Reviving A Genre!
Dice Book Publishing
Indie Publisher with a focus on revitalizing the gamebook genre, as well as a publisher of children's books.
Dice Book Publishing started because I (Davis), thought I was the first person to have the genius idea of combining dice rolls to the standard format of the Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) genre. I remember creating a very basic dice system and thinking I was possibly the smartest CYOA author that ever lived. I was going to introduce the world to a solo RPG experience that would be so much better than the vanilla CYOA experience they'd been used to.
Turns out a 10-second Google search would have saved me hours of work creating that dice system and the basic story to go along with it.
No, I wasn't the first one to think of the solo RPG idea. It had been a thing for literally decades. Not only that, but I soon found out that the mechanics those pioneering authors had dreamt up, blew my simple dice system out of the water!
Some of my favorite systems that I discovered were basically like playing Skyrim in a book, 20-30 years before Skyrim was a thing. My mind was blown, while my ego was quenched...at least slightly.
I guess this discovery could have gone two ways. How could I compete with what had already been done? But the more of the books I read the more I was inspired by the genre and the more I wanted to be a part of it!
Now I'm actively working on several projects to make my own contribution to this awesome genre while publishing a kid's book here and there in the mean time.