Why We Walked Away
Lightspress Principia has stopped selling through one of the largest marketplaces in tabletop roleplaying. If you’ve previously purchased our books there, they’re still available in your library. They’ll remain accessible, and nothing you’ve previously purchased has gone anywhere. The door is open for us to return in the future, should things realign with our vision and principles.
For now, every title in our catalog remains available through our website, with print editions continuing to be available through Amazon. We’re also working for long-term solutions with new partners, with an eye on expanding distribution into other digital and print venues, both online and in brick-and-mortar stores.
Several readers have written to ask us what happened. The short answer is that the incentives driven by that platform were starting to push our books in a direction we didn’t like. Our work, and our principles, had begun to drift. No single dramatic event triggered the change. The issues had been accumulating gradually, making it easy to overlook them for far longer than we should have.
We’ve been around, under different names, since 2014. In that time, we’ve repeatedly heard that we do things “wrong.” Our books don’t match the assumptions that people bring with them when they shop for roleplaying material. We don’t check off all the same boxes as the major publishers, or the small press that tries to follow their lead and imitate them. The emphasis on clarity and restraint, over colorful coffee-table books with maximum crunch, looks weird in a market where massive tomes and high prices have become the norm.
Some of that reaction comes from habit. Some comes from the environment where people discover new roleplaying systems, settings, and sourcebooks. Platforms of all kinds, be they storefronts of social media, shape expectations; if you spend enough time browsing, you begin to absorb an idea of what things are “supposed to” look like, based on what the platform rewards with attention, and the type of content that gets those rewards. When those expectations metastasize, anything that looks different feels like an aberration.
DriveThruRPG is part of that environment. Visibility on their platform tracks with a product’s price. because their bestseller rankings are calculated by revenue over time, rather than the actual number of copies sold. A book that sells 2 copies at $50 outperforms a book that sells 100 copies at $2. Once you notice the pattern, it becomes easier to see who it’s meant to favor and how it influences publishing decisions at every level.
We’ve noticed it influencing our own thinking for a while now. When working on a manuscript, we’ve caught ourselves asking a quiet question: Does this section belong here because the book genuinely needs it, or because a few extra pages make a higher price point easier to justify? Anyone who’s ever edited a book already knows the better instinct. Restraint usually produces a stronger book, because clarity improves when any unnecessary material stays out of the final version.
The platform’s incentives pointed things the other way around. Longer books support higher prices, and higher prices are rewarded with greater attention in the ranking system. No one needed to say anything directly for that pressure to exist. The signals were already there, shaping the environment.
That pressure runs against the way Lightspress Principia approaches publishing. Our work follows a set of principles that guide editorial decisions. Clarity matters, which means getting to the point so rules are clear and books are easier to use at the table. Constraint matters, which means only using art if it supports clarity instead of making a book shinier. Structure matters, because it’s the scaffolding that both clarity and constraint are built on. A book should be exactly as long as it needs to be, period. Pricing should reflect the usefulness of the work itself, rather than an algorithm’s preference or one platform’s ranking system.
We had to decide which direction mattered to us more. Were we shaping the work to serve readers, or shaping it to perform well inside of one particular platform? Once that question was out on the table, the answer was obvious.
There are also practical issues that have increasingly made the situation harder to ignore. When distribution runs through a third-party platform, readers experience the entire process as belonging to the publisher. In reality, a lot of parts sit outside our control. Previews of books were appearing and disappearing without explanation, even when things looked fine on the back end. Discount links that the system inserted into emails would be broken. Print-on-demand timelines fluctuate from days to weeks and back again, both for publishers and customers, in unpredictable ways that create frustration all around. Print quality, to be blunt, is a crap shoot that seems to depend more on the printing partner’s workload than anything else; the greater the delay, the higher the likelihood the book is going to be off-center, have rough edges, and generally look bad because they’re rushing to get through a backlog. Or so we presume; solid answers are hard to find.
When those things happen, the readers contact us rather than reaching out to the site. The assumption is that we’ve made a mistake. We do our best to help, but the underlying systems belong to someone else. You contact us, we contact them, we wait for them to get back to us, when they do, we contact you, and the delay makes it look like we’re the unresponsive party. That creates a mismatch between responsibility and authority. We’re expected to solve problems that originate inside systems we don’t manage. It’s not that we’re unwilling to help, but it’s frustrating, time-consuming, and draws resources away from projects.
To add to the frustration, our contract with the platform includes a non-disparagement clause. We need to be careful about how we describe those factual, processed-based experiences publicly. Even ordinary logistical frustrations require us to use cautious wording. Over time, that situation became increasingly uncomfortable, because clear communication with readers matters to us and contractual silence makes that more difficult than it ought to be. Our feeling was that we were forced to place the protection of the platform over the needs of the customers or our business, even when all we were trying to communicating with the reality of how things work. One of the reasons we limited communications channels here, on our own website, for so long was because of the amount of time we were spending untangling customer issues over there.
Moving sales back to lightspress.com resolves most of these tensions. Our pricing going forward will reflect our design decisions rather than marketplace signals. Page counts will be based on the needs of the material. It also restores a more direct relationship between us and you, because your questions will reach the people responsible for the work, those able to do something about it, instead of disappearing into someone else’s support system and waiting for an answer.
This change comes with trade-offs, naturally, primarily the fact that large marketplaces provide visibility. Leaving one means giving some of that visibility up. Discovery is going to slow down for a while, and we’re realistic about that. Even so, the decision itself was straightforward once we saw the situation clearly. We could continue shaping the books to suit the platform, or reshape our distribution so the work answers its own standards first.
The books themselves are still around. The catalog continues to grow, print editions remain available through Amazon, and every title can be found in our own shop. What’s changed is the way books reach readers, and the priorities guiding our decisions. The work now answers to the principles that created it, rather than the expectations of a marketplace.
