Samothdm said:
As a fellow marketing person (advertising for me), I'd be very interested in reading what problems you encountered on this.
God, where to start. Basically, the problem is that the company I wrote for lacks established connections to the D20 world. Their own rpg is loved by critics but is largely unknown in the gaming community. Since my book represented a relatively low priority (low expectation) experiment with D20, it was basically up to me to get the word out, if that was indeed possible.
I definately didn't really see this coming. Writing the book was a fairly immense project, once I actually saw it in print I thought my work was largely over. I knew marketing was going to be up to me, but I thought it would be simple. So much the fool I! You can write an excellent book for d20, and I think the Primer is one of the most unique and useful suppliments out there, but if it's not marketed correctly, given the current flood of competition, nobody is going to even notice it.
So the difficulties I have to admit were largely due to my almost total lack of knowledge or ability in marketing. I've never been much of a salesman! I'm much more of an artisan type, and something of a curmudgeon to boot.
A few specifics, I was asked to find a reviewer and I didn't realise that reviewers have different style preferences. I asked a guy I knew virtualy nothing about (other than that he did reviews) who I think approached gaming in general from a very different perspective from the philisophy of the book. As a result, my first and most widely read review was mixed. All the others were very positive, but I don't think they were noticed.
That was just the first problem though. There were so many little technical dificulties. One example, I couldn't get the image of the book uploaded to Amazon. I've tried over and over, there is some problem with their automated software. This is still ongoing. Probably my biggest blunder was attempting to promote the book on usenet. Not having seen usenet in like 5 years I had no idea how vicious it had really gotten. I ended up getting baited into a flamewar with some psychotic newsgroup regulars, a couple of whom proceeded to stalk me for weeks, sabotaging me in every way they could think of and causing all kinds of unbelievable headaches.
Support material (web enhancements) took longer to get finished than anticipated, though feedback on what we did so far has been very good. I talked the publisher into holding a spell naming contest with pretty good prizes, but nobody entered it. That was a flop! The mini adventure we did still needs to be edited... On one occasion I went to my FLGS to see if they had my book on their shelves, with some vague idea about promoting it in some way, but I felt embarrassed and when someone asked if I was the author I kind of clammed up, mumbled a bit and left.
In general, it's so hard to know where to go online, there are so many websites, so many gaming companies. So many distriubtors. As you said, this is a huge part of the research which goes into developing a d20 product, only for me, it was something I got into after the book came out. Even now I don't have a clear idea in my head of who the major industry players are. I really have no idea which websties are the best for promoting a D20 book, but I found some people discussing the Primer here on ENworld and it seemed the friendliest site I found, so I stuck around here basically. For better or worse, this is where my marketing efforts end!
DB
