Plug for a New Author: Realms of Ashenclaw

One of the local guys (Gary) in my town recently self-published his first fantasy novel and had the chance to meet RA Salvatore while we were at Gencon.  You can check his RA Salvatore post over on his blog, Eye on Ashenclaw.  I know there are a fair number of bloggers out there that are also aspiring writers that could drop in, say hello, and share ideas on writing and publishing; Gary's trying to learn the biz.

He's sat in on a few of our old school games; now if we could just get him to drop the 4E stuff and play our weekly classic game all the time...

Advice on publishing / Helping a blogger out

I'm thinking about pushing the Black City towards becoming a downloadable PDF product, maybe even later this summer after we get in some play testing.  It's got some interesting things going for it - it has a sweeping scope, it's got some awesome art, and Vikings exploring a frozen, alien city is cool.  I think my role model would be Stonehell and Michael Curtis - he's the closest to a hobbyist blogger that posted pieces of his megadungeon campaign in starts and stops and pulled it all together into an awesome book at one point.

Self-publishing is well-worn ground for other folks in the blogosphere - does anyone have suggestions for tools?  The level 1 dungeons are all currently drawn on graph paper with hand-scrawled notes; I'll need to scan them and redo them as graphics.  Does everyone use Photoshop (I'd need to learn some basic GIMP) or is there a simpler dungeon mapper for making basic old school dungeon maps?

I'd have to learn the basics of laying out pages, too, so recommendations on a basic layout program would be helpful as well.  I'm not ignoring the epic amount of work to edit it - it's one thing blathering on a blog in verbose mode, another to write economically for a page count.

Finally, an "official" edition decision would need to be made.  It seems to be a practical decision of licensing and understanding the OGL (of which I haven't looked much into either, since my home games are Frankensteins cobbled across rules-sets).  I've seen plenty of hobbyists write Labyrinth Lord compatible stuff - Labyrinth Lord must be easy to identify.  I'm not sure if Realms of Crawling Chaos is open in the same way - I'd hazard to guess it is.  I think I've seen some hobbyist stuff that's Swords & Wizardry compatible, nothing for LotFP (probably means it's a closed license).  If folks have insight on the license side of things, it'd be super helpful.

Comments, links to posts on other blogs, or tutorials would all be welcome - before I reread the daunting effort outlined above and talk myself into keeping this just a blog project!  If you'd rather drop a line through email, you can send a note to dreamsinthelichhouse via gmail.

Thanks all!