A drawer full of unfinished games?

So did I, for twenty years. What was missing was never talent. It was a method, and it fits on one page.
Are you ready to begin your publisher journey?

Karl Otto Kristoffersen#8 best selling publisher on DriveThruRPG, 2025

Take the assessment See the free tools

Twelve questions, two minutes, no email needed.

The part nobody puts on the cover

You have a folder of unfinished things

I know, because mine stayed full even while I was publishing. A half built setting. A rules document at ninety percent. Three covers for a book that never came out. I told myself I was waiting until it was good enough, and the truth was simpler. I had no idea what actually made a book sell, so I kept polishing instead of finishing.

Five years of that gave me sixty nine sales. Not sixty nine per book. Sixty nine in total.

Free, and yours in one email

Three tools I use every week

Printable, free, and yours the moment you ask. These three are the paper I actually work from, not a sample of something else.

The Bestseller Checklist Pack

Four phases, sixteen boxes, one page. Make, Give, Grow, Sell. The sequence I run for every single release.

Get the checklist

The Value Equation

Score your book before your customers do. Promise, craft and table use add points. Friction and broken trust take them away.

Score my book

The Hidden Hours Worksheet

The reason books stay in the drawer is rarely talent. Audit your week, find the three hours, and that is 150 hours a year.

Find my hours

What actually changed

I looked at what I had been doing all along

There was no new system. There were twenty years of trial and error, and somewhere in there I had started doing a handful of things consistently without ever naming them. Small books instead of big ones. One problem solved per title. Priced under five dollars, where the platform rewards you. The same launch sequence every time.

Those twelve months produced more than 10,000 sales, a Mithral bestseller, and a week in July 2026 where four of the five top selling titles under five dollars on DriveThruRPG were mine. It took me another year of reading the reports before I could see why. Only then did the habits become a process I could name, repeat and hand to someone else.

That page is the checklist above. It is the shortcut past the twenty years, and it costs you an email address.

Where are you on that road right now?

Twelve questions, two minutes, no email needed. You get your score on the dial, the phase you are actually in, and the one step that moves you forward.

Take the free quiz

Two more tools

Two more that live in your browser

The Medal Calculator

Every bestseller badge on DriveThruRPG has a number behind it, and the first one is closer than you think. Free, no email needed.

Open the calculator

The Pricing Sheet

Price is the fastest lever you have and the one most people pull last. Drag the slider and see what each price is actually buying you. Comes with the toolkit.

Set my price

Who is writing this

Karl Otto Kristoffersen

I publish tabletop roleplaying games from Kongsberg, Norway. No office, no staff, no editorial team. Just me and a catalog. The West Marches Guidebook holds a Mithral bestseller medal and has passed 3,600 copies. The Hexcrawl series I write with Matthijs Holter has three books out and three medals.

In Geek Native's 2025 DriveThruRPG publisher league table I finished eighth, one place behind Cubicle 7 and two behind Onyx Path. My local paper put it less politely: Karl Otto outcompetes many of the giants in the industry.

I write down what works as it happens, including the expensive mistakes, because that record is the thing I could never find when I needed it.

“Nine products added to the DriveThruRPG catalogue in 2025 finished the year at either Mithral or Adamantine status.”
The West Marches Guidebook was one of the nine, listed beside Daggerheart, Cyberpunk and Fabula Ultima. Geek Native, best selling 2025 releases

Coming Q2 2027

The DTRPG Bestseller Blueprint

The checklist fits on one page because it has to. The Blueprint is the book behind it. Every phase explained in full, every decision I got wrong the first time, and the numbers that made me change my mind.

The free tools show you what to do. The Blueprint shows you what it did to my numbers: what converted, what a reader is worth over time, which launches failed and why I changed my mind. That is the part no worksheet can carry, and the part I could never find when I needed it. The full system will be released in Q2 2027.

It is not the only thing on the way either. There are tools, templates and a few projects I am not ready to name yet, all built to help you further along the same road. The waiting list hears about every one of them first.

What would this be worth to you?
The Blueprint will not launch as a book alone. It comes as a full package built to support and accelerate your journey to independent bestseller. If it took you from full drawer to published author in a week, what would you pay for it?

Under $20 $20 to $49 $50 to $99 $100 and up

Answering puts you on the waiting list. Free to join, you hear first, and you get the launch price. You can join from the form above without answering if you would rather not.

The obvious questions

Why give away the method?

Because I struggled for two decades, and I really do not want you to do the same. I want to see more independent publishers selling their games, starting with you.

Does this only work for tabletop games?

The sequence is general. Every example is from my own catalog, so if you publish for tabletop it will feel familiar immediately, and if you do not you will need to translate a few specifics.

How often do you email?

The first two weeks, a short series that walks you through the method behind the tools you picked. After that, only when there is something to say. Usually a launch, a number that surprised me, or a mistake worth warning you about.

Do I need the Blueprint to use the checklist?

No. The checklist works on its own and always will. The Blueprint is for when you want the reasoning behind each box, not just the box.

Start where I should have started

One page, sixteen boxes, and the honest numbers behind them.