Ten Takeaways from the Indie RPG Creator Summit

Everything you need to know about online marketing (mostly)

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of attending the Indie RPG Creator Summit, a three-day online event featuring dozens of speakers across thirty-four panels about creating, marketing, and distributing independently-produced roleplaying games (RPGs) and products.

The event was hosted by Goodman Games, publishers of the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, and BackerKit, the crowdfunding and digital pledge management platform. While many of the talks were about online crowdfunding and publishing material under the DCC third-party license, there were plenty of lessons applicable to online content creators of all stripes.

Whether you run an Etsy shop as a side-hustle or produce board games full-time, there was something in this summit for you. Having had a couple of weeks to digest the information, I wanted to share some of the lessons I found most helpful from across the summit’s three days.

A List of Lessons Learned

1. The best thing to do is just get started

Across all talks, the most consistent message was one you have probably heard before: the best way to get started is to just get started.

It does not matter if your output is good. In fact, it is better to get your worst work out of the way early, when you have the fewest eyes on you. Improve as you go, produce as much as you can, and eventually you will be producing results that people enjoy and gathering a community of fans that appreciate your content.

2. Get thee a (project specific) email list!

There were a lot of questions about how to garner a following online. Surprisingly, almost everybody said the same thing. The best thing you can do to garner an audience is not to post on a certain social media platform or create a certain kind of content. The best thing you can do is create an email list.

Unlike social media, which is always at the mercy of the ever-changing algorithm, an email list allows you to reach your fans directly and build a personal relationship with them. By emailing people who are already invested in your work, you are more certain that they will support you, and you will have a pre-built audience for your next project. Likes and shares often do not translate into purchases, but emails allow you to track who is invested in your product and how much interest translates into sales.

3. Pitch your crowdfunding campaign ASAP

Crowdfunding was the most popular topic of conversation. Crowdfunding, for those unfamiliar, is a method of online fundraising in which fans donate money before a product is launched. The money is often used to see the product through to completion, subsidizing the costs of printing and delivery, and early backers tend to get copies of the product and other goodies for their support.

The most frequent tip from experienced crowdfunders and BackerKit employees was to pitch your crowdfunding campaign as soon as possible. You don’t need a finished product, just a few promotional images and a clear pitch to garner interest. Your pitch should be as specific and succinct as possible, focusing on what the product IS rather than what it is not.

Pitching early not only gives the word time to spread, but allows you to gauge interest in your project through email lists (see above!) and build a strong relationship with your fan base long before your product is ready to be financed. Is there such a thing as too early? Not really, so long as you keep the project on people’s radars. A year of radio silence will do nothing for you.

4. You can use BackerKit to advertise projects on other platforms

This is a more platform specific thing, but one of the biggest surprises for me was how you can leverage BackerKit to promote a project on just about any platform.

For a little bit of context, BackerKit started as a fulfillment platform for Kickstarter. Kickstarter would run the crowdfunding campaign and collect the money, but the job of distributing rewards to backers was done by BackerKit. As of last year, BackerKit has expanded to become a full-fledged crowdfunding platform in its own right. Despite being competitors now, the two platforms maintain a close relationship.

BackerKit has a lot of tools to support you in your crowdfunding efforts. One of them, the BackerKit Launch tool, creates a landing page for your project whether you are crowdfunding on Kickstarter, Crowdfundr, Indiegogo, GoFundMe, or any other platform. The advantage to using this over a platform’s native tools is that it lets you collect email addresses and control your email list in a way that other platforms do not. Also, their landing pages are customizable and feature countdown timers, allowing for more creativity and flexibility up front.

5. Crowdfunding is only a part of the process

Crowdfunding’s most common function is to cover the costs of production, whether those be start-up costs or the cost of producing and shipping a finished product.

However, crowdfunding is also a powerful tool for generating excitement and creating a relationship between customer and publisher before a product is even out. It also gives publishers a sense of how much interest exists for their product, which will inform their production decisions moving forward.

But all of that is only a part of the process. Before your campaign launches, there is planning and marketing, not just for your product, but for the campaign itself. You should be advertising, creating an email list, and doing whatever you can to drive interest. After a campaign comes the difficulties of fulfillment: completing the project, delivering pledge rewards, and handling setbacks and customer complaints. The best thing you can do is to prepare yourself, and do not commit to anything you may not be able to deliver.

6. Don’t try shipping and handling yourself

Don’t try to ship your own product. Beyond the pain of packaging a product and making sure you are shipping it to the right customers in the right places (hoping that no one has moved or given the wrong address), you also have all of the headaches that come AFTER you’ve shipped. Missing and damaged shipments are your responsibility, and you will be the one to deal with customer complaints. It is time consuming and it always always always costs more than you think.

Don’t offer physical rewards if you don’t have to. Especially if you are publishing for the first time, try to offload the work of shipping and handling to a third-party service. For RPG products, try using DriveThruRPG’s (DTRPG) print-on-demand (POD) service. DriveThruRPG is the most popular website for digital RPG materials, but also offers a robust printing service for those who desire physical copies of their favorite product.

By using DTRPG’s POD service, you can give backers a coupon code in lieu of a physical product. It is then up to the customer to redeem that coupon on DTRPG, at which point DTRPG will fulfill printing and shipping. This is costly, but ensures a high level of quality and customer service that is likely outside your expertise. Problems can and will arise still (something I can personally attest to), but by working with DTRPG, you have more options for handling unforeseen problems.

7. International distribution is difficult, but possible!

Some of the best talks from the summit were on day three, which was exclusive to paying participants and covered specific topics related to marketing and making money. Several of these talks covered international distribution.

One talk, titled “Fundamentals of RPG Translation Deals” covered the challenges of translating material from one language into another. Translation, it turns out, is not just a matter of translating words. Changing languages affects the layout and presentation of a book, as the words do not fit the same way, and there are many considerations around licensing and art contracts. Art you have permission to use in your book may not be used in international markets unless your contract specifically says so. This is why many books look completely different in other countries.

“Selling, Shipping, and Marketing RPGs to Latin American Markets,” had a plethora of information about the South American gaming scene, particularly in Brazil. Brazil has a small but growing TTRPG community. The average Brazilian does not have very much disposable income, so gaming is considered a luxury hobby. As such, PDFs are popular, as are games that are cheap and easily accessible. Physical copies are still valued, but for logistical reasons, it is cheaper for South American countries to purchase them from UK distributors. Central American countries, conversely, will purchase from US vendors.

The Brazilian scene is definitely one worth looking into for aspiring RPG creators, and with careful planning and smart business decisions, can be a profitable outlet.

8. YouTube has the best return-on-investment for creators

There are many ways to build an audience and generate buzz about your products online. However, when asked about which platform had the biggest return-on-investment (ROI), speakers all agreed that YouTube was the best. While social media and podcasts can get the word out about a product, YouTube videos draw the biggest numbers for the least amount of effort. YouTube videos can also serve as the basis for short TikTok videos, and the transcripts can be repurposed for use in blog posts or sales copy.

The caveat is that YouTube is not a reliable income source. While some people have been able to turn YouTube into a full-time job, even they are subject to the ever-changing terms of YouTube’s content policies and algorithms. YouTube is at its best when it is supporting your other financial ventures. Getting a Patreon set up as soon as possible is also recommended for online creatives.

9. Don’t talk about AI

This wasn’t a panel, but rather an interesting phenomenon observed at the event. The Summit took place over Zoom, using their new Zoom Events platform. While the audience were not able to interact through voice or video, there was a very active chat.

During the second session, somebody asked a question about AI use in the RPG industry…and it took over the conversation for a solid ten minutes. The facilitators quickly realized that bringing up such a controversial topic distracted from the talks, and asked people to avoid the subject. It became a running joke amongst the attendants.

Whatever your thoughts about AI and their potential uses, it’s best to leave controversial topics to their own discussions when at a panel.

If you want to hear some of my thoughts about AI in the RPG space — its potential uses and problems — check out my article about ChatGPT and Elder, the Call of Cthulhu AI.

ChatGPT and the Future of RPGs

10. Be willing to learn

Going into this Summit, I wasn’t sure what it was I expected to take away. I’ve always learned better by doing rather than listening to other people. Even by the end of the first day, I wondered if it was worth my time to listen to all of these talks. Much of what they had to say could have been learned quickly through experience.

But I am glad I attended. People have been publishing RPGs for a long time, and they all have a little bit of insight to give. Hearing it from others, even something I could have learned through practice, will help avoid common pitfalls and reveal new approaches. These talks taught me uses for BackerKit that I never knew existed, and made me think about crowdfunding more than I had up to this point.

Above all, listening to these voices has boosted my confidence and has done more to convince me to follow my passions than I could have talked myself into.

Putting it into practice

So, having learned what I have from the Summit, I am excited to put it all into practice. To that end, I am proud to announce my upcoming Kickstarter project: MÖRK KÖPHETS: A Dead Mall Dungeon Crawl for the MÖRK BORG RPG.

Taking advantage of Zine Quest, an annual Kickstarter event celebrating indie RPG projects, I will be crowdfunding this brief adventure-scenario next month. Not only will this be my first commercial product, but my first stab at crowdfunding and marketing. I look forward to learning what it takes to get a project off the ground.

I would love it if you could follow my project at the link below. You will get email updates when the project goes live mid-February.

Thanks for reading and supporting me in my creative journey. I hope you learned something useful and I will see you in the next newsletter.

Also, if you are participating in Zine Quest yourself— or its Crowdfundr rival: Tabletop Nonstop — please share! I’d love to feature you in the next newsletter.