I’ve been thinking a bit about what makes some publishers more successful than others.  As Louis would say 9/10th of it is “putting out more products” and I don’t disagree.  But having products out doesn’t mean they are gonna sell.  They should look nice.  Production values have come a long way since the first AD&D books.  Looking at them now compared to the current crop of Pathfinder, Dark Heresy and Warmachine books presents a stark contrast to how far we have come.

But aside from actually having a product to sell that looks like you spent more than ten minutes to put together is only the beginning.  Marketing is king.  People need to KNOW about your product.  Today an average new release will be on the RPGNow front page for two to three days.  (Sometimes less!) So of all the RPGNow customers, how many look at the site every day or two?  Half? More? Probably less. A lot less.

So we have to market our products.  Everyone knows that, of course.  But how to do it?  Item number one is to post to some forums.  I post on ENWorld, RPGLife, RPGNet and (where appropriate) the Paizo board.  I used to just do ENWorld but have since added the others.  But you can easily see how many people have clicked on your post and frankly the numbers can be pretty small. 20-30 reads is common, but if you can get an actual “discussion” going then those numbers can get much bigger.  The thread can sometimes drift, but that is another topic.

Next up is a mass email!  RPGNow has a great tool to let you get the word out.  The last couple I sent went out to over 1,200 customers.  Those numbers are way better than what I am seeing from the forums.

Your website.  You have to have a website.  They are so cheap now days, there is no valid excuse not to have one.  How cheap?  How does FREE grab you?  Head over to BlogSpot.com and plug in your company name and set up a blog.  That will get anyone started.  I sprung for the domain name (a whopping ten bucks) and hosting for about five bucks a month so I can host my own files.  (Flip books, audio commentaries and other stuff.)

All of the above ads up to “people knowing about your company and your products”.  They say that traditional advertising has to be seen several times before it “sinks in” with the customers.  Thats why we see the same ads on TV all the time.  So it is with marketing your RPG company, keep posting to the forums, link back to your site, keep putting products on the front page of RPGNow, keep sending well crafted emails and your company will get “on the radar” of customers.

One other option I mean to focus on more this year is actively participating in the forums.  Not just to drop a press release about my stuff, but to actively post as a player, a fan and someone who actually loves to play games.  I think you have to watch just piping in on any old thread just so people see your ’sig with the company logo.  That will get old quick if your not actually adding something to the discussion.

I’m also focusing on the look of my OBS sales listings.  I try to make them look good.  I use a footer that I assign to all my products.  It has a cool little Flash thing like on the Apple store where several of my product covers will slide back and forth as you roll your mouse across them and links to the product shown.  It has links to the various categories of products I sell, as well as to my website. Did you know that you could create custom footers?  Did you know that you could stack multiple footers? There is some really cool things you can do with a little HTML know-how and some custom footers.

I just created a “Full Monty” bundle of all my Dept. 7 D20 Modern products and while it is active now it looks pretty lame.  I plan to put some real effort into making it look better so that I can sell more bundles.  (Hey, and at 75% off the retail price of the products individually I’m hoping it will sell pretty well!) If you check it out now you will see what I mean.  Check back next week and see if it looks a bit more enticing. (And while you’re there, go ahead and buy a copy of the bundle to prove how awesome my Marketing-Fu is!)

Well, the focus of this post isn’t so much to instill my wisdom to the six people that check this blog once in a while (Hi Mom & Dad!), it is more of a New Years Resolution to do more marketing and move Skortched Urf’ Studios from the kind of business that brings me a few hundred bucks a month to one that puts a comma in that number every month.

P.S.- No I didn’t ‘forget’ about Twitter and Facebook; I just don’t use them for marketing Skortched Urf’ Studios.  All the methods above are very focused on finding the customers where they are; the RPG forums, RPGNow/OBS, emails to previous customers and those that care enough to seek out your website.  I don’t think Twitter and Facebook are focused enough for a niche market like RPG’s.  Maybe I’m wrong, and I’m not knocking anyone that uses Facebook and Twitter for marketing.  In fact, if you do use them I’d be very interested in what actual results you are seeing compared to the other methods I mentioned.