Mike Gerrard

The adventures you submit to me in the hope of getting a review really are a knock-out... one way or another. The number of adventures being sent in is increasing all the time, so what are your chances of getting your adventure reviewed in the pages of your favourite magazine?
    For starters, let's just look at the odds against getting reviewed. Each month I receive on average 20 or 30 Speccy adventures, and at the most, I've got room to review about six.
    Sometimes it's a lot less than that if I want to squeeze in a solution or a clue collection or a special feature like this. Of those 20 or 30, about half a dozen will be from big or budget software houses, the rest being written at home and sold mail order. Chances are that the professional releases will get more attention, for various reasons. One is that if someone's agreed to publish them then it's already likely that they're better than average - though looking at some of the stuff that gets published, that isn't always the case. I'll also be more inclined to review them because it's more likely you'll see these games advertised or on the shelves of your software shop, and so they're more readily available than mail order titles. These games sell in thousands, and mail order games sell in hundreds, so I have to consider that when deciding what to review.
    One thing I can tell you is that it's no good writing to me saying that you're thinking of writing an adventure, and do I like the idea and will I review it? I'm only interested in finished games, because until it's finished I've no way of knowing whether it'll be ace or awful, and you may not even finish the game as writing adventures even with a utility like PAW is harder than some people think.
    One thing that will guarantee your game not getting more than a glance from me will be if there are bugs, spelling mistakes or grammatical mistakes in the first few locations. Get someone who's good at English to check the game for you, if you know you're not so hot yourself. If the screen layout has mistakes in it, so that you get full-stops on their own at the start of a new line, or the last letter of a word in the same place, then you'll get your game straight back. Likewise if I start to find bugs very early on, I'll waste no more time trying to get into the adventure. It's not my job to debug your adventures.
    If you still want to send your game in despite all this, then send it in a jiffy bag. This might seem like common sense, but I receive lots of tapes in ordinary envelopes that have split in the post... so some of the tapes sent never even arrive. Also include return postage, if you want my verdict on your game or if you want to get the tape back again. That doesn't have to be another jiffy bag, but do include a sticky label with your address and the stamps on it. And enclose a covering letter and make sure your name and address are in it. To guard against loading errors, also record the program a few times at different volume settings.
    Don't expect a reply straight away, or a review to appear in the next issue, as it takes quite a while to get through all the adventures that come in and reviews usually take a couple of months to appear anyway because of production delays. If you haven't enclosed return postage, don't expect to get a reply from me.
    These are just a few basic guidelines, but I can finish with two more definite comments. DON'T send me yet another spoof of The Hobbit, and DONT send me an adventure set in your school or featuring you and your friends. I get one of each of those every week, and they're usually so bad they make me want to go AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!
    

John Wilson has published several of his own adventures, first under his own name and more recently as Zenobi Software, and I'm sure most readers will be familiar with titles like Fuddo And Slam, The Secret Of Little Hodcome, Bulbo And The Lizard-King and others. For the inside story about running your own mail order operation, I asked John a few questions recently.
    
What would your first bit of advice be for anyone wanting to 'do-it-yourself'?
    Well first you sit on your hand until it goes numb, and then...
    
Not that! I'll rephrase it. You're writing your own adventure and thinking about publishing it yourself, so what's the f'irst thing to think about?
    Before you publish it you've got to play-test it thoroughly. I do a fair bit of this while I'm writing it, but as soon as I have what I feel is a 'finished product' I sit my young son down in front of my humble Speccy and let him do his worst. His function is to make sure that no matter what the player tries to do, the game will respond in a logical manner, no walking through walls or incorrect responses. At the same time I send off copies of the game to a couple of friends who are undoubted 'adventurers' in their own right and ask them to simply play the game and see how it feels, and to list any points that they think could do with correction. Eventually after three or four weeks and numerous debugging sessions I finally arrive at a fairly comprehensively tested game.
    
So what about duplicating the games?
    More than any other stage, this is undoubtedly the most critical and the most troublesome. You could employ a professional outfit to do it for you, but this would involve holding quite a bit of stock which would tie up 'cash-flow'. Doing it at home is cheaper, but involves a lot of time and patience. You have to make sure you get a copy that's as near as possible to the general standard of a pre-recorded tape, to compensate for the wide range of different tape decks that they are going to be played on. To get this I've adopted a routine of 'Clean tape-head, check azimuth' before every session of duplicating, and part-way through the session if it's a lengthy one.
    
What equipment do you use?
    I've got a 128K machine, a Bush tape recorder, and a 'copy-tape' manufactured by a guy over in Bury. This way I can just load up my master copy and run off as many copies as I need. The 'copy-tape' allows me to check whether the code I've loaded into the 128 is correct before I try to save it out, which some don't so you end up saving several dozen games with unloadable files. I have tried using a tape-to-tape copying system, but even with one that costs over £300 the results weren't that satisfactory for consistent good-quality copies.
    
No, they're not designed to copy computer signals are they? But what about tapes that don't load?
    Well I never have any of these so I can't answer that! Well alright, seriously, no matter how well you try to check you'll always get a few that don't load and all you can do is check them when they come in to see if you can see the fault, then send a fresh copy in exchange.
    
So that's the tape duplicating side, but then there's the packaging as well - what about inlays and labels?
    It would be very nice to have colourful inlays but it's really a matter of cost. One printer quoted me £500 just to have the plates made for a full-colour inlay and that didn't include the cost of printing them! I decided to adopt the 'neat and tidy' approach rather than try to compete with the likes of Rainbird, and settled for plain coloured card printed with the name of the game. It serves its purpose and adds very little cost to the product. I buy the cards in sheets from the local art shop and cut it up into the correct size pieces by hand. Then I print the name and so on onto it using an up-market version of the old 'John Bull' thing we all found in our Christmas stocking at one time or another.
    
So that gives you quite a nicely presented game - but what about reaching the people who might want to buy it? How do you advertise?
    I've never inserted a 'proper' ad in any of the magazines, as I've been doing alright in other ways. I concentrate on mail-shots, fanzines and reviews.
    Because cost prevented me from producing a nicely-printed inlay, I decided to produce a leaflet to accompany each game, that would take the place of all the bumph you would normally find on the inlay. I do these by hand with the help of drawings from friends, and then have them photocopied at a local office supplies firm that has cheap rates.
    With fanzines it's more a case of getting your name known rather than drumming up sales, as their circulation is in the hundreds rather than the tens of thousands of proper magazines.
    Reviews are another matter altogether, as you're putting yourself at the mercy of the reviewer's personal taste and while they're useful as another source of information as to how your game plays and feel, even rave reviews rarely bring in very much by way of sales. In order to get the best possible review, make sure the person you send the game to has as much information as possible, and if there are fairly obscure solutions be sure to include some kind of help sheet that they can consult if they want to. And of course if you find that one particular reviewer likes your type of game, make sure they're the one you use most regularly. No names mentioned, Mike! Blow playing fair, it's sales that matter!
    By far the best form of advertising has been the Special Offer. I started to use this ploy about six months ago and I've found it to be well worthwhile. It runs on my age-old principal that people like to get a bargain, so I shaved a few coppers off my profits and decided that it would be better to sell 100 games at £1.49 than 50 at £1.99. I must say that both the offers that appeared in Your Sinclair did tremendously well, but the one in Sinclair User was a bit of a failure. But then you win some and you lose some.
    
OK, so suppose you win some... we get to the subject that everyone is going to want to know about: money!
    Well, the bad news is that nobody's ever going to get rich by selling mail-order. To explain that, I can break down the costs involved in producing a £1.99 game, though bear in mind that this only applies to me as other people have their own ways of cutting corners and lowering production costs. Right, well a blank tape will set you back about 35p, the inlay and label 10p, a jiffy bag to send it off in is 17p, postage is 26p. (I always use first class). Then I normally include at least a couple of leaflets with each game, say another 10p, and advertising I'd put at about 25p, which would include the cost of getting the person to buy the game in the first place, like the envelope, stamps and leaflets if you wrote to them. Add that lot up and it comes to £1.23, leaving you 76p profit on each game - but that doesn't include the time you spent writing it, preparing the leaflets and the inlays, duplicating the game, addressing the mail-shots and the 101 other tasks involved in producing an adventure game, like posting copies to your play-testers and the cost of review copies. My last game took me over three months, working 12 hours a day. Seven days a week. Not exactly the best hourly-rate around! Not to mention the cost of the electricity you use while all this is going on.
    If the business is to be-a sideline then you've always got your regular wage to see you through, but if you intend to do it full-time then you do have to learn to balance and control your cash-flow. It might be nice to have a large stock of pre-recorded tapes, but if that means spending all your available cash to do so then just how do you intend to eat? Fried cassette tape isn't very nutritious, never mind appetising. So get used to planning ahead and make sure you have as little capital tied up at any one time as possible.
    Then you've got the inevitable bouncing cheque, something that doesn't reveal itself 'til after you've parted with your precious game. You can try resubmitting it to the bank, then you have to get in touch with the villain who fobbed you off with it in the first place and ask for some kind of acceptable currency in exchange. If this fails, just write it off to experience and kick the cat!
    It's important to open a bank account to handle the financial side of your new-founded business. To open an account in a name other than your own you'll need some good references and a letter-head; simply a sheet of paper with the name and address of the proposed firm.
    Then, of course, there's the dreaded tax-man! There are two things you can do about this. One is to try to ignore him and declare as little as possible, the other is to treat everything in the proper fashion and declare all your earnings. I'm a coward so I chose the latter. You've got to keep some kind of accounts in order to keep everything legal, and I use the Simplex-D type of account book. This allows me to keep a daily record of all purchases and sales, and keeps me informed of the cash-flow situation. Make sure you keep copies of ALL bills and receipts, no matter how small, and make sure you enter these up at regular intervals.
    
So there's a great deal more to publishing your own games than meets the eye?
    Yes, but for me and a few other people it's not so much a business, more a way of life, and most of the time I just do it because I want to do it and it's something I enjoy a hell of a lot!
    
FAX BOX
Blank tapes: UK Home Computers, Swindon
Labels: Industrial Process, Kent
Computer program: G. A. Bobker, Bury
Help with graphics: Sean Doran and Shaun McClure
Play-testing: Thomas Coulter, Graham Collier, Peter Wilson
    

Ian Williams, of the wonderfully-named Willysoft UK, published his own game, The Realm, and has since had it taken up by a professional software house. I asked him to report on the pros and cons of both methods of publication. This is what he had to say:
    "Once you've written your adventure there are several things you can do with it - you can make your friends play it (and watch them miss all those incredibly obvious clues), play it yourself (for those with a short memory), or you could SELL IT!! But should you try to get an established company interested or publish it yourself? I've tried both courses of action and would unreservedly recommend the latter.
    To start with, submitting games to software houses can be a very disheartening experience. More often than not you'll wait anxiously for weeks only to receive a package containing the cassette you sent and a photocopied stock letter saying 'thanks but no thanks'. Once you've read a few of those you'll be wishing you'd spent your time more profitably, like peeling potatoes or watching Prisoner Cell Block-H!
    The other big problem with submitting to large companies is that, like it or not, adventures are not currently at the cutting edge of the computer game industry. They are perceived by many big companies as a minority interest lacking both the mass appeal and big money of the game-of-the-book-of-the-film-of-the-sweatshirt end of the market.
    But we know there's a market for them, don't we? Which is where self-publication comes in. Publishing a game yourself means that you can reach an audience which is being all but ignored by the larger concerns; it's good for those people who want to buy adventures and it can obviously be good for you. It's a much more positive act than sitting around waiting for your hundredth rejection slip and can (as it did for me) lead eventually to publication by a larger company anyway!
    Obviously, publishing a game yourself entails a lot more work than simply sending copies of your masterpiece to software companies and letting them worry about it all. There's the packaging to consider, tape duplicating, book-keeping and those all-important reviewers to woo. (Hi, Mike!)
    Finally, brethren, there's the question of dosh (and how best to acquire it). Speaking from personal experience, there's a lot more money to be made from selling your game to a software company than from publishing yourself. Having said that, however, it was only after my games had been reviewed in various magazines that I was approached by D&H, a company I would never previously have considered submitting an adventure to! Which just goes to show that if it's the adventurous life you're after - publish and be damned!