Call from the Deep Part 4 – Making it Pretty

How to Help your Work Sell

This article series covers lessons I learnt while writing the best-selling Call from the Deep, my first long-form campaign published on the DMsGuild in June 2019.

The past three articles; Planning, Research, and Links, have all been about narrative design and how to actually write a campaign that’s of a publishable quality. Call from the Deep taught me a lot about how to write, or rather how not to write, but it also taught me about graphic and layout design (and illuminated how much I despise it).

Here’s the hard truth. Call from the Deep would not have sold a single copy at the $39.95 price point if it was plain text on a white page with no art and no cover. NOT A SINGLE COPY. I guarantee it. Even if it was written by a better known, more talented author, I still doubt it would have sold many copies. It certainly wouldn’t have hit the #1 spot on DMsGuild, and still be hanging around at #13 nearly two years later.

What makes Call from the Deep sell is the artwork. What makes it loved is the writing. Without the art, specifically the cover, it just wouldn’t attract people’s attention. Selling is about drawing attention to a product. Customers want an epic cover, awesome interior art, and handsome maps.

Art on a Budget

Getting awesome art isn’t cheap. Custom art especially can run into the tens of thousands of dollars for a single book. Maybe even more for enormous tomes or bestiaries. Not everyone, certainly not new publishers, can afford that kind of outlay, especially if they have no guarantee that they’ll make the money back. So, here are my three pieces of advice:

• Kickstart your project.
• Use stock or public domain art.
• Reach out to artists about existing work.

Kickstart. If you kickstart your project you’ll know how much money you have before you spend it. This is in contrast to traditional publishing sites (like DMsGuild and DriveThruRPG) where you rely on sales. While DMsGuild gives you access to a lot of free art from the WotC archives, a lot of it is crummy, and all the best stuff has already been used a hundred times over. It’s not new and exciting any more. My suggestion would be to fork out for a nice cover then Kickstart. The cover should draw people in, and then you can spend as much on interior art as your budget allows. If you go over-budget, you still have the potential to generate income via sales on DriveThruRPG or other platforms afterwards. You cannot kickstart a DMsGuild project.

Stock & Public Domain Art. Stock art varies in quality and price, but there is some great stuff out there. I’d highly recommend Dean Spencer, the king of stock art, and Dyson Logos for maps (although folks love colour maps rather than black & white if you can afford it). Forrest Imel is also grand, as is Daniel Comerci and Eric Lofgren. Both DMsGuild and DriveThruRPG have loads of great stock art that you purchase, and most of it is very reasonably priced. Public Domain art in the fantasy style is much harder to find unfortunately, but if you’re a wizard with Photoshop you can sort of layer things up and add filters or whatever (I’m not a Photoshop wizard) to make awesome things. Check out this stream by Chris Bissette for an example of what I mean.

Existing Art. The cover of Call from the Deep was not made for that adventure. It’s a piece by Gabriel Cassata published on ArtStation 5 years ago. I found it long before I wrote the campaign, and gained the usage rights not long after. If you can’t afford custom art, try reaching out to artists about licensing their existing work. It’s often much cheaper, though pretty inconsistent depending on the artist.

I have an older article from my Guild Guidance series about getting art.

What Works?

Another sad truth is that people typically, certainly the DMsGuild audience, prefer the Wizard of the Coast styling. Tools like Homebrewery allow creators to copy that style with amazing ease. It’s what I used when I started out on the Guild. Nowadays I use Adobe InDesign, because it allows me to do a little more and is a lot faster. I use it in conjunction with DocsFlow to seamlessly sync the Google Docs I work in with the InDesign file. However, I know top creators that use Microsoft Word to similar effect. I still use Wizards of the Coast styling in most of my D&D work, because it’s a clean, simple style that people are familiar with – they don’t need to acquaint themselves with my style, they can just rely on what they know – boxed text, sidebars, etc. However, if you’re going to come up with your own layout style, consider taking a look at old edition layouts and see what remains constant throughout the editions. The main thing I’d say is – keep it simple! Nobody wants to have to remember how to read your work, as well as the work itself.

Building Relationships

This applies not just to artists, but to editors, layout artists, graphic designers, proofreaders, and playtesters – pretty much everyone involved in the process of creating a book, especially a big one like a campaign. Build a relationship with these people. I’ve worked with Danny Pavlov, Call from the Deep’s primary artist, on half a dozen projects now. Because we have a good working relationship, it always flows smoothly. Danny knows the kind of scenes I like, and I know how much time he needs for certain pieces, and what his rates are. This makes things like commissioning art a lot easier, because it’s a more predictable process. Again, the same is true for folks like editors and proofreaders.

Design is the Game is the Design

A slight side note – sometimes, a game is directly interwoven with its graphic design and layout. Think about MÖRK BORG or Thousand Year Old Vampire for example. The mechanics and feel of both of these games are directly linked to their design and the artwork style. That’s often not true for D&D releases – certainly it’s not true for the books Wizards of the Coast produces. Despite this, it’s worth bearing in mind. The way things are laid out impacts the way a reader moves through the book and processes the information within.

Conclusion

Your adventure might be the best written thing in the world, but it won’t sell unless it looks good. It’s an unfortunate reality but one we’ve got to deal with. Sorry. I don’t make the rules. I really do advise talking to artists like humans, not like art machines, and building a relationship with them so you can work with the right people on the right project. Heck, if you’ve got the money, hire an art director!

If you’re on a budget, stock art is your best friend. It’s going to take time to find the good stuff, and it’s almost never going to be exactly what you want (unless you find the art first, then write the adventure, which is a nice way to work sometimes), but it’s perhaps worth it for the money saved.

For now, this is the end of the Call from the Deep series. These four parts cover the biggest things I learnt while writing and publishing it. Hopefully at least some of it has been useful! If you’ve got any questions about things I did with the campaign, please do reach out by replying to this email, or via social media.