As many of you might know, my work life has recently been in an upheaval for the better. In November 2001, talks began between what was to become Paizo Publishing, LLC and Hasbro Inc.’s Hobby Games Division, Wizards of the Coast. Hasbro wanted to form a new corporation to publish the titles currently being produced by Wizards of the Coast. I was involved with the project early on.

This two-part article is the tale of how we became a new publishing company and what steps were necessary from a production standpoint to pull the trigger and hit the ground running... gotta meet those deadlines even if you don’t have a place to sit!

Last November, my boss Johnny, came into my office and closed the door. He described a CEO’s meeting where the powers to be had proposed that he spin our department off from Wizards of the Coast, effectively forming a new publishing corporate entity.

My first thoughts were cautious elation, curbed by shear terror. In this economy it could seem to some like madness to begin a new company. It certainly, to a degree, did to me! Johnny enlisted Pierce Watters, our Circulation Director, and myself to crunch numbers for inclusion into a business plan. While Pierce and I were busy getting these numbers together, Johnny was having lunch meetings and long phone conversations with potential investors and board of directors members.

We had several challenges to overcome. Being a publishing group that had not operated on our own, we needed to convince potential investors that we could not only turn a profit on our own, but that we had the capital necessary for such a startup. We also had to address staffing, which was actually our smallest challenge. To complicate the matter, both Pierce and myself had to collect specific data from a variety of sources without divulging exactly why we needed such information.

Hasbro, being a publicly traded company, had us under a non-disclosure agreement, so we had to operate very secretively, not even letting our own staff know of the venture.

One item that was fairly unique to our titles was licensing. Our magazines support two basic products…the Role Playing Game "Dungeons and Dragons" (along with other "D20" system game coverage) and Star Wars. We needed to have every i dotted and t crossed not only from Hasbro, who was licensing Dungeons and Dragons coverage rights to us, but also from Lucas Film for our title “Star Wars Insider".

The long and short of it was that between Pierce, Johnny, Lisa Stevens (our soon to be CEO) and myself, we were able to:

- assemble a viable business plan
- enlist the investors
- form a board
- draft contracts with both Hasbro and Lucas Film
- switch all our vendors (including our two contracted printers - R.R. Donnelley and Quad/Graphics) to Paizo Publishing
- purchase unused paper and production materials from Hasbro
- form a prepress department

Not to mention transferring a full staff to new quarters on the same day that two titles were due into prepress and, of course, not miss a beat. How did we do it from a production standpoint? Man, it was quite a ride! See Part Two.