Nine Tips For Your First Kickstarter

A Zine Quest postmortem

Hi! Good to see you again. How have you been?

I’ve been busy on a number of projects this year, some of which you can read about in the Announcements section below. This week, though, I want to talk/brag about my first successful Kickstarter campaign!

That’s right, through the power of crowdfunding, I was able to produce a sixteen-page adventure-scenario for the MÖRK BORG roleplaying game (RPG). It’s called MÖRK KÖPHETS: A Dead Mall Dungeon Crawl and it is available on DriveThruRPG (DTRPG) and itch.io in both PDF and print-on-demand (POD)!

It was a long and complicated process, and I’d like to share with you some of the lessons I learned as a first-time creator.

How It Started

It started as a writing prompt. I had been studying MÖRK BORG as part of the Storytelling Collective’s Bookwyrms TTRPG Reading Club. (By the way, if you want to study several tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPG) in a group context, you should join us). At some point we decided to create a collection of MÖRK BORG supplements.

After two weeks and around eighty hours of work, I had a fourteen-page adventure based on the modern-day phenomenon of dead malls. Unfortunately, I was the only contributor and the collection never materialized.

Fast-forward to January, when Goodman Games and Backerkit hosted the Indie RPG Creator Summit, which I wrote about in a previous newsletter:

The summit was full of excellent advice for independent publishing, including a step-by-step guide for crowdfunding on Kickstarter. By the end, I was convinced that I could publish my humble adventure on my own.

The summit coincidentally happened a few weeks before Zine Quest and Zine Month, which made my next step abundantly clear. Zine Quest is an annual promotion put on by Kickstarter where independent TTRPG writers are encouraged to crowdfund their own zine-sized projects. I wrote about the event at length in my series of articles:

How I Muddled Through, Somehow

The advice from the summit was to start advertising as early as possible, so I immediately created a landing page on BackerKit where people could learn a little about the project and sign up to be notified at launch.

I began posting to social media every day before and during the campaign. I also shared the project in various Discord groups while I frantically tried to get a Kickstarter page set up.

I had limited art assets to show off, so I enlisted the help of my brother - a professional videographer - and had him shoot some promo videos of me in an actual dying mall (it has since become a dead-dead mall, RIP). This provided me with lots of cool promo shots that I could use to spruce up the Kickstarter page, and the final copy of the zine itself!

I was advised that you want to advertise a lot ahead of time and make your campaign short to maximize its impact. So I launched the Kickstarter page, which you can still see here, and advertised as hard as I knew how for a full week.

Given that there was no overhead and no artists to pay, I kept my goal low. I was going to publish this thing one way or another, but I didn’t know how many people would want to buy it or how many physical copies to print. Because, yes, I had made the foolish decision to make physical copies of my zine available to those who wanted it (it was me, I wanted it).

I’m happy to say that the campaign was a success, with almost $500 raised in that single week.

Then I took a break, for reasons that I will get into in my next newsletter. Fortunately, the zine was already 80% done, so it didn’t take long to finish.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Print-on-Demand

Putting the finishing touches was easy. The real challenge was publishing the zine to DriveThruRPG and ordering physical copies.

DTRPG is the industry standard storefront for RPG-related PDFs, but its user interface (UI) is pretty old-fashioned and difficult to navigate. It was a steep learning curve for someone releasing their very first product. Fortunately, DTRPG has an extensive help library to walk you through every step of the process.

DTRPG has strict rules about how PDFs are created, and I failed to do my research before hand. Print-on-demand products require a MINIMUM of eighteen pages, which meant that I had to add FOUR pages of content at the eleventh hour.

Fortunately, one of those pages was supposed to be blank, to make room for printer information, and the other was easily taken up by an inner title page, which did not take away from the design at all. Also fortunate, I had made a few thematic items for MÖRKTOBER, an annual MÖRK BORG writing challenge, which meant that I could dedicate the last two pages to some wacky magic items.

The last surprise was that DTRPG does not print saddle-stitched (or staple-bound) zines. All of their POD titles are perfect-bound, meaning they are glued together like a regular book. This was 100% an oversight on my side, as I did NOT read the DTRPG guides as closely as I ought, and I made my entire zine with saddle-stitched in mind.

I had to adjust the layout on all of my pages, and the final product has noticeably tight margins. Had this been a more professional product, I might have re-designed the entire thing. As it was, no meaningful content was lost and the zine does exactly what it was supposed to do.

It was a long, messy process, but in the end I had a completely original commercial adventure in my hands!

If you were one of the eighty-three backers of my campaign, thank you so much for supporting me in this venture! I hope you enjoy the product you ended up with, and if you actually bothered to read the thing and have any comments, please feel free to share them with me!

Nine Tips for Publishing Your First RPG Product

1) Just Start

I feel like I’ve said this before, but the more I do it, the more it proves true. Just start. You don’t have to have all of your ducks in a row before hand, so long as you’re willing to learn on the fly. You don’t know what you don’t know until you’re smacked in the face with your own ignorance and have to adapt.

2) Look for Encouragement

I may never have started this project if it wasn’t for Bookwyrms, the Indie RPG Creator Summit, and the Zine Month community. The deadline for the initial collection, even though it never materialized, gave me the motivation I needed to commit an idea to paper. The advice and personal stories from the summit convinced me that I could publish something in the here-and-now. And of course, the Zine Month community encouraged me to act fast and learn alongside dozens of others all working to publish their passion projects. And that’s not even mentioning the support from family and friends.

It took all of these things to push me from initial idea to final product, and I am so happy to now have something tangible and real to show the world. No matter what your project is, a little encouragement can go a long way.

3) Marketing Matters More Than Content

It feels wrong to say, but when you are an independent creator in an over-saturated field, the best thing you can do for yourself is be seen. I’ve heard it said that more TTRPG content is purchased than read. People are drawn to cool concepts and driven by fear-of-missing-out, but there is just so MUCH content out there that reading it all is impossible.

So your goal is not to make the most polished, perfect product you can, as people are likely not going to notice anyway. I still don’t know if any of the eighty-three backers of MÖRK KOPHETS have even opened the PDF, and that’s okay.

If you want to make money from your passions, you have to market, and that means learning some basic business skills. I know that sounds unappealing, it was for me, but it is necessary.

4) Market Early, Market Wisely

For all that I learned about marketing over this project, I am still an absolute novice at it. I was diligent, but the returns were minimal. The problem was, and still is, that I don’t have much of a following right now. Social media works best when you have a following, so work on getting that before anything else.

Building buzz takes time. As soon as you have a solid concept, tell people, because the only way to generate interest is to give it time to grow naturally.

Be aggressive, and be smart about where you post. It’s never too much, unless you are being actively belligerent. Someone I knew did not realize I had a campaign going because I posted in a Discord channel he did not monitor on our shared server. I lost a potential backer because it didn’t occur to me to reach out directly through a channel he would have seen.

5) Take Advantage of Promotions

There is no way I would have sold HALF the units I did if I had run this campaign any other time of the year. Kickstarter metrics made it clear that most of my backers discovered me through Kickstarter itself, not social media or even this newsletter.

That was the biggest reason I chose Kicksarter over other crowdfunding websites like BackerKit and Crowdfundr. These are great sites, perhaps even better than Kickstarter, but as someone with no previous audience, releasing a gaming project to the public for the very first time, I knew there was no way I was going to be discovered on other platforms.

Zine Month is a GREAT time to crowdfund a small project, as it is the one time of year when everybody in the TTRPG space is in the same place looking for new experiences.

Look for opportunities to promote your work! Game jams, itch.io bundles, anthology submissions, and other promotions are great opportunities to get eyes on your project.

6) Know When to Use Backerkit Launch

Did you know that you can use BackerKit’s Launch service to advertise a project on Kickstarter? I didn’t, until somebody told me at the summit.

There are two advantages Backerkit Launch has over Kickstarter. One is that you get a detailed landing page where you can describe your project in detail, instead of a single-paragraph blurb. Second and more importantly, it allows you to generate an email list that you can use to update people ahead of the campaign and in future projects. Email lists are often considered the best, most reliable form of advertising, because you get to interact with customers directly about things they care about.

I did not get the full benefit of this service, though. I collected maybe a dozen emails from my Launch page, with all of my other backers coming from Kickstarter itself.

I recommend setting up Launch far in advance of your Kickstarter campaign to get the most out of it. It is a great tool for generating hype, building an email list, and marketing early, but less than a month out you likely won’t see much benefit.

7) Know Your Tools Ahead of Time

I encourage diving into a project before you’re ready, but I also encourage you to take some time during the creative process to learn about your platforms and tools before committing to a finished product.

My biggest mistake was glossing over the DriveThruRPG help library and making assumptions that did not turn out to be true. I know of another creator who fumbled fulfillment of their Zine Month project because they assumed that Backerkit would handle the fulfillment of their Crowdfundr campaign when in fact they could not. He sorted it out with Backerkit and was able to make it work, but it’s unexpected moments like that that can de-rail a campaign.

So just be careful, take some time to familiarize yourself with the tools you are using, and if you are distributing through another website, make sure you are designing your project with the correct standards in mind. If you have a clear idea of the steps you have to take before you hit “launch,” you will be in a much better place.

8) Use Affinity Publisher or Adobe InDesign

I designed my zine in a decade-old version of Adobe Illustrator. Don’t be like me (you may have just heard the collective gasp of a hundred graphic designers). I used it because it was a program I happened to have, and the zine I was making was a graphic-heavy one, but Illustrator is not designed for PDF production. I had to edit the final PDF in arcane ways that I still don’t understand just to get it into a format that DTRPG would accept.

If you are making a PDF, I highly recommend shelling out for Adobe InDesign or Affinity Publisher. Not only are these more or less industry standard, they are also programs that DTRPG is specifically used to handling. They even provide templates and tutorials for users looking to create PDFs.

9) Don’t POD Out of the Gate

I was too ambitious promising print-on-demand copies of my very first product. I wanted the satisfaction of having a physical zine to hold and pass around, but it required more work than a PDF, and created the biggest hurdles.

I opted to hand out POD codes instead of printing books myself. The advantages of this were that I did not have to manually package and ship books to every customer, nor did I have to worry about addressing missing or mishandled product, DTRPG did all that work for me. The other advantage was pricing. DTRPG charges you the price of printing and shipping, but shipping differs from country to country. You can cover the costs yourself, but it’s all or nothing: you pay for printing and shipping, or you make the customer pay for it all.

This meant that a fixed Kickstarter price would lead to me making a profit on some purchases and a loss on others. The solution is to offer a POD code to backers of a certain tier that allows them to but the book “at-cost,” paying for shipping and printing, but costing them less than a regular customer.

It’s a weird system that means the customer is essentially buying a product twice. It seems to be common in the TTRPG world, purchasers tend to understand what they are signing up for (and I tried hard to communicate to customers clearly) and it makes things much easier on me, though I’m not sure if I’d do it again. Your mileage may vary, depending on how hands-on you like to be.

If you are making a product for POD, you have to create your PDF according to very specific standards, wait a long time for proof copies and approval from DTRPG, and manage any problems that crop up along the way. In short, it adds a lot more complexity to an already complex process, so do yourself a favor and do not make your first TTRPG product a physical one if you can help it. Don’t be like me. Get comfortable first.

Announcements

I’ve Launched a Podcast!

Bros Before Prose is a bi-weekly sci-fi & fantasy book club in which my brother and I talk about tales both classic and contemporary. I’ll be cross-posting the first couple of episodes here on this newsletter, so expect just a little bit of spam. Subscribe to the podcast below or find it on your podcast platform of choice.

Faces of the Cage, a Planescape Supplement Now on DMs Guild

On top of launching MÖRK KOPHETS, I also contributed to a supplement for D&D’s Planescape setting. In it, you get sixteen unique NPCs and locations you can drop into your Planescape campaign to bring it to life! I contributed the “Merchant of Doors,” a mysterious woman who will sell you a key to anywhere in the multiverse, for a price. Click the image below and see for yourself:

The Annual Interactive Fiction Competition Needs Your Support!

The Interactive Fiction Competition (IF Comp) is a great celebration of narrative design, featuring rich text-only experiences from dozens of creatives. Submissions are being accepted until the end of August. Voting opens in September, and runs until October 15.

If you want to know more, check out my coverage of last year’s competition:

You can support the competition whether you are a casual fan or die-hard parser-head. The competition hosts are looking for generous parties to support the work of the creators.

One way they do this is through physical prize donations. Winners of IF Comp receive an item from the prize pool. Prizes can be anything, from novels to art prints to a Mesopotamian-style cylinder seal.

If you would like to support the arts and makes someone’s day, consider donating something to the prize pool! More information can be found on the IF Comp website.

See You Next Time…

I’m getting back into the swing of things, but next week I’d like to tell you about this year’s other great adventure: visiting Japan! I got only the briefest glimpse of the gaming scene there, but I am eager to share!