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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SlyFlourish" data-source="post: 9702734" data-attributes="member: 54840">Really great insights and I agree with a lot of it.For me, the big shift in the complexity of our projects was switching from print on demand to offset printing. POD prices went up, quality went down, and the amount of books we were shipping was high enough to switch to offset printing but it was a huge and dangerous learning curve. Luckily it worked out and now our little company (my wife and I) have a whole workflow for writing, producing, publishing, printing, and distributing books worldwide. It's still a pain in the ass, no doubt, but I'm really happy with the quality of the books. But for us, we have a sort of lower benchmark where it's not worth the effort. That's about 2,000 backers or so before it's profitable.Marketing is a big focus for us now and that's a shifting environment. Like Morrus said, we have had luck with Backerkit's marketing activities which pay for themselves and I think get a greater reach than what you pay for but Facebooks whole ad platform continues to suck and with another company in the middle, profitability is low.For us, the biggest marketing value came from:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">YouTube (I have a pretty strong channel with good conversions)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Patreon (I have a strong patreon site with people who also respond very positively to new big projects)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Newsletter (I wish I had started this 15 years ago but I'm happy where it's at now and Kickstarter helps it grow)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Podcast (it's not nothing but not nearly as popular or as conversiony as YouTube)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Blog (blogging isn't dead! But yeah, its no youtube).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">All other social media (Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon) is hardly measurable. It used to be that Twitter was a great place to market but not now, that's for sure.</li> </ul>Like you, we now manage pretty much everything on our own from the writing and production of the book to managing the Kickstarter. I'm very lucky that I can partner with Scott Fitzgerald Gray who manages editing, layout, and art direction so that's a huge benefit.Since the roughly 30% drop in the industry post COVID and with such a huge amount of fantastic products and full RPG systems out there, it's harder to identify a new product that's going to draw in enough energy to make it profitable. I guess that's just reality these days.I'm adding a list of the sources and how much they brought in for our last project, the <a href="https://shop.slyflourish.com/products/the-city-of-arches" target="_blank">City of Arches</a>.[ATTACH=full]411021[/ATTACH]I try to compile all my best advice here:[URL unfurl="true"]https://mikeshea.net/how_to_make_it_in_the_rpg_industry.html[/URL]</blockquote>

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