For quite a while now JBE has used DriveThruRPG’s printer Lightning Source to print our books no matter where you bought it from (with Amazon being the exception). They are convenient and the price is competitive with other US printers, if not better.
Recently, however, their color technical specs changed. I’m not going to go into details here, but it came to my attention when the book I have been working on most recently Foreven Worlds: Creatures of Distant Worlds was rejected for failing to meet those new standards. When I investigated what was in violation of the new standards, I discovered it was nearly the entire book. That’s a problem. Were it a single piece of art or two, that would be no big deal, but it’s a monster book; more than half the pages has some form of graphic on it and all but a few require some level of modification. Even worse, I’m no artist; alter colors on an image is something I leave to the professionals. I know my limits.
Do how does that change JBE’s plans for the books we want to print? Well for books we haven’t created yet, focusing on black and white/grayscale artwork is definitely the way to go. If you love our color artwork as much as I do, that is a disappointment. However, I will be looking for alternatives and I’ll just have to get better at the art side of things.
For books we are currently have available for PDF download but don’t have in print yet, we would like to hear your opinion. Are you just happy to have the book in print and the art is secondary or does losing the color artwork make the book less interesting to you? Should we convert our books to black and white or just leave them as PDFs?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Order JBE’s print books at Amazon, DriveThruRPG, and the JBE Shop.
Jon Brazer Enterprises 