How to Self-Publish Your Own Collectable Card Game- Part2

After settling on the rules comes getting your game designed, published and on the market. The following steps require a lot of research, money and legwork. You will want to make sure that you have a budget set out already. If you need a little more cash there are always loans, but be wary of these. If you are considering taking out a loan to fund your game, talk to a representative at a bank first and find out all the information you can about it first. You will not see a lot of profit on your game straight away, so do not get ahead of yourself and end up owing more money than you can afford to pay back.

First comes the task of designing the layout of your cards. Using Photoshop, Illustrator, or another design program will speed the process up, make the cards look better and smooth the process along later on. If you do not have a design program or just not all that savvy with them, you can ask and/or hire someone to do it for you. This is also useful if you plan on including artwork on the cards. There are many artists on the internet who are itching to do professional work and would relish the opportunity to have their artwork featured in a card game. If you do not know where to start looking, try deviantart.com or elfwood.com. Each site has hundreds of artists and many of them do commissions. Talk to the artists and see if there price is within your budget. After you have this all taken care of you should begin the play testing phase. Either print out the cards from home or go to a print shop to get a few cheap decks made. Finding play testers is easy enough; post up an ad at your local game or comic shop or go on a few local forums and you will find volunteers. Listen to all of their comments about the game. A lot of times they will find holes in your system that you have yet to realize. This will also let you see how much people like the game, which will give you an indication of how well received it will be once the game is on the market.

When you decide that your game is ready for print you can go one of a few different routes. First you can stay with the small print shop. It will be the cheapest route to go, but the production quality will be low. Another option is to use a small independent publishing company. A few have popped up over the last few years; such as thegamecrafter.com and Guild of Blades Retail Group. You keep the rights to your game, they simply publish it for you. You will need a little bit more money to use these services, a few hundred would be your safest bet, but the production quality will be higher than the print shop. The third route is to find a third party company and see if they will publish your game. This can be a bit of a double edge sword and really works best if your starting capital is in the low thousands. The production quality will be the highest, but since most of the publishers use over-seas factories, it can take several weeks for your game to arrive at its destination. It is best to go over your budget and see how much you need to start and how much you can afford to continue printing decks.

The last thing you need to do is find places to sell your game. Starting your own website and buying ad space online are good first steps. It gets the word out about your game and gives people a place to order your game from. After that you should try talking to local game and comic shops and see if they will sell your game in their store. Lastly there is gaming conventions. You can purchase space at a convention and set up a booth. The rates will vary depending on the size of the convention, but it does gives you the opportunity to get your game out to a large audience. If you follow your budget closely and go through each step carefully and patiently you can be well on your way to having a successful CCG.