5 questions (and answers) from the Small Publisher Diaries Q&A Panel

I was invited to be part of the Small Publisher Diaries Q&A Panel at Unpub Festival 2026. Here are five of the questions from the panel and my responses.

Learning from small publishers

In addition to playtesting Ratsail and Epsilon, I was on the Small Publisher Diaries Q&A Panel at Unpub Festival, hosted by Tony Tran. I’ve done a lot of public speaking and teaching in my life, but I think this might be one of the first panels I’ve done.¹

Here’s the description from the Unpub schedule:

“Tony will invite publishers to answer Q&A questions about what made their previous games successful and how others can learn from their mistakes. Come listen to publishers at the indie, mid size, and mass market level share their experiences.”

I was on the panel along with Xoe Allred (Lunarpunk Games) and Heather O’Neill (9th Level Games). Compared to the others, I was definitely the smallest publisher.²

Based on the feedback I received, people seemed to really enjoy the panel. So here are my responses to the first five questions:

Q1. What is the most important investment your company continues to make? AKA what consistently delivers the best ROI?

The time spent writing Skeleton Code Machine (SCM) and Exeunt Omnes (EO).

Those two newsletters now have a combined total subscriber count of over 8,500 subscribers and growing.³ They don’t generate any direct revenue, but I consider them to be the core engine that drives the rest of the business.

SCM is one of the largest sources of traffic to both the EP digital games page and the EP shop. EO continues to grow and ensures that EP fans know when a new game is released. I don’t have much of a presence on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok), so I rely heavily on the newsletters.⁴

Also, they’ve created new opportunities for me as well — free library classes, presenting at colleges and universities, and publishing design guides. Most notably, SCM has spawned Tumulus, a print-only quarterly design zine.

Is it work and a significant investment of time? Absolutely. But every year in the SCM annual survey, it is the consistency that people appreciate. I’ve never missed an issue. Vacations, holidays, and sickness happen, but I always make sure the newsletter goes out Tuesday morning.

Plus, it has the added bonus that I actually enjoy writing the newsletters! I know it sounds weird, but I look forward to picking SCM topics and digging into them. I always end up learning something new and picking up some inspiration. The reader comments frequently change my opinions and expand my knowledge of games.

Q2. What has surprised you most as a publisher?

The constant struggle for attention.

For example, I launched Tumulus in late 2024 and felt like I was talking about it non-stop. And yet the annual survey showed that 26% of readers had never heard of it.

I knew it was hard and potentially costly to advertise your business, but I didn’t realize that it is just as hard to reach people who actively enjoy and want your products! Social media is ephemeral and unreliable. Newsletters have a 30-40% open rate in most cases. YouTube videos get missed and buried in the mass of older videos.

Learning that it takes seven touches before someone makes a purchase and about the purchase funnel have been new territory for me. It’s all a lot harder, more complex, and more challenging than I had expected.

Q3. What was the best advice you received before or as a publisher?

Know your costs and charge enough for shipping.

While I think I’ve been pretty good at knowing my costs from the start, I was regularly losing money on shipping. I used to dread large orders from California because the cost would be considerably more than I was charging, but I was afraid to increase the shipping fee. This was exacerbated when I’d include stickers, bookmarks, and other items in with the order.

Eyrk from Peregrine Coast Press finally (after many attempts) got through to me that it is unreasonable to try to do free, flat-rate, or low-cost shipping like Amazon. I’m one person, and I need to cover that cost. So I increased shipping prices to no longer lose money, expecting complaints and a drop in sales — and nothing bad happened.

Now I no longer groan when shipping across the country because I know it’s covered.⁵ I’m extremely glad I took this advice early before order volume significantly increased in 2025! It would have been a mess.

Q4. What advice do you wish you had taken or wished you learned earlier?

Don’t write in layout.

I use Affinity for almost all design and publishing work at Exeunt Press. When I started, I was making one-page games — games that fit on a single A4 sheet of paper. By their very nature, they don’t have a lot of words. So I’d do layout and writing all in Affinity at the same time.

While that works for tiny projects, it’s not sustainable or smart for large projects. I’ve had some projects where I was writing in layout, only to find I need major changes later. That meant trashing not only the words but the layout work too, causing a huge amount of rework.⁶

At some point, projects are too big to write in layout. I learned this the hard way and wasted a lot of time.

Remember: Affinity is not a word processor.

Q5. If you could have a “redo,” what would you do differently?

Structure my week and use time blocking.

In 2025, direct to customer (D2C) sales really picked up. I was spending a lot of time packing and shipping orders. Everyone told me, “It’s a good problem to have! Ha ha!”

And then by the end of 2025, I realized that I was working full time as a newsletter writer, social media manager, instructor, and order fulfillment worker who happened to do some game design in the evenings. While I did release a 50+ page Tumulus issue every quarter (no small task), Exeunt Press didn’t have a large stand-alone game release for the year.

This year, I’ve developed a priority system for game projects (Tier I = Epsilon) and started using time blocking. I have specific times when I work on game projects, write newsletters, prep for classes, and other times when I pack orders.

This is one of those things that I’ve read about 100 times, but I guess sometimes I just have to bump my own head before you learn.

Share what you know

From the start, I’ve tried to share how I run Exeunt Press and what I think is working well (and what’s not). This includes lessons learned, year-end reviews, advertising mistakes, and the annual reader survey.

The indie gaming space is so small that I feel like I know (and have met) many of the people trying to do similar things. I’m happy to help in any way I can. If nothing else, I can at least be a cautionary tale. 😅

What do you think? Is this type of information helpful or interesting? Which of the questions was the most helpful? Let me know in the comments.

- E.P. 💀

P.S. If you love tabletop games, you should check out Tumulus. It’s a print-only, quarterly zine packed with Skeleton Code Machine game design content.

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Written, augmented, purged, and published by Exeunt Press. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission. Exeunt Omnes is Copyright 2025 Exeunt Press. For comments, questions, reports from the EZ, or pro tips: games@exeunt.press

1. Technically I did a panel once or twice before, but that was in a professional/work setting. I mean a panel in a fun convention or conference setting.

2. Exeunt Press has two employees: Murphdog (unpaid intern) and me (bone mech pilot).

3. There is significant overlap between the two lists, so the unique total is somewhere less than 8,500 subscribers. Skeleton Code Machine has about 6,000 unique subscribers. I could probably look at the overlap between each and infer unique per list.

4. Like almost everything, I didn’t come up with this idea on my own. Chris Zukowski’s Build Your Own Fan Club talk at GDC 2019 and Show Your Work by Austin Kleon were highly influential. When people ask me for advice, my advice is to watch that talk and read that book. Steal Like an Artist, also by Austin Kleon, is very good too.

5. I also switched from flat-rate to weight-based shipping at the same time. It meant I had to spend some time weighing every product, every piece of packaging, and doing a fair bit of spreadsheet and online shop work. It was worth it.

6. The term “rework” here is used in the sense of muda — having to discard and/or rework a product due to defects or changes made to the specification. This is Muda Type II which is both non-value adding and unnecessary for the end customer. Wasted and unnecessary work and effort that should be eliminated. I’ll probably write more about this in a future Skeleton Code Machine article.