it,” despite having no direct book publishing experience. “I obviously had lots of experience as a graphic designer, so I knew how to produce a book, in theory.”
KICKSTART/STOP Over the next few weeks and months, Dyer continued to develop what would become his first title, Commodore 64: A Visual Commpendium, tweaking and adding to his designs during evenings and weekends. When it was almost complete, almost without having
any formal plan or expectation, early in 2014 he took the project to Kickstarter to see what interest there would be. In little over a week, the book was funded. “I honestly didn’t know how well it would be received,”
he said. “I think off the top of my head the first campaign had just over 900 backers which was pretty amazing. People placed a lot of trust in me and Kickstarter played a massive role. The whole business really sort of snowballed from there. It was sort of quite accidental. I didn’t set out to become a publisher or create a publishing business. It was just me having a bit of fun with it.” Later, as the customer base grew and the costs of
publishing became increasingly prohibitive, Dyer came to rely less and less on crowdfunding and abandoned Kickstarter after the eighth publication in 2018, despite Sega Master System: A Visual compendium being fully- funded in less than 48 hours. “By this time we’d built up a pretty strong database of
customers anyway. So we kind of outgrew it - not in a big- headed way, but we just didn’t really need it, I suppose. We had enough marketing clout away from it.”
THE EMPIRE GROWS One thing that hasn’t changed from the first compendium is that Dyer works cover to cover on every title. “The majority of the books are designed by me. After
the first couple, I started moving on to publishing other people’s books. We published Gremlin in the Works, which was all about Gremlin Graphics and that was designed by Mark Hardisty, the author. And then we
published a book called Super Famicom: The Box Art Collection, which again, was designed by the author, Stu Brett, but I’ve always had a hand in the design. I suppose it’s always been sort of a collaborative thing.” While it may seem that Bitmap Books has grown into
a vast publishing empire and that Dyer sits behind a vast walnut desk demanding coffee from editorial interns, he assures us that not much has changed over the last decade. “I don’t want to break the illusion, but I’m in my
dining room talking to you. It’s just me, basically. My wife helps out with the admin side of the business and we have someone doing social media part time, but apart from that it’s just me. And it’s kind of intentional that it’s like that. I can never see myself employing people. The pressure that would come with that, I think, would take the fun out of doing Bitmap Books. “Another reason is that I can do three, maybe four
books a year. For me that’s a really good number. I’ve never really wanted to produce six or seven books a year because it would just feel like I’m churning them out and it sort of lessens the fun really.”
MORE STUFF While Dyer may not have changed the way he works since Bitmap’s first book in 2014, the market for retro- themed publications and the machines and games they celebrate certainly has developed. “It feels like more people are involved in the
community, in the hobby, so it’s definitely grown. There are a lot more books on gaming. There seems to be one a week coming out, or it feels like it, so there’s quite a lot of competition, I guess. Also, I think there’s just a lot of retro products generally, and obviously people have only got so much money to spend on a hobby. So, the mini consoles, the re-released games and magazines - there’s
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