by Mike Shea on 5 October 2024
This page includes resources and shared experiences for those interested in publishing tabletop roleplaying products. It’s based on my own experiences – just a drop in the bucket in the world of TTRPG publishing – but hope they’re useful.
How do you define “make it”? That is the ultimate determination of success. What’s your goal? Is it reasonably attainable?
These are the “powers of ten” for “making it”, each is an order of magnitude harder than the previous to achieve and offers an order of magnitude higher income.
What sort of product should you make? Is the product you're thinking about something people really want?
In order of best to worst from the perspective of reach, profit margin, and control over the platform.
The traditional concept of the marketing funnel doesn’t always work. Customers sometimes enter at the bottom of your funnel. Instead, think of your whole work as a bubble with entry points like the Disney business model. Know what the entry points are and then get them bouncing around inside the bubble of your work.
What does the traditional marketing funnel look like?
The funnel:
You can’t jump levels in the funnel. People buy $6 starbucks coffees because they know what they’re getting. They have a relationship with Starbucks. If two guys in ski masks jumped out of a van and told you to buy their $6 coffee, you’d run. It took Starbucks a lot of time and money and energy to get you to buy a $6 coffee.
This is what a marketing bubble looks like. Each product type leads to other product types. Customers enter the bubble and bounce around from product type to product type.
We can do this to! What are our product types and how do customers bounce around?
This is how people tend to find the rest of my work in order of popularity. The percentages are the percentages of people who found my Patreon through these channels but I bet its similar for my other projects. Notably absent is my newsletter. I wish I had put it on there.
Once people are into the bubble, they bounce around to other parts of the bubble.
Sometimes the bottom of the funnel is actually the top!
Where do people find your work organically? Which platforms bring customers to me that typically don’t already know about my work?
Most of these platforms are designed so users don’t leave the platform.
What about sources for Kickstarters? These are the sources from my City of Arches Kickstarter campaign.
| City of Arches Kickstarter Sources | Backers | Percentage | Gross Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kickstarter Driven | 1886 | 43% | $87,548 |
| BackerKit Marketing | 779 | 18% | $36,161 |
| Unknown | 392 | 9% | $18,197 |
| Email Newsletter | 221 | 5% | $10,259 |
| YouTube (Non-Sponsorship) | 210 | 5% | $9,748 |
| Patreon | 193 | 4% | $8,959 |
| Previous Kickstarter Update | 181 | 4% | $8,402 |
| Web Search | 144 | 3% | $6,684 |
| Blog Promotion | 126 | 3% | $5,849 |
| DTRPG Email | 93 | 2% | $4,317 |
| Sponsored YouTube Video | 70 | 2% | $3,249 |
| Influencer Outreach | 28 | 1% | $1,300 |
| 17 | 0% | $789 | |
| Community Post | 14 | 0% | $650 |
| Mastodon | 5 | 0% | $232 |
| Twitter / X | 4 | 0% | $186 |
| 4 | 0% | $186 | |
| Bluesky | 3 | 0% | $139 |
| Podcast | 1 | 0% | $46 |
Note, podcasts is almost certainly an error and podcast referrals were likely included in YouTube referrals because I accidentally used YouTube tags in most podcast descriptions. Still, I expect Podcasts were low. No one in a car is going to stop to click a link.
Think about your entry point and think about how every product you make is a vehicle to get people to your other products. Get them into your bubble and bounce them around.
Ignore platforms that don’t bring people into your bubble (seriously, let go of X).
Think hard before you publish your product on the DM’s Guild. Lots of people are excited about publishing to the DM’s Guild but it has one huge drawback and a couple of smaller ones. The big one:
Once you publish a product to the DM’s Guild, you can never publish it anywhere else – ever.
When you publish a product to the DM’s Guild, you’re agreeing to an exclusive perpetual license. You can never publish that work anywhere else, ever. You can’t split it up and make it parts of a newsletter or Patreon. You can’t turn it into a Kickstarter. You can’t use it as marketing material. It’s on the DM’s Guild, and only on the DM’s Guild, forever. You still technically “own” it, but not really. You own it but you’ve lost control of it.
Regardless of what people think, WOTC is unlikely (like lottery-ticket unlikely) to hire you because you posted on the DM’s Guild. Yes, I have friends who published there who ended up getting freelance work from them. But that’s out of how many publishers? Tens of thousands? And, these days, it’s a lot less likely than it once was.
Some argue that the DM’s Guild has better visibility to D&D customers than any other source. Maybe that’s true but it’s only one source, but you have all of them. You don’t just publish to the DM’s Guild or Patreon or Amazon – you can publish to all of them. You can experiment. You can change your product and your model. You have no limits when you publish your work to non-exclusive stores. Make it an audiobook. Make it a YouTube series. Do whatever you want with it. Maybe you get more purchases on the DM’s Guild than DriveThruRPG. But you for sure can’t experiment by publishing it anywhere else.
This doesn’t even get into the extra 20% you pay to WOTC for each purchase of your product in order to have the privilege of that exclusive perpetual license (which, if I haven’t been clear, is a VERY BAD bad license for authors). What are you paying that 20% for? Access to WOTC IP you wouldn’t otherwise have – and that is the ONLY reason to publish to the DM’s Guild.
Only publish to the DM’s Guild if you must use Wizards Intellectual Property you can’t otherwise use.
If your product is built to use WOTC intellectual property, now you’re making them earn that 15%. If you’re writing a book about Greek mythological monsters - why are you paying them 15% and signing an exclusive perpetual license for a book about a medusa?
I can go on and on about this. You can’t get access to your customers. You can’t email them to let them know about other products you have. You have limited access to sales data at all. The DM’s Guild is an extremely restrictive platform to publish to. Be very wary. You can’t say you haven’t been warned.
I get this question a lot so I'm posting about it here.
This is not aa replicable model but sometimes I get asked how I manage my time in this crazy business of mine. Here’s some thoughts I wrote up when asked:
First off, I don't think I could do what I'm doing without my wife being as into this stuff as I am (she is a 50% partner in our RPG business). We talk about D&D all the time. We watch videos about it. We play it together. She was into D&D before I was. She brought me to my first group in this part of the world. She's my #1 player. That helps considerably.
Now that a lot of my actual work is RPG work, I do have some balancing things I try to put in place. I try to work a somewhat normal schedule of about 10am to 6pm or so. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes I'll go take a break and watch a movie or whatever.
I do find myself drawn back to it all the time, though. I get new ideas and I'd rather work on those ideas than go play a video game.
I work about six days a week.
I keep a regular pacing by using Todoist on my phone. It's a to-do app with scheduling and projects and stuff. I have a ton of recurring tasks that pop up on the day and remind me to do them. Then I look at that in the morning and plan what I plan to accomplish. I'm pretty good at managing the work load so I'm not totally overwhelmed.
I've gotten good at saying no to things. Many times I'll turn down projects or freelance work or other ideas with a simple "I'm sorry, I'm completely swamped and I don't know when I'll be above water" which is true. I have more than enough of my own work to fill up all my time.
One thing that helps me tremendously is my ability to automate or semi-automate tasks with Python. Being a tech nerd helps me manage stuff like that. I have an army of Python scripts that help me do things like prep my YouTube videos and Podcast recordings, manage my Mastodon posts, calculate my end of month book sales, and lots of other things I can't even remember.
The following articles expand on the topics in this one:
The following shows I either made myself or joined as a guest where I talk about making D&D stuff. They offer some insights on what I’ve done and what worked for me.
Two other great videos and playlists include: