The BRUTAL reality of publishing

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]I spent two years building a full tabletop war game set in my fantasy universe and right now you still can't play it. So where [music] is it? Well, it's currently frozen/ on standby. And that's because the reality of publishing your own creation is well very brutal.

[00:00:18]Of course, publishing a book is not as brutal as a, you know, tabletop war game because you don't have a a box and plenty of different things inside because the only thing you need for a book is just write a story and then go to a publisher. But then again, books have other problems like for example way more competition. In USA alone, I believe there is around 4 million books being published every single year and almost half a million of those is fiction. And well, publishing a book have way more problems than just the amount of competition that you have.

[00:00:52]Just keep that in mind whenever you think about publishing your own book.

[00:00:55]But before we get into why it's currently on standby, let me show you my project and tell you a little bit of how it actually started. And it all began when I was living in Iceland a couple of years ago. I always loved the northern vibes, you know, Vikings and tundras and snowstorm. And since Banner Saga is one of my favorite games, at least in terms of pure flavor, I decided to start my own war, my own fantasy universe. You probably saw the map that I posted on the community tab some time ago, but well, here it is. Here is the full resolution map of my world, or more specifically, at least one continent of my world. This map, at least in its entirety, was supposed to be kind of like a mystery where we would just make a tabletop war game or a book uh written and it would take place in each specific region and each time we would publish something new, a new region will be, you know, revealed and slowly and surely you will, you know, gather the entire map.

[00:01:55]And so that map was first drawn by hand by by me, but I kind of lost the original notebook where it was. So, you know, I've made a map for my universe, and I started casually world building and adding more and more lore and context for different regions. And I also made an RPG system for it to play, you know, a tabletop RPG campaign because I'm a nerd like that. And after hosting a couple of RPG campaigns, a friend of mine who also played in one of the those campaigns approached me and well, he proposed that we should do something with it with this universe.

[00:02:28]And so the idea to make a tabletop war game was born. To give you a bit of a context why we chose a tabletop war game and not something, you know, much simpler and shorter and much easier to produce. Was that I'm a giant nerd and just I just I just love very complex games like Crusader Kings and Hearts of Iron. And the same goes for tabletop games. I never ever liked short party tabletop games. that's just that that's just not for me. I always found them very boring. But on the other hand, I always loved big complex games like for example the tabletop version of the Game of Thrones or as this also known by its other name, How to Kill All of Your Friendships. If you know, you know. In addition to that, I also collected Warhammer 40k miniatures and I played quite a lot uh the tabletop war game 40k but that but pre before the eighth edition which was an absolute disaster and I will make a video about that. And since you know I was inside the community of war gamers, I knew that people are very interested in playing war games and a lot of people would really love to go and play tabletop war game. The problem always was the price because Games Workshop miniatures is that their price are just insane. And the other thing that was filtering people from playing was the fact that even if they had those miniatures, they were forced to, you know, assemble them and then paint them. And well, not everyone wants to do that. And so knowing that, we approached it with a accessibility in mind. We wanted to create a war game that would not require you to uh spend thousands of dollars just to play one army for one edition.

[00:04:12]We wanted to make it more accessible and not require a lot of friction, a lot of painting and assembling. When you buy the box, you would get the full game that when you open it, you would be ready to play. You would have the cards because in our game, you would not have miniatures, you would have cards, which you know saves on costs. and you would have cards for both factions, for all units, and a couple of maps to play. So basically, you didn't need to spend additional money on anything else. And so to test the mechanics of the game, we used a tabletop simulator. So here, for example, is one of our battle maps and our unit cards. I know it looks very rough, but it was not supposed to look nice. It was supposed to be very practical. And also, if you recognize some of the artwork on the unit cards and the commander cards, that is because we were just using a lot of random artwork found on the internet as placeholders representing the utility of the units on the battlefield because, man, commissioning your own artwork.

[00:05:15]We'll get to that. However, we do actually have two official artworks for our game that is not yet released, which I will show you right now. Here you have Ulf Urson, one of the commanders of the Isdarian faction. And here we have a card for a unit, specifically the retainer defender, which represents the kingdom of Ardana, the other playable faction. As you can see, the map and units do look simple enough, but there is actually a lot of complexity in terms of tactics and strategy. What we wanted fundamentally is to avoid metagaming and allowing new players to play well just by using historical tactics and strategies. This tabletop war game was supposed to be our baseline for publishing my own universe, you know, to to have something new and then use that universe to publish more and more things and to hook you up in this universe.

[00:06:10]Aside from the manual, you will also get a separate small book talking about the world, uh the factions, the backstory for each commander, which we had around 20 in total, as well as two short stories telling the different perspective of the war. That is the context of the game told from the side of one faction and then the side of the other faction. But don't worry, I will not start to describe the entire background lore of the game because this video would be like 4 hours long if I would start talking about it. But maybe another time. Now, the question is why did it fail? Well, I don't think fail is the correct word here. We're not abandoning the project. I'm still very passionate about it and I want to release it someday. But [sighs] here comes the brutal reality of publishing based on the research that we've made and trust me there was a lot of research that we've made and also some interviews with people working in the industry as well as actually published tabletop games designers.

[00:07:18]We calculated that just to start a Kickstarter campaign, and yes, you heard me right, just to start a Kickstarter campaign, not to publish yet, we would need around 50 to 60,000 Polish water, which is around 15,000 US.

[00:07:38]And [clears throat] well, for a passion project made by two people in the Eastern European country who don't really earn that much money, that's that's that's a lot of money. That's a lot. Especially that there was no guarantee that we will even publish it because again, that's not the price of publishing. That's the price of just having a chance to get the money from the Kickstarter campaign. That is just enough money to print like a dozen or two dozen boxes because you do need to print them to show uh what you worked on on the Kickstarter campaign and also to uh send them to other content creators and people who would be potentially interested in marketing. Spend money on marketing. Spend money on you know all the artwork on designing the manual and the other books and make the design of the cards and the design of the terrain.

[00:08:26]There's a lot of costs that get into that initial price of just starting the campaign. Now, if we would have an artist in our team who would agree to draw for us and design all the artworks for, you know, a cut in the revenue after it will be published. That would be great. That would save us a lot of money. The problem is that good artists don't do that. They just they just don't because they are very good. They know they are good and so they always ask for a price up front which you know that's fine but that means that we couldn't really you know ask any artist to do that.

[00:09:05]But for the artists who would potentially want to start operating with us for a cut we would need to go down to some lower quality artists who were just starting off who wanted to build their portfolio on something new since we also were building a portfolio. Those artists are extremely emotional wild cards because [snorts] we did actually find a couple of artists who were just starting off who didn't really had a bigger portfolio who wanted to you know build their brand with you know working with us and they were okay with you know with with sharing the the cut after publishing without any you know upfront cash and I don't know if I was just very unlucky but all of those people they were very emotional unstable people who either created a lot of problems, they were constantly complaining, they were missing their deadlines or just ghosting us or just just vanishing after like a couple of months of work. And part of me get it a bit because a project like this require hundreds if not thousands of hours for no guarantee of pay. But that also included us like the people who actually created the project. Just to give you a taste of it, to to to calculate how much potentially hours we spent on that project, we've made around 60 test plays. A single play would be around 3 hours of just gameplay and around 1 hour of explaining the rules both before the game and explaining the rules midame. So 4 hours times 60, that's around 240 hours just on testing alone. We are not even counting the meetings where we discuss all the mechanics. We are not counting the process of publishing our discussions about the logistics creating actually all that lore behind you know this game you know writing the background lore for all of that you know making world building for this specific region because I was doing world building for my entire world but we in that tabletop war game we focused on this one specific region so I needed to focus on that uh writing all the backstories for all 20 commanders uh writing those two short stories that I mentioned you and many many more and that I guarantee you would pass more than 1,000 hours of work if not more for absolutely no guarantee of return and no return on investment yet until I publish. I guess I wanted to make this video maybe not to blackpill you because I know that the reality that I'm describing to you is is pretty dark but because even if I complain a lot on how difficult it is on how much time I have spent on it how much energy how much it drained me because I you know I was still working in my normal 9 toive job even after all of that I was just happy making it like I was I was really enjoying doing it and I believe one of the main reason for that is that I expected that like I was not really expecting it to be a success immediately. I approached it with the mind that there is a chance that this will this will not happen and even if it will happen and we will manage to publish it there is a chance that we will not really earn that much money and I was okay with that because at the end of the day I I'm not doing that just for money. It would be great to just live, you know, by doing that, but I'm just really passionate about it and I would really like to go back to this project, but well, with the reality of, you know, [snorts] the lack of funds, we decided to freeze it until either we managed to save enough money for that or this channel will grow big enough so that I will not really need to worry about marketing that much because there will be enough people, you know, on that channel who would probably like to support me. As for now, I decided to start writing my book uh specifically a book about the origin of one of the factions that uh will be playable in that tabletop war game. And so, if you found value in this video or all of my content, then please consider subscribing and checking out my writing community that I just created where I will personally help you with your writing, with your storytelling, with your characters, with your world building. And if that's something that sounds exciting to you, then well, consider joining. And that's all for today.