mikeshea.net

How to "Make It" in the RPG Industry

by Mike Shea on 5 October 2024

How to "Make It" in the RPG Industry

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.

General Recommendations

• Everyone's path in this industry is different. Advice for one doesn't always work for another and the industry changes often. Few paths are replicable but shared experiences are always worth while.
• Decide on your own realistic definition of what success looks like.
• Build a platform you own to bring people to your work. Start with an newsletter, website, and blog. It takes years to build up a strong platform and audience.
• Focus on small projects. Check out MT Black’s Iskandar sourcebook as an example.
• Build a marketing bubble where every product you create drives customers to other products you make.
• YouTube is the only social media platform that still brings people to my work. 43% of my patrons come from YouTube.
• Sell your products on platforms that serve you and give you the freedom to sell elsewhere. Your own web store, DriveThruRPG, Amazon, Itch.io, etc. Focus on platforms that bring their own audience to your work. Avoid the DM's Guild.

Table of Contents

• General Recommendations
• How to "Make It" in the RPG Industry
• What Does it Mean to "Make It" in the RPG industry? The Levels of "Making It"
• Getting Attention
• YouTube Experiences
• What Should You Make?
• Where Should You Sell Products?
• The Marketing Bubble
• The Traditional Marketing Funnel
• The Disney Bubble
• The Sly Flourish Bubble
• Entry Points into the Sly Flourish Bubble
• Example Interconnections
• Surprising Interconnections
• Finding Your Entry Points
• Kickstarter Sources
• Which Platforms Don't Bring New People To My Work?
• Is AI Killing Blogs? Not Yet!
• Final Thoughts on the Marketing Funnel
• Thoughts on the DMs Guild
• Links to Further Discussions

What Does it Mean to "Make It" in the RPG industry? The Levels of "Making It"

How do you define “make it”? That is the ultimate determination of success. What’s your goal? Is it reasonably attainable?

Here's a loose but useful model for different levels of "making it". The model has three considerations to keep in mind:

• Each level of the model has roughly 10x the revenue of the previous level.
• Each level has roughly 10x fewer people or companies in it than the level below.
• Getting to the next level requires 10x as much work and luck to achieve.

And here are the tiers:

• Tier 1 - $1-10 a year. Selling one roughly $5 product a year on itch.io or DriveThru.
• Tier 2 - $10-$100 a year. Selling a product roughly once a month.
• Tier 3 - $100-$1,000 a year. Selling ten roughly $5 products a month or so. Gives you an allowance to buy other RPG books maybe.
• Tier 4 - $1,000-$10,000 a year. Selling roughly one hundred $5 products a month or maybe you've gone up to twenty five $20 products. You can pay your electric bill, maybe! A good allowance and maybe some revenue for expenses.
• Tier 5 - $10,000-$100,000 a year. A thousand $5 products a month roughly or 250 $20 products a month. You probably have a real business now and can form an LLC. You're actually making a healthy profit, hopefully, and can invest in higher quality products, materials, art, or stuff to run your business. Still have a day job though.
• Tier 6 - $100,000-$1,000,000 a year. Equivalent of ten thousand $5 products a month or 2,500 $20 products a month but probably getting income from several sources. A real business. Can maybe go full time if you have access to good health care. Maybe a small company with a couple of folks. This is about when my own company went to off-set print runs and global shipping which is a huge leap.
• Tier 7 - $1,000,000-$10,000,000 a year. A good-sized RPG business with multiple employees, lots of products, lots of income streams. Definitely doing it full time with a small staff. There are probably less than 100 of these companies.
• Tier 8 - $10,000,000 - $100,000,000 a year. Probably less than ten RPG companies fall into this category. Good-sized staff, lots of products and lots of funding lines.
• Tier 9 - $100,000,000 – $1,000,000,000 a year. Only one company hits this level – Wizards of the Coast. This just counts their sales of D&D products, licenses, merchandise, and what not. Dozens to hundreds of employees. It's unlikely we'll see another company hit this level.

Sly Flourish is a tier 6 company and will likely stay there until we close the doors. Tier 5 is a reasonable expectation for a good-sized successful company and any tier can be considered a success. You decide where you fall and what level you'd like to grow to.

Again, this isn't a perfect model, but it can help us to understand the ladders of "making it".

Getting Attention

• If you have a new book and you want people to find it, start building your platform and audience ten years ago. The next best time is to start today.
• An email newsletter is 20x to 40x more likely to pay off than a tweet with the same impressions.
• In your newsletter, give 3x what you take. Give free stuff. Give a benefit to them three times before you try to sell them something.
• Build on platforms you control like podcasts, blogs, email newsletters, Mastodon, and your own storefront (Shopify and Woocommerce are popular). Otherwise you’re building a house on rented land with big enshittified platforms (Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, YouTube).
• Never trust big centralized enshittified platforms like X, Twitch, YouTube, Tiktok, Instagram, Reddit, and Facebook. Their business (keeping people continually engaged in their platform) goes directly against yours (getting people to click away to your work). They have trillions of dollars working against your interests.
• Engage with people. Get into conversations. Help others. Join group projects. Be a positive member of the community. Don’t be an asshole.
• Be consistent. Release quality work regularly and consistently.
• It takes time. The longer you do it, the more chances you’re giving the world to turn in your favor. Your effort keeps adding extra modifiers or rolls on the big random dice roll of success.

YouTube Experiences

• YouTube is the only social network that brings significant amounts of people to the rest of my work: 40% of Patreon subscribers found me through YouTube.
• Great thumbnails and good titles are critical to a successful YouTube video.
• Your followers are log-useful. Each piece of content you put up on an algorithmically-focused site (Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram, YouTube) has its own metrics only loosely connected to followers. This is why a channel with 200,000 subscribers might only get 10,000 views on a video. Subscribers matter 1/10th as much as a good well-received piece of content.
• Building up a channel of videos is hard. Focus on audio quality. It matters a lot.

What Should You Make?

What sort of product should you make? Is the product you're thinking about something people really want?

• Consider people's time.
• What's useful for other people who don't know you?
• What work are you doing for your customer? How are you saving them time and effort?
• What makes your thing unique? Why you?
• Who wants this? Why isn’t this need fulfilled?
• Why this over everything else?
• Don’t let a drive to make a perfect thing push you away from starting to make things and getting them out there.

Where Should You Sell Products?

In order of best to worst from the perspective of reach, profit margin, and control over the platform.

• Your own store (Shopify, Woocommerce)
• Bundle of Holding
• Kickstarter
• Patreon
• DriveThruRPG
• Amazon (Print on Demand, ebooks, Seller Central)
• Itch.io

The Marketing Bubble

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.

The Traditional Marketing Funnel

What does the traditional marketing funnel look like?

• From Glengarry Glen Ross
• Chris Zukowski on newsletters – Build Your Own Fan Club: How to Use Your Email List

The funnel:

• Attention – Billboards flying by the highway, most social media sites, first page of a website.
• Interest – Do they look at more than one thing of yours? Do they recognize you and your work elsewhere? Do they watch a couple videos or read a couple of articles? Now they’re getting interested in you.
• Decision – Do they give you something? Do they sign up for your newsletter? Do they subscribe to your youtube channel and keep looking for you?
• Action – Do they buy your book? Do they join your Patreon? Do they back your Kickstarter?

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.

The Disney Bubble

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.

The Sly Flourish Bubble

We can do this to! What are our product types and how do customers bounce around?

Entry Points into the Sly Flourish Bubble

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.

• YouTube (43%)
• Books (23%)
• Blog (12%)
• Podcast (7%)
• Friend Recommendation (4%)
• Other (4%)
• Reddit (2%)
• Twitter (2%)
• Kickstarter (1%)
• Facebook (0%)
• Twitch (0%)
• Discord (0%)
• Freelance work (0%)
• Mastodon (0%)
• Instagram (0%)
• Tiktok (0%)

Example Interconnections

Once people are into the bubble, they bounce around to other parts of the bubble.

• YouTube subscribers join the newsletter, go to the book store, and join Patreon.
• Patrons get notified about and support Kickstarters and book sales.
• Kickstarter backers join the newsletter (50% growth from one Kickstarter!)
• Newsletter subscribers hear about and support book sales, Kickstarters, and Patreon updates.
• Blog readers join the newsletter, go to the book store, join the patreon, or back a Kickstarter.
• Amazon customers buy my book, check out my youtube video, and become Patrons.
• DriveThruRPG customers hear about and support my Kickstarters.
• Bookstore customers join the newsletter, hear about and join the Patreon, and support Kickstarters.
• Podcast listeners...well, they don’t do much of anything (7% of Patreons instead of 41% from YouTube).

Surprising Interconnections

Sometimes the bottom of the funnel is actually the top!

• 23% of patrons found me through my books. Shouldn't this be the bottom of the funnel?
• 11% of Kickstarter backers came from my email newsletter.
• Newsletter subscribers grew by 50% from one Kickstarter.
• Patrons are 2x to 3x more likely to buy books on a sale or back Kickstarters.

Finding Your Entry Points

Where do people find your work organically? Which platforms bring customers to me that typically don’t already know about my work?

• YouTube Search and Recommendations
• Amazon Search
• Google Search
• DriveThruRPG Search and Discovery
• Kickstarter discovery and recommendations
• Podcast searches and recommendations

Which Platforms Don't Bring New People To My Work?

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Tiktok
• X
• YouTube Shorts
• The DM’s Guild
• Discord
• Twitch

Most of these platforms are designed so users don’t leave the platform.

Kickstarter Sources

What about sources for Kickstarters? These are the sources from my City of Arches Kickstarter campaign.

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.

Is AI Killing Blogs? Not Yet!

While I'm hearing a lot about the collapse of hits reaching websites due to Google's AI summaries, it isn't hitting me yet. Looking over years of web statistics I keep on SlyFlourish.com, I'm seeing a gradual downward trend but nothing like the big cliff big content sites seem to be hitting.

Beyond that, though, I still think it's worth having a blog for a few reasons:

• It's a homepage you can point people towards where they can find all your other stuff. You own the domain so no social media company can take it from you or change their business model or be taken over by nazis.
• You can archive your newsletters there. My blog posts became email newsletters but now, when I write them, I think of them as email newsletters first that end up on my blog.
• Even if traffic goes down, you'll still get people who come to your site and browse your site. Blogs are still worth having.

The article The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work has some great insights into this problem but a quote from Will Welch at New York magazine:

“The good news for any digital publisher is that the new game we all have to play is also a sustainable one: You have to build a direct relationship with your core readers,”

I like that a lot. Our focus should be on reaching individuals ourselves -- building that direct communication and connection. When I send an email newsletter, it's an article I wrote with my own fingers and emailed to a real individual who subscribed because they want to hear what I have to say. When someone subscribes to my podcast, I'm talking to them. When they join my Patreon, I can email them cool stuff I'm making, take questions from them in my Q&A thread, and talk directly with them in Discord. Whey they buy a book, they get a book I wrote and produced with my best take on the subject of the book.

That's what I want to focus on and I think having a blog still helps me do that.

Final Thoughts on the Marketing Funnel

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).

Thoughts on the DM’s Guild

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 agree to an exclusive perpetual license. You can never publish that work anywhere else, ever. You can’t split it up and offer samples for a newsletter or Patreon. You can’t offer it as part of 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 they say, WOTC is unlikely (like lottery-ticket unlikely) to hire you because you published 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 authors? Tens of thousands? 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 access to all of them. You don’t just publish to DTRPG 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 would get more purchases on the DM’s Guild than DriveThruRPG, but you for sure can’t experiment by publishing it anywhere else.

Also, a 50% royalty is really bad. You're paying at least an extra 20% to WOTC for each purchase. 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.

The only reason to publish to the DM’s Guild is if you absolutely must use Wizards Intellectual Property you can’t otherwise use.

• If you have to write for the Forgotten Realms or another WOTC world.
• If you have to use monsters not included in the SRD like beholders or mind flayers.
• If you have to use WOTC art they’ve released to the guild.

If your product is built to use WOTC intellectual property, now you’re making them earn that 20%.

Better yet, make up your own new monsters and your own new world and sell it wherever and however you want.

The DM’s Guild is an extremely restrictive and expensive platform to publish to. When you publish a product there, you've handed that product to the DMs Guild forever and can never take it back. You can’t say you haven’t been warned.

Links to Further Discussions

The following articles expand on the topics in this one:

• Running Kickstarters
• Marketing Your RPG Product
• Kevin Crawford wrote a guide for running Kickstarters as well

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.

• Making a Sly Flourish Book: How the Sausage Gets Made
• How to "Make It" in the D&D and RPG Industry YouTube Video
• Homie and the Dude - Writer of Lazy DM Series/5e Supplement Creator - Mike Shea (Sly Flourish) - HATD S2 #48
• Inspiration Point S02 E26: The Laziest GM - Sly Flourish (Guest: Mike Shea)

Two other great videos and playlists include:

• Teos Abadia's Making It in the RPG Industry series
• James Introcas's Getting Into Game Design
• Everything I Know About Making RPGs by Lyme