None of my friends had heard of Choice of Games either.
I did actually consider writing up reviews for some sites that take user reviews but I’m not great at writing reviews. It’s also time and energy I could be putting into my own project. I did try and write one for the google store but I’m really not happy with it.
@Cataphrak have you been doing promotion for Sabres of Infinity?
Man, we should do a campaign of submitting and reviewing CoGs. I’d personally be willing to write a bunch of reviews; these games deserve more publicity than they’re getting.
Start a couple of CoG review blogs. I’ve written a couple of reviews of HO games on my blog and I’m astonished at the traffic they get. And people are going to trust off-site independently written reviews more than they’ll trust retail site reviews, which are usually scummed for.
@FairyGodFeather
I’ve done a bit of stuff to increase my online profile overall (new site, new twitter, etc) but I’ve only really sent off a few requests for reviews so far and put up a profile on IFDB. I have a friend in social media who’s helping me out a bit in his spare time, but he doesn’t have much of that so that’s slow going as well.
I don’t suppose any of you know any higher profile fantasy/sci-fi authors willing to take a look at our writing, do you?
It would be useful to know how most people are finding Choice of Games. If it’s through search engines, reviews, social networks or just app store searches. I do think everything will help increase the awareness. I’ll admit to also being nosy and finding those sorts of figures fascinating.
I love reading indie game developers and their break down of where their sales and traffic come from.
I have friends that know high profile authors, I don’t know any personally though.
I would love to meet some high profile authors, but I haven’t yet, and it is highly doubtful that I ever will. Even if I finish school and do get my dream job as a copy editor, I still probably won’t actually meet the authors. Besides, from what I have read online, a lot of copy editing is now done over the Internet instead of actually reading a paper manuscript and editing that way.
@FairyGodFeather
I’ve had friends of friends recommend books to me before. I’m not sure how much more awkward it would be if the person in question were famous, but it’s probably worth a shot.
I just sent off an e-mail to Rock Paper Shotgun informing them of SoI’s existence. Not sure how much good that will do though.
@Cataphrak That’s an interesting thought! I assume that famous authors still read what other people write (unless they are too arrogant to be alive!), and I don’t think it would be odd for them to get suggestions from a friend. I know that a lot of the authors who write the Forgotten Realms titles among other works seem to be friends according to their various blogs and such, so I can’t imagine that they don’t take suggestions for reading at least from their other famous friends. I would be stupid to think that they have no other friends outside of other authors, so they would probably take suggestions from other friends as well. This is all just guessing, of course.
I know a handful of midlist fantasy authors but while they’re interested in taking a look at my project when it’s ready, they have not, alas, been too impressed (for the most part) by the other CoG games they’ve looked at. I’m hesitant to impose too much on their goodwill at the moment. There’s a limit to what they can do, anyhow; a solid collection of reviews on a themed blog is going to do more to set up a Trusted Taste kind of thing that propagates. All authorial recommendations can do is give things a bit of a push, and I think Choice of Games themselves is capable of that at this point. Note that 20,000 downloads is equivalent to a hell of a lot of book sales-- definitely midlist level and possibly a bestseller within its genre.
(And in answer to Galador: A lot more reading is work, or work-related for established authors. They have friends who are authors, of course, and they are often solicited by publishers to read works by other authors and provide blurbs, and so on. They do read for pleasure, as much as they can, but being asked to read something with an eye toward recommending it definitely falls closer to the side of work/obligation than pleasure.)
@chrysoula Well, of course they do a lot of reading as work rather than pleasure, but as you said, they do generally have time for a bit of pleasure reading, if not as much as a normal person might. Whether or not they’ll choose to take a suggestion from a friend rather than reading something they picked out for themselves is the issue. I’m sure if they are told what to read all the time, they probably would rather choose something for themselves for a change. Maybe not, though. Like I said earlier, I’ve never actually met anyone who has written anything…
I wonder what sort of advertising Choice of Games is doing? Do they have an Adwords campaign running? Are they relying solely on social media like Facebook and Twitter recommendations?
An Adwords campaign can be a very powerful tool in increasing sales. I recently ran a small one of the Google Online Marketing Challenge, with a budget of $250. There were over 300,000 impressions over a 7-day period, and more than 500 clicks.
Most of these clicks came from mobile ads, which augurs well for increasing CoG downloads/sales, since CoG games are priced low-enough that they can be impulse buys, unlike the product I was advertising. Mobile ads are also a lot cheaper than the Search and Display Network ads, so you can get more clicks for the same budget.
On the other hand, I think most people overestimate the power of social media in influencing digital purchases. It’s like having a friend recommend a TV series or book, unsolicited; you might be interested, but it is more likely that you’ll ignore the recommendation or file it away for future reference and forget about it.
I would think Zombie Exodus’ 10,000+ downloads came mostly from people searching for zombie games on Play, rather than people specifically looking for a CYOA game. But CoG should be doing more cross-promotion in games for other CoG games. Just having a link saying “More Games” isn’t enough. If you can put small ads for CoG or CoG-hosted games in the places where Google Ads used to go, you might see more downloads across the entire catalogue, assuming they enjoyed the game they were playing.
Actually, word of mouth is one of the biggest contributors to people picking up a new entertainment. It’s huge. Advertisements are much less successful-- but much more controllable and measurable. Word of mouth and sufficient distribution can make anything into a hit.
I honestly think Choice of Games is doing fantastic at this stage of their development. The primary thing they can do now to keep extending their reach and success is to keep building a catalog of compelling games, which simply takes time and hard work (and a bit of talent).
(And Galador-- you know me, sort of! I’m not a midlister like my friends, but I am published. By a publisher, even.)
“But CoG should be doing more cross-promotion in games for other CoG games. Just having a link saying “More Games” isn’t enough. If you can put small ads for CoG or CoG-hosted games in the places where Google Ads used to go, you might see more downloads across the entire catalogue, assuming they enjoyed the game they were playing.”
I think that’s a brilliant idea.
As for social media, is reddit social media? I’ve seen a few articles, probably over on gamasutra or the indie developer blogs saying that reddit has been an extremely good source of traffic. I’ve also seen indie games say that facebook and twitter are in their top 10 traffic sources.
You are published? What did you write?
in Unnatural I have faux-ad breaks where I advertise other games. Looking into adding actual links too.
AdWords costs a lot. Even if you do long-tail keywords, you’re looking at 20 cents a click easily for the ad to be seen. If you have a 2.99 game, for example, the author receives around 0.53 per sale. You’d need to sell 1 game per 2.5 clicks to make money. I found I only received 1 in 20 installs per click. I ran AdWords for a few months from ZE and don’t feel it was good ROI. The only time I’d pay for marketing is to blitz the Web in the first few days of release to improve my rank in the app stores for visibility.
@FairyGodfeather: An urban fantasy about angels and nephilim called Matchbox Girls. The sequel, Infinity Key, is going to have a cover reveal next week, and will come out in November.
@JimD: I remember looking at math like that for my books, yeah. That’s the thing with advertising-- you get a very clear ROI! I did find advertising on Goodreads interesting (since it prompts a variety of behaviors) but still probably not worth the ROI.
Speaking of Goodreads, it might be useful to make sure your game is posted there. They are, after all, interactive novels, and it’s frequented by a ton of readers and if you do choose to advertise you can find people interested in the topic and genre of your games pretty easily. Heck, even if you don’t choose to advertise. There might be a social group dedicated to CYOA books already.
(And that’s the thing, by the way-- people who hang out here are into CYOA games, so of course you’re thinking in terms of advertising games and assuming people who like one game in that playstyle will like other games in the same playstyle. Think of it in terms of book publishing and you can see why Heroes Rise hasn’t infected people with a burning desire to play other CYOA games-- what they WANT (presumably) is more superhero CYOA games, and ‘superhero’ is more important to their tastes than ‘CYOA’.)
Just looked up Matchbox Girls and the blurb seemed interesting. I may have to pick up a copy when I’m next paid.
I’ve only self-published myself but most of my stuff I’ve taken down due to wanting better quality stuff out there. Although I still have a few short stories on my website. I’ve always doubted my chances of getting actually published, so I’m always happy for those writers who actually manage to get published 
@Jasonstevanhill Have you tried Project Wonderful? (https://www.projectwonderful.com) I actually find that I click a lot of their advertisements when I’m reading web comics, because they almost always advertise other things that I’d actually be interested in. So it doesn’t feel like an advert, just a “hey this is something else you might like.” I’ve seen some games advertised there too.
I seem to recall that we have a sub-reddit, maybe we could put that to use?
There are a lot of people I know who are utterly addicted to reddit, and they go and look up all sorts of crap they never would have if they didn’t have a reddit account. I think using reddit might actually be a very good way to get more people to find out about the games!
@chrysoula I just went and looked up Matchbox Girls, and it seems like it’s something I could enjoy! I read a lot of reviews for it too, and I didn’t see a single negative review! I think it’s something that is worth picking up a copy, and I think I’ll look for it next time I decide to go and buy more books. I was a bit worried when you first said that it was urban fantasy since I’ve only tried that subgenre once because I didn’t like the book and extrapolated and decided I didn’t like the subgenre, but it seems good enough that I’ll give it a go!