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My take on "how to publish without engaging with social media"

So - I kinda felt for the person who posted that they didn't want to do the marketing side of publishing. I have to confess it fills me with dread.

The designing, prototyping, playtesting, attending playtest meetups and the final production I LOVE - I'm even pretty thick skinned about getting feedback now

(as an aside I was lucky to learn from some pretty seasoned designers at the UK Playtest sessions. This helped me get to grips with the idea that opinions are like assholes, everyone has one, and thats fine. Some of them are even good and useful - and some of them are brilliant! But you are obliged to use none of them - just politely listen to all of them, after all people took the time to play your game with the intention of helping...The best tweaks to my games have come from playtesting feedback so always worth listening.)

But the idea of engaging with social media to actually tell people about the game - just horrifying. I'm not too comfortable with the idea of shouting to a large group of - often more experienced designers - about my fledgling games. What if they hate them? What if they pick holes in them? What if they ask me questions I can't answer - or worse, someone responds somewhere I don't notice for a while. All very valid and potentially possible. Unfortunately though, I won't publish successfully without some semblance of crowd to buy our games, and equally unfortunately noone is going to do this for me - even publishers are going to want you to generate some interest from the community it turns out.

So - as there's no way round it, I need to find the joy in it. My plan is to break it into manageable chunks - by splitting it into channels and then specific targets, it becomes less daunting and more manageable.

For example - I am picking twitter, facebook groups (3-4), youtube, our website blog and a couple of forums to get the word out. Tonight I've made a point of updating posts on the Motley Sprue website (motleysprue.com) and sending a few tweets about things that I am focused on. Small steps but I feel like I've made some progress.

I also feel quite strongly about giving back to the community before demanding much in return - so my intention is to post where I can be helpful, to give feedback to others before asking it myself. I read somewhere recently that a good rule of thumb is to provide 10 helpful comments before asking anything yourself which seems like quite a nice guide.

At least I only have to do it until the kickstarter is written, published, completed and hopefully all games are shipped having been successful! Well....until the next game needs supporting! :D

Any tips, experiences, snide comments gratefully received :P

Comments

Yeah...

Why don't you drink some vitriol along with that salad!

Just kidding! :P

The reality is this: most of your social media exposure will lead to very few sales in the end. How does any of it make sense? IDK - if you have no social media well you'll lose out on a few backers.

Many are DIRECT from Kickstarter. How they make it, IDK either. I can say this for a second (2nd) Game, if you have 1,500 e-mails, the odds of getting a least 1,000 backers on your second (2nd) try ... is well very realistic.

So HOW do you get that INITIAL "crowd" for a first game. Have Stretch Goals but also include Social Goals too. Something like 100 tweets or 100 BGG likes (thumbs up) or 500 Facebook "likes"... That's GOOD because it GIVES backers something to do and earns backers extra rewards.

The slow route is:

1. Get your first game to fund with about 200-250 backers.
2. Use social media and e-mails to double or triple that amount on your second game...
3. Continue with more games and more people.

That seems to be what Jamey Stegmaier did with Viticulture, Euphoria and then Scythe... And now on to Charterstone. But not everyone has the abilities to handle all these aspects. So one-man-shows are possible and I know of a few (but even Jamey has a business partner... Allan Stone).

Jason Glover the designer of Plague is another solo designer. He even does his own artwork for his games too. Jason also started with one game and then kept adding and KS-ing more games too. Not at the same magnitude as Jamey -- but the process sure looks the same (as I have mentioned).

Anyhow what I am trying to get through is that it's not an "instant" success... It takes time. And sometimes you'll need more than one crack at it.

Best of luck(?!) with your game(s).

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blog | by Dr. Radut