Product Codes for Retail Distribution
One of the many things I didn’t know when I published Eureka was the significance of the little product code that appears on the spines of gaming books.
I made one good assumption and one bad assumption, and could have saved some money by avoiding the bad assumption. This post is aimed at helping other first-time publishers avoid this pitfall.
My good assumption was that it was a stock number. It’s obvious that it includes an abbreviation related to the publishing company, and I figured that those letters plus a number helped publishers, distributors, and retailers refer to the product internally. That’s all correct.
My bad assumption was that I could just make up that code. I looked at a handful of gaming books from different established companies and guessed that I could pick two or three letters to represent Engine Publishing and make up a four- or five-digit number for Eureka.
As it turns out, those letters aren’t made up, they’re assigned by Greater Games Industry, which puts out the Greater Games Industry Catalog, a retailer bible for pen-and-paper gaming products. Their database holds three-letter codes for thousands of publishers, and distributors — called Standard Manufacturer Codes (SMC) — and retailers count on that standardization to stay sane.
If you plan to get your books into retail game stores, it’s a good idea to obtain a GGI code for your company. Our fulfillment partner, Studio 2 Publishing, required Engine Publishing to have an SMC in order to sign on with them. (Which isn’t uncommon: When we signed on with Paizo for webstore sales, they required it as well.)
To get an SMC, just contact Marcelo Figueroa with GGI at sales@greatergamesindustry.com or 909-322-1526. It takes a little while, as he has to come up with a code that both matches your company name AND isn’t already taken, but it’s free and Marcelo is very pleasant to work with. Your code also includes a free listing in the GGI Catalog (and the option to buy an enhanced/bigger listing, which I declined).
Engine Publishing’s SMC is EGP, and that plus four or five numbers is a valid product code. Eureka started out as EP42001, but became EGP42001 after I got our official code. Because we didn’t think any direct-order or convention customers would mind, our first print run and GenCon print run both included the old, incorrect SMC. (The correct code appears on all copies that will be headed to retailers.) If you own a copy, or buy one before my stock runs out, your copy is part of an unintentional limited edition of Eureka!
Revising Eureka’s spine to reflect the new, corrected product code cost money, and I could have avoided that cost if I’d known about, or found out about, GGI’s Standard Manufacturer Codes in advance. If you’re considering retail publication, hopefully I’ve just saved you a few bucks and a little heartache!
