The Business: Making A Not-Crap RPG: Part Three: The Shilling

You can nail your game design. You can nail your technical writing. Both the game and the manual can be the best damned thing ever made and none of it means a damned thing if you do not know who wants to buy or if you can't get it to them.

You likely don't know what to do about this.

You have access to Google and YouTube. You don't need to become an expert overnight, but a couple of basics can be learned in short order. In particular, you need to learn what A/B Testing is and what a sales blurb is. The former helps you with the latter, and the latter is what you use when you put up your sales page at Amazon, DriveThruRPG, Lulu, and so on.

You should have a social media contact point, but if you're just starting out you can skip this for now. Twitter will do; now that you can cough up $8/mo. for a Verification mark, pay that price because it will pay for itself. You may choose other sites depending upon your user demographics. Put the link to your landing page in your Bio.

You must have a landing page. This is the URL that takes someone to where you present your game to a prospect and summarizes what the game is about--what you do and how you do it--and provides the prospect with links to where they can buy it or download it for free. Use Chris Gonnerman's landing page for Basic Fantasy as a template for what you can do cheap and easy; you don't have to make it look like Globe of Gankcraft's site.

You must have an email address. The link to this needs be clearly labelled as such on your landing page as a Contact option. You don't have to be fancy; a free account at Gmail, Yahoo, Proton, or whatever will do. Then you want to go to a place like MailChimp or Substack and set up an email newsletter.

Okay, you have a Twitter account, a landing page, and an email address. Now why the Google?

Trends. You want to use Trends.

Specifically, you want to look up existing games that are like your game and use the keywords that those games feature in their ad copy as well as terms commonly used by players to describe themselves in demographic terms.

In short, you want to come up with a target demographic profile and find what words hit that profile. Trends helps you find this. Then you want to (a) point your shilling to the online spaces where that profile congregates and (b) use their own self-identifiers in your sales blurbs.

When you write your blurbs, go to Amazon, DriveThru, etc. and read the blurbs of other games that are like yours. You want to be brief, you want to be direct, and you want to use all those demographic tags to focus your blurb at your target audience. Consider it a form of Search Engine Optimization.

Then you want to get them to sign up to your email newsletter. Palladium Books is very active on their newsletter; readers get the word about sales, new products, etc. before anyone else. This is a good idea that you should shamelessly steal and copy BECAUSE IT WORKS.

You can also use your newsletter as Alexander Macris uses his Substack column and write articles that explain what your design of a given thing is, how it is meant to work, and how you iterated your way to the final form; this establishes rapport with your customers and makes fans of them- which generates returns when you offer them new product to buy or recommend something by a friendly alternative.

Now why the YouTube?

This is where you show your game being played. You also do as the Pundit did and do product reviews and previews. I suggest also curating other voices that talk about your game and given them attention on your channel. A podcast is advisable if you're the sort to like that format of media.

Given that YouTube is YouTube, you should have backup channels on other sites like Bitchute, Rumble, Odysee, etc. and copy your videos there. YouTube is also fantastic for having a lot of channels to teach you sales, marketing, building up a channel, and other topics that I've hit upon here.

Oh, and specific to YouTube, most RPG designers and publishers are terrible about YouTube; doing this competently will make you stand out from the crowd and that can only benefit you as you try to get your game out there.

But then you have an audience. There's one more thing to do, and that's for tomorrow.