CoG/HG business model

There are some helpful insights here and here, though I didn’t find anything from the last couple of years. I was overcome with delight when Smart Podcast Trashy Books had a discussion with Rebecca Slitt about IF and Creme de la Creme. I suspect approaching bloggers or podcasters is a good way of doing things, because you’re appealing to people who are more likely to have some interest already rather than the more scattershot ad-buying (my understanding of which is that it’s never been worth the cost) and I know @NMCannon has been active in doing this.

Participating in comps like Spring Thing or IF Comp puts author names out there and has its own rewards of general community participation and getting an idea of what’s being made outside of the CoG/HG/HC environment (it’s interesting to me how creative norms become established and how a lot of things are tolerated or enjoyed in other IF that wouldn’t be enjoyed by a bit section of the CoG/HG/HC audience, and vice versa; that’s a whole other essay though, haha!).

With Twitter in its throes of… something, I don’t know how far tweets really go these days, and I had the impression it was never much use for IF marketing-wise. I finally broke free and deleted my account a couple of months ago, and don’t really want to go back as it always made me anxious anyway. Bluesky is less anxiety-making, but far smaller. Some authors use Facebook groups/pages or Instagram; more, I think, create Discord servers but that’s less useful for discoverability.

I know @Barb has done videos on YouTube and TikTok, but I’m not sure about many others. Like you, I am not a video-maker other than a couple of recorded chats on webcam, and do not want to go down that rabbit hole :sweat_smile:

This forum, and Tumblr, are the places where I have the most interaction about my games. There is a pocket of IF authors and players on Tumblr which has its own quirks and strong likes/dislikes the same as anywhere else, but almost all my experiences with it have been positive. I do not know how much my activity there has expanded my audience for my games because I haven’t analysed anything, but it absolutely brought attention to my Patreon, especially when I first set it up. I would suggest if authors are considering which social media to focus on, if any, that is a good place to start.

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