Print On Demand
Down the hall, I can hear Samanta and Kate printing copies of Captain's Log #34. They previously printed the rulebooks for Strategic Operations and Romulan Border and Module C5 Magellanic Galaxy and other things.
Samantha (named for the lady on Stargate) and Kate (named for the murdered agent on NCIS) are Kyocera 9520 last print engines. We've had them for over two years and they can each print 100 copies of Captain's Log per day. They've been going for a few days now and have a few days to go, and they keep busy most of time printing restocks of old products. Other than color work (which must be done at a regular printer) we do everything (the black and white pages) print on demand, or print it yourself since we own the print engines.
The business model of the wargame/roleplaying industry for many years as been:
1. Print a minimum print run of a new product at a printing company.
2. Wait two weeks (or four weeks with some printing companies).
3. A big pallet of books arrives at the warehouse dock.
4. You sell enough of them to pay for the printing and to run the business another month.
5. The rest sit on the pallet waiting for restock orders, selling fewer and fewer copies each month.
6. Sooner or later, sales more or less end and you dumpster what's left, OR
6B: you sell out, need to reprint, and tie up a lot of money printing something that is selling a few copies a month.
This is basically a suicide pact. While it may work on cash flow (or may not), it accounting you can only deduct the cost of the books you sold, not the cost of the books you printed. You have to pay storage and insurance (and in Texas you have to pay inventory tax) on what's not sold yet. Most of the profits of most wargame/RPG companies were in fact "paper profits" (paper in the literal sense) stacked in the warehouse. All those unsold books were non-deductible expenses, in effect, profit but not money.
With print on demand, we print what we sell. We print a few more for what we expect to sell in the next month, but we don't have entire pallets of unsold books in the warehouse. If we spot a mistake, we can correct it on the very next copy. If we run out of something, we can start printing more copies of it without investing five thousand dollars in a standard print run of books so that we can sell five or six a day. We have, in the past, even thrown out pallets of non-selling books from printing companies (nice tax deduction there) and done an updated edition on the print on demand equipment (which if course means a lot of people buy it because it's the new version). Print quality is higher (since every copy is an original) and if one of the graphics prints bad, we know it when the first copy comes out of the printer (not when we have 5,000 copies land on the freight dock). We can replace that page before binding that book.
The running joke is that we could auction "the last copy of XYZ ever printed" on Ebay and then print another copy the next day.
Samantha (named for the lady on Stargate) and Kate (named for the murdered agent on NCIS) are Kyocera 9520 last print engines. We've had them for over two years and they can each print 100 copies of Captain's Log per day. They've been going for a few days now and have a few days to go, and they keep busy most of time printing restocks of old products. Other than color work (which must be done at a regular printer) we do everything (the black and white pages) print on demand, or print it yourself since we own the print engines.
The business model of the wargame/roleplaying industry for many years as been:
1. Print a minimum print run of a new product at a printing company.
2. Wait two weeks (or four weeks with some printing companies).
3. A big pallet of books arrives at the warehouse dock.
4. You sell enough of them to pay for the printing and to run the business another month.
5. The rest sit on the pallet waiting for restock orders, selling fewer and fewer copies each month.
6. Sooner or later, sales more or less end and you dumpster what's left, OR
6B: you sell out, need to reprint, and tie up a lot of money printing something that is selling a few copies a month.
This is basically a suicide pact. While it may work on cash flow (or may not), it accounting you can only deduct the cost of the books you sold, not the cost of the books you printed. You have to pay storage and insurance (and in Texas you have to pay inventory tax) on what's not sold yet. Most of the profits of most wargame/RPG companies were in fact "paper profits" (paper in the literal sense) stacked in the warehouse. All those unsold books were non-deductible expenses, in effect, profit but not money.
With print on demand, we print what we sell. We print a few more for what we expect to sell in the next month, but we don't have entire pallets of unsold books in the warehouse. If we spot a mistake, we can correct it on the very next copy. If we run out of something, we can start printing more copies of it without investing five thousand dollars in a standard print run of books so that we can sell five or six a day. We have, in the past, even thrown out pallets of non-selling books from printing companies (nice tax deduction there) and done an updated edition on the print on demand equipment (which if course means a lot of people buy it because it's the new version). Print quality is higher (since every copy is an original) and if one of the graphics prints bad, we know it when the first copy comes out of the printer (not when we have 5,000 copies land on the freight dock). We can replace that page before binding that book.
The running joke is that we could auction "the last copy of XYZ ever printed" on Ebay and then print another copy the next day.
posted by Federation Commander at 12:43 PM
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