How to promote an indie RPG?

#21

Must be 50+. Cool to know. Thanks for sharing that! It’s a mystery number that DTRPG does not share.

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#22

I’ve seen numbers on this page before. Seems accurate. (50+ = Copper.)

Congrats on the award!

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#23

Fascinating! It looks like virtually the same number that made Copper hit Silver so that seems like a pretty high chance at this point.

#24

This is a great topic; thanks for both the original idea and the fantastic contributions thus far. This veers heavily into anecdata territory, and probably isn’t especially authoritative, but I wanna kinda second some thoughts in this thread around making yourself a genuine participatory resource in the community at large.

There’s probably some not-entirely-reasonable “paying your dues” thinking going into valuing that, but regardless, when I see a product coming out that looks cool, and I search up the creator and see them engaging on twitter or forums, dishing on design thoughts and supporting other creators, I can’t help but think more highly of them than someone who seems to have just come from nowhere to sell me something.

I mean, almost no one actually drops a product into the RPG space without having been a part of the community somewhere, at some point, but tying your commercial presence to your community presence helps solidify your bonafides, and for what it’s worth, a lot of the people who manage those “overnight success stories” on Kickstarter are connected early and often. You mentioned how tough it is to get your product onto AP podcasts without paying, and I can see why some would choose that route for “slush pile” submissions, just to keep the numbers manageable.

But if you’ve grown close with someone with a 1.5k subscriber YT channel and do some recordings with them, and meet some other players and maybe get invited to another Twitch stream a few months later, not only are you having fun and adding value to the community by helping make entertaining content, you’re also making connections and contacts you can rely on when you’re trying to push your brand out. A podcast host or Twitch channel’s way more likely to host your demo one-shot as part of your marketing push if you’ve been a cool guest a few times already not pushing your own wares, ya know?

I mean, all of this is all well and good unless you’ve got 600 posts of relentlessly trolling fans of your least-favorite system on RPG.net as your most notable public RPG-related contribution, of course :joy:

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#25

Thanks, Armando. You’re not wrong – I didn’t realize how much I should have been building my brand and presence before releasing the game. And the groups I’ve been joining since I started are valuable in and of themselves, so I’m learning what I was missing out on.

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#26

Hey Tom, I actually stumbled across this thread trying to find a way to get in touch with you, which I couldn’t find on either the GeekNative interview nor the RPG Drive Thru (and had a difficult time finding the itch page, though eventually did as well). Promotion wise, probably worth having a way to contact on both pages and also on the interview page.

I happened to find you in the Magpie Games discord when looking for indigenous related material, so shooting you a reply there!

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