The Blackwood Errantry Codex

Production Postmortem

[Part the First]

Well, my first publication has been released into the wilds of the Internet. I’m not a parent, but I imagine this is similar to what it feels like to send a child off to college. Will it hold up on its own? Will it make friends?
…Will it remember to call me every once in a while?
I posted right after the Kickstarter concluded in June in go over some of the numbers and other data (see Part the First above). Now that the full production cycle is wrapped up, I thought I’d go into a little more detail about what happened between June and November, what I did in the months leading up to the Kickstarter, etc.

Production

This being my first crowdfunding campaign and my first published work, I tried to learn as much as I could from people who had run Kickstarter campaigns before. Without a doubt, the single best source of information was the Kickstarter Production Guidelines article by Kevin Crawford in The Sandbox #1, an e-zine available on DriveThruRPG. It’s a free publication, so you have no excuse: download it, read it, and love it. Now!

One of the things mentioned in the article was to calculate how much time you think you’ll need for production and double it. I was able calculate production time by talking to my layout/design guy, Nathan D. Paoletta, and asking how long he’d need to handle layout. Nathan said he’d be able to finish layout by early September, three months after the end of the Kickstarter. Doubling that meant an early December release, but I’m getting married in December so I shot for an early November fulfillment.

I’d already written the text, so the only other major work unit was producing art. I ballparked that time frame by asking my artists how long they thought they’d need for the pieces, then setting clear deadlines. I was lucky to have everything go according to plan (thanks to all my awesome, punctual artists and designers!) and the project was released on Friday, October 27th, 2017. Just a few days before my November deadline!

Promotion

As my Kickstarter Consultant, Eric Simon, said: Kickstarter is the place you go to mobilize your audience. It’s not a good place to go to grow an audience.

I’ve been playing and running games for at least 15 years, but I’m fairly new to the online and design/publishing communities. A year ago, I really wasn’t “known.” I needed to build an audience that I could bring to my Kickstarter campaign, and on top of that I wanted an easy, reliable way to get in touch with all of them. There were two basic prongs to my audience-building strategy: social media and DriveThruRPG.

Social Media: I’ve had a personal page on facebook for the past decade or so, but it’s really not suited to professional/gaming promotion. My facebook account is connected to all my friends and family, but I knew my audience would need to be bigger than that if I wanted to run a successful campaign. I’ve been active on Google+ for the past couple years, and it turns out what I always thought is a barren wasteland is actually home to several thriving communities of gamers. What’s more: these communities are focused! It’s all signal and no noise on Google+ and I love it.

My strategy for social media promotion was basically “join these communities.” Whether it was facebook, Google+, or (later) Twitter, I had the sense that constantly promoting my own stuff would be annoying. Instead, I looked for people posting conversation topics I knew something about, then I would join the conversation. I didn’t just want to be a publisher, I wanted to be a person who was part of the community and happened to publish things from time to time. I think it’s worked out pretty well! I recently went to my first gaming convention (Gamehole Con in Madison, Wisconsin), and getting the chance to meet the people I’ve spoken to online was a lot more heartwarming and awesome than I expected. I don’t think of them as customers. They’re friends, and in true friendly fashion we’re all interested in supporting each others’ games.

DriveThruRPG: It turns out DTRPG has some great tools for tracking and contacting past customers (I say, with no other reference point to draw upon). The trouble is that you need two things: something to sell, and time to build up a list of customers. When I started my DTRPG page in January 2017, I felt like I didn’t have much of the latter and I had none of the former. It was sort of a chicken-and-egg conundrum: how do I build an audience with no products to share? How do I create products to share with no customers to support me?

With a little bit of seed money from a very generous friend (and now partner in gaming-related crime), I was able to commission enough art to create 6 pregenerated characters. I also wrote 2 one sheet adventures using public domain art to save on cost (fortunately, art from 19th century Grimm’s Tales printings was perfect for a fairytale setting like The Blackwood). In exchange for making the map for Saga of the Goblin Horde, Richard Woolcock turned my text and images in attractive trade dress.

I hosted my first 3 products on DriveThruRPG starting in late January. By May, I’d released another 5 free/PWYW products and I’d had about 1000 unique customers I could mail. Compare that to the Mythic Gazetteer facebook page, which had around 180 likes at the time. The reach is not even close to comparable! Without setting up my DriveThruRPG page at least a few months before launching my Kickstarter, I don’t think it ever would have funded.

That’s All For Now!

So that’s my process in a nutshell. I started with careful, thorough research, I joined communities (rather than just using them), I worked with fellow publishers, and I built up my audience and my business bit-by-bit. The core of my plan revolved around a fairly common sense mantra: communities are better at creating things than lone wolves. If you can focus on building or joining a community, eventually you’ll get to a place where it’s a lot easier to create something cool.

Got any questions about part of this? Ask away! I’m happy to chat about finer details with anyone who’s interested. I’m no expert (and there are plenty of things I plan to tweak in the next year) but this worked pretty well for me, all things considered.