M&M Superlink product and Amazon.com, Buy.com, and BN.co

[Luke de Sade]

Hi, guys. As most of you know, I plan on releasing a softcover M&M Superlink book (I still will not make the official press release, though). It will be an NPC book with new powers, new weaknesses, three short adventures, headquarter maps, and whatever else I may slip in at the last time. I don't have a name for it yet.

Still, the thing will be in black and white (this is all coming out of my pocket, and the color separation was WAY too expensive), with full color cover. I may end up using glossy paper, since it prevents runnines of the ink in regular "pulpy" paper. Gotta get the price for that.

Anyway, my question is this. I plan on selling this thing through a website I'm gonna put up, and I'm gonna use CCNow's services for credit card sales through them (I have been using CCNow with my father's magic website for our magic CD-Roms for three years now and we've never had a problem with them). Thing is, I wanna put this on Amazon.com, Buy.com, and BN.com, but I don't have the smallest clue as to how to go about doing this.

Anyone out there know how can I do this? And do I need to get an ISBN for the book to sell it through these companies?

[SassyRonin]

You might want to look into http://www.lightningsource.com/. They print on demand so you don't have to plunk down a ton of cash to get started, and they feed into Amazon (.com, .uk, etc...) so your book will get in their system. Last I heard their print quality wasn't the best (you could run your finger along the page and feel the text) but they're hard to beat for setup fees.

As I understand it, bn.com is a tough nut to crack, but you gotta start somewhere.

Another option for printing that is new and I've heard no reviews of is cafepress: http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/books.aspx

Hope this helps!
Good luck!
Evan

[Luke de Sade]

Evan, thanks for the help, man. I want to give this book the best quality possible, and I don't know if the first one is a good choice if you can feel the print with your fingers. Still, good prices are tough to beat.

[mrobviousjosh]

I just wanted to say Luke that I respect your quality over cost methodology. It's one of the reason I bout G.R's M&M with it's glossy pages. It showed they cared enough to spend the extra and charged less than comparable WOTC books would have. Anyway, just wanted to say your extra effort is noticed.

[Novac]

Okay, I confess I wasn't a MnM fan at first. Tri-Stat SAS has my heart and it'll always be my first Super Hero RPG love. However, here in N.C. I couldn't ever find anyone running, or playing anything but d20 games of any stripe. Then I saw MnM, I had put off getting it at first because I really didn't want to buy another book I'd never use. Then I flipped through it one day in the local shop. Quality printing, nice art work and it showed they put a lot of effort in it. I ended up buying it, FC and ToC.

I guess the 'moral' of the story here is that while people might not judge a book by the cover they judge it by all the other stuff. Content not being the least. If you build it (and it rocks) we'll come

Then there's blokes like me that'll likely buy it just to have something to read that day, but that's beside the point.

[Luke de Sade]

I still have to get that quote about how much I'm gonna pay for the glossy paper. I think it would not go as high as I would expect.

But yeah, my friend at the printer gave me the price for Bond paper, but 'm not really convinced. It looks too cheap. And I saw some glossy work of his and it looks really professional, so I'm thinking of going with that one.

Still, it's gonna be black and white because color separation is TOO expensive, and I don't wanna pay that much for so many copies of the book if I don't know if I'm gonna sell them all. Remember this is all coming out of my pocket. But I still wanna give it quality, even if it's not in color, so I'm going with glossy.