clear other validators and does not return error messages. Their for-pay ‘ePub Conversion Service’ turns out files riddled with formatting errors. So they refuse your file, don’t tell you why, offer to charge you money to do it themselves, and do it poorly on top of that. So I’ll be investigating Smashwords tomorrow.

I’ll write “Part 2″ of this process soon; in the mean time, if you’d like to check out the ePub process or the first few layers of the Lulu process (before you hit the layer of utter failure), read on…

ePub

So the first step is turning your content into an .epub file. I’ve found this great tutorial at jedisaber.com which shows you how. All you need is a text editor and a .zip program*, because .epub is basically a set of XML and XHTML files inside a .zip archive that’s just been renamed to .epub. The tutorial has a ‘hollowed out’ .epub file ready to use as a template**. I don’t want to repeat every step that’s in the tutorial, but the basic strokes are: dump your content into the chapterX.xhtml files (which is stupid-easy if you store your content in XML, which you should because of this very thing), update the index file with where to find what, and then enter all your metadata (author, publisher, etc). Then zip it back up and rename the .zip file into an .epub file.

As a side note, if you publish to Kindle as well, your .epub can use the same XHTML files that you upload to Amazon… and if you don’t publish to Kindle, well, now you’ve got a suitable file, so go set up a new revenue stream.

*What this tutorial will not tell you is you cannot use the Mac OS X built-in compression feature, because that function re-orders your files within the archive and adds invisible files that mux things up. After much frustration, I used Springy, a little utility that makes proper archives. And while we’re on the topic of ‘proper’ archives, when you use Springy, make sure you add the mimetype file to the archive first and use the “Store (no compression)” option. Then dump in the rest using the “Deflate (standard)” option.

**The other thing is that the sample file available at the tutorial isn’t quite up to spec. It may have been obsolesced by a new epub standard or something — I’m not researching why it fails, you can do that for extra credit, if you like — but the thing of it is that sample.epub fails validation for a handful of reasons. Its xhtml files must be resaved as UTF-16 text encoding, and content.opf’s line 14 needs its media-type changed to “application/x-dtbncx+xml”. Or you could just use my file as a template.

You will want to validate your ePub, and there is a handy web app from Threepress Consulting that will check it for you. Apple will have its own validation process that checks this and a few other things, so make sure your file is clean here before proceeding.

Lulu

Publishing to iBooks through Lulu is relatively straightforward, with two caveats (besides it not, you know, working). The first is that Lulu will slap its own ISBN onto your iBooks ebook (that seems redundant…). This means that the publisher of record, at least as far as ISBN is concerned, will be Lulu. On the up side, this ISBN is only for the ebook version, and Lulu will “give” you the ISBN for free (whereas Bowker will charge you a chunk of change). The second caveat is that Lulu only accepts .epub files for publishing to iBooks (could be worse: Smashwords only accepts .doc), which are notoriously difficult to produce well (and very easy to produce poorly).

Lulu has been doing the self-publishing for years, so it’s got its ducks in a row. You start a new eBook project, you upload your ePub, you set some metadata (for some reason all iBook prices need to end in .99), and then it wants a cover image. I already have cover images set up for rooksbridge.com and for print production, but of course these weren’t the right size. One quick crop later, and I uploaded the cover file (and turned off their text-overlay of the title and author). Lastly, you click the prominently displayed check box labeled “iBooks Distribution Service.”

…except there is no such check box.

While their “we do iBooks” page is flashy and slick and looks like they’ve got their shit together, well… the truth of the matter is that it’s still a new service and there’s a guy at Lulu that’s got to flip some bits for you. You’ll find this out if you dig through the Lulu Knowledge Base to find the How to get your book in Apple’s iBookstore (Authors) article. Yes, it’s another tutorial.

Luckily, this one is short. The skinny is: set up an ebook with the handy-dandy ebook wizard (which is relatively straightforward) and then “buy” this free product. Putting this product (which is “free for a limited time”) into your cart adds you to a queue, and one of Lulu’s people will contact you by email in “two business days.”

I got my response the day after I “bought” the submission service. The email reminded me that the ebook needed to pass ePub validation and asked for the Lulu ID number of the project I wanted submitted to the iBookstore. Presumably I might have other eBooks published through Lulu, and since the submission service is presently bound to my account and not a specific project, they need to know which to send. The email then advised me that the submission process might take 4 to 6 weeks to complete. The kicker of course being that, if Apple refuses the file (which it reserves the right to do), Lulu won’t actually tell me; I have to keep tabs on the iBookstore (which, without an iPad, is difficult…) and if my book doesn’t appear, then I contact Lulu again.

Of course, this process ended with emails from Lulu claiming my files did not validate, not giving me any reason why they did not validate, and the “resolving the case” so I couldn’t reply for more details. I did a little research on their own support forums and found this same story repeated over and over again. Perhaps someday Lulu will get their act together and become a conduit for self-published content making its way to the iBookstore; that day is not today.

One of the unforeseen advantages of my approach, though, was that it left me with a lot of steampunk “pamphlets” full of colorful descriptions of a fictional solar system and short-short stories of the people who call it home. Content I might be able to use in other ways. For instance, I’ve had a “Spirit of the Full Light Full Steam Century” project on my hard drive for years that I never quite complete. Recently, though, as I’ve been putting Stories from Rooksbridge onto Kindle, it occurred to me that this stuff might be of interest to folks all on their own: pamphlets of the digital age, as kindle minibooks.

There are three, and I fired them off into the intarwebs at 99 cents a piece:

• For Queen and Country
• A Daring Tourist’s Solagraphy
• The Layman’s Reports from the Royal Society

And of course, I’ve got Rooksbridge available on Kindle, too, for the usual two-buck price:

• Dirty Work
• Getting By
• The Divide
• Ravens, Rooks, and Crows

Publishing to Kindle, it turns out, is dead-easy… as long as you have your content in an easily-accessible format, like XML or HTML. The above titles were approved for the Kindle store a couple days ago; when I went to check if they were live, they already had a couple sales on them. This with absolutely zero promotion, which is pretty neat. For maybe an hour’s effort on my part, it’s a nice little revenue stream that I don’t really have to do much to manage. The percentage of revenues that gets back to me is less than awesome (35%), but in the grand scheme of things, that’s 35% of revenue that I doubt I’d be tapping any other way.

So those of you who are Kindle-enabled: here’s another way to get some tasty, tasty content from my corner of the world. Hope you enjoy!

You can download the game from the 44 page of Stories You Play. Free registration is required; it’ll take you thirty seconds. The game is well worth it, if only for seeing the Clever Dice Tricks. The color is expertly embedded into the text; as I read it, I could see the rainy streets, 50s-era city blocks, and classic cars. This game will definitely get added to my game bag, and I suspect will make an appearance on my convention play list.

Thus ends the review portion; the game itself is very neat and you should download it. What interests me the most, though, over and above the actual (and very well-done) game, is its status as Free.

Matt is not spouting off a deluge of justifications for this decision (at least, not that I’m aware of), but I suspect he’s gone the Free route for a lot of the same reasons I’ve been eyeing it, myself. There is something very appealing about simply contributing to the community rather than wading into the marketplace. You can focus on making the product the best it can be, divorced from profit-driven marketing (which is not the same as no marketing at all). You don’t have to worry about making your investment back. You don’t have to remind yourself to pimp your game over and over and over again. You can just design and publish the best game you can make, and then release it into the wide, wild world.

Which sounds all nice and pretty, but there are of course a slew of caveats attached. Free is not simple.

I do have a few misgivings about how microfame garnered from previous retail sales contributes to adoption rates of free games. Or in other words, Matt can do this because he’s Matt Snyder; same with John Harper, and certainly the same for the game snippets that Vincent Baker occasionally throws off just to illustrate a thesis. I’m not sure if just anybody can walk into our schism-riddled “community” with a free product and have anybody take notice.

Because, let’s be frank, the only reason to publish is if you’re offering it to other folks. That’s sort of the definition. Otherwise it could remain a set of notes on your googledoc that you and your friends reference. If a designer goes through the effort to publish a game and there’s no splash, the effort to publish is (mostly) a failure. So the question is: how does Free publishing connect the publisher with an audience? Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers. Not yet.

I am intrigued by this Free thing. I would like to see more Free games — I suspect that would actually do some good for the broader community of players. I think, once properly harnessed and practiced, it could help develop the state of design. I’m just not sure what functional Free publishing looks like — but I’d like to find out.

— from the Aria of Bajinoth Steele,
Minoan-C Manuscript Fragment

The Six Ineffable Lessons of the Hidden Moon, or Six Lessons as it is more commonly known, was one of the greatest ven operas. Unfortunately, only fragments remain today. However, we can still experience the “Apotheosis of All Art” — at the gaming table. I’ve compiled everything that modern research knows about Six Lessons from my “Mysteries of Shan’ri” seminar, and packaged it together as a game scenario for John Wick’s Houses of the Blooded.

Ideally suited to convention play or as a one-shot “introduction” to the game, Six Lessons plays out in three to four hours before reaching its inevitable, bloody conclusion. The best part, though, is that there is a different bloody conclusion each time, whether it’s duels on rain-slicked precipices or murder on the Senate floor.

Six Lessons includes:

• Six Player Characters
• Seven NPCs, including Bajinoth Steele
• Developments for the Narrator to keep Players on their toes
• An Abstract of Senate Politics of the Period

Download Six Lessons here.

Download Situation Report!

This little project was a long time coming. Waaaay back when I first published Full Light, Full Steam, I put together demo materials: six “half-gen” characters and a handful of situations engineered for those characters. As a theme, I set each situation on a different planet: one on Mercury, one on Venus, one on Mars, and one in the Asteroid Belt. I also tried to diversify the situations as much as possible, so while one is all politics and social maneuvering, another one is all action-adventure, and another one is all scifi spaceships shooting ether cannons at each other. It was a nice little package and I was proud of it. It was, however, all in long hand and filled out cog cards. I always meant to fire up Illustrator and transfer all those characters, sets, props, and situations over into a pdf and publish it. Life intervened, of course.

As of a month ago, I actually thought I had lost the longhand originals, one or two drifting off at a time into the untold mess that is a Monday unpacking after a gaming convention. A couple weeks ago, though, I was pleasantly surprised to find three of the four situations in an old folder, and the fourth one filed away for safekeeping. The cog cards for all four situations were scattered all the hell over, but I managed to find them all and put all the pieces back together. In other words, I lucked out — it was all still there. Sensing that having all the pieces all in one place was not something I was lucky enough to have happen twice, I resolved to sit down and finally get the situations in a nice, safe, digital format.

Thus I present you Situation Report!, a free supplement for my three-year-old game Full Light, Full Steam. It includes six characters and four situations engineered for those characters, ideally suited to one-shot, short-form, or convention play. Hope you enjoy!

Jake Richmond is such a smarty.

Seth recently asked if the blog would explode when the tower hit full. The answer is yes: explode in awesomeness. I will also, I think, get to take a nap. I’ve been pounding away on this project like mad to get it to completion. Most recently, XML has saved my ass and made a lot of things lots easier. There’s nothing quite like laying out sixty pages by hitting an update button.

I’m presently looking at a launch date of August 1st. Fingers crossed…