Hey friends! I’m the author of Moonrise, the queer femme werewolf game. As part of regular author life, I’ve been looking for opportunities for promotion and marketing. Does anyone have any favored blogs, review sites, or let’s play people they recommend?
I thought I’d share marketing leads I’ve found.
Holy Mother of Yuri tumblr blog: She reviews women who love women (wlw) games and manga. Though I originally contacted the owner about doing a review, she suggested sponsoring a post instead. It worked out nicely and I think there was an uptick in sales.
Vocaotome tumblr blog: She translates and reviews mostly Japanese otome games, but I’m in talks with her about reviewing Moonrise.
LGBTQ Game Archive: this website archives all video games with LGBTQ game content. I’ve submitted entries with them before and it’s worked out well. I submitted Moonrise last week and it should show up soon.
TheMarySue & Autostraddle: I’ve left tips in their anon tip box about Choice of Games, Moonrise, and the minor kerfuffle that happened when Moonrise was released, but no response so far. Maybe that’s not how to best contact them?
Dead ends: contacting Let’s Play people on Youtube (tried 3x) and contacting the Bisexual Book Awards (they only do physical books)
All this is in addition to encouraging my friends & family to play/review and keeping up my online author platform here and on Twitter (mostly on Twitter). Any other leads would be appreciated!
Commenting to see new posts. Marketing is definitely something I’m curious about once I start getting my games published. Hopefully we can build this into a good resource.
i think anyone that play text based games already know of hosted games and choice of games, more than marketing helping your sales it will be what type of game you make that make you sell more or less.
It’s always interesting to see new ideas tossed around, and I’m curious to see the suggestions, but honestly I concluded a few years ago that marketing our Hosted Games as individual writers is just not cost effective.
I mean, our margins are very low, we depend on volume, most people don’t even understand our product, the app stores and the publisher do all the work for us, and the product itself is tucked inside an Omnibus app, which creates another layer of friction over which we have no control.
This is just much different than the situation independent authors (of traditional fiction/non fiction) find themselves in. They control the prices, they control special promotions, they can seek out avenues like bookbub, and people already know what novels are. Plus, their margins are (generally) higher.
Of course they also spend hundreds/thousands of dollars of their own money on editing, covers, and Amazon ads, so we have a relatively sweet deal. I just think our best business model boils down to “get your next IF project published!”
*a caveat to all of this is that if an IF writer can get a review on a big/influential blog/website, than that would change all of the above.
It is still a new website, but https://ifadventure.com/ provides a spot to register your story for free, help increase its visibility a bit. Has a paid option for boosting who sees it as well.
Not a lot of sites regularly review or cover Choice games. IF stands at a crux between gaming and reading and is largely shunned by the press for both sides.
I definitely agree that many people don’t know about interactive novels. I remember when I was a kid I couldn’t get away from CYOA books, but now I tell people “it’s like a choose-your-own-adventure book but on the computer” and they look at me like I’ve grown a second head.
I think your caveat brings up another great point. There ISN’T a big, influential website that reviews IF games or indie queer games. The Yuri blog is the closest I could find, but I stumbled upon that site on accident. It’s a lot of piecemeal.
I’ll keep in mind that it might be best to focus more on the next project. Thanks for answering!
@hustlertwo OOOO, that website looks shiny! Thank you!
Chiming in to note that the most successful ‘marketing’ I’ve done by far (for my unpublished HG WIP, mind) has been through Tumblr; posting and sharing regularly on there with a dedicated account for my WIP has brought around 1,500 readers who stumbled upon the game nebulously, the majority of whom (so far as I’m aware) weren’t already aware of the game through the COG forums.
These aren’t necessarily specific leads, so I’m also going to throw out sub-q magazine, which I’ve heard about from @HarrisPS. They’re a publication for interactive fiction and seem to do interviews and columns and news about IF, so maybe contacting them would be worth a shot!
Yep. I asked around about sponsored advertising in some areas that likely would have netted some people outside then normal HG sphere due to overlapping interest, but the amount for a single short shout out seemed to start at about $600-1000 from memory. No way that’d ever be cost effective for a game like Oedipus (I’m sure I would have been out of pocket by a big margin from cost to gain for trying that although I couldn’t be sure), and a gamble even for games that you’re fairly sure are going to go well without advertising. It doesn’t help that there’s no way to give out sample games to reviewers. (If your game is on steam I suppose you could buy keys, but if not I don’t think there’s any way to gift particular google or apple games.) I tried a small amount on facebook promotion posts, but didn’t really get enough views to justify it, and few likes of my actual facebook page, so I’m not convinced that is a cost effective way of promoting either. I agree, best recourse is to just continue writing stuff, rely on the audience already being there for HG’s (which is considerable) and otherwise hope for the best .
NB: I do think tumbler accounts can be useful, but it’s also a trade off in the amount of time it requires to keep them active enough to be useful vs the time you have to continue working on another project. (I honestly don’t think I’d have the time to maintain one properly and so haven’t tried.)
@hustlertwo I’ve never seen that site before. Looks worthwhile looking through
Edit: Tried to add a listing twice and there seems to be something wrong with the site at the moment as it errors out
Also forgot to add: Everyone make sure you register your games at ifdb. It probably won’t increase the visibility of your games a heap, but it’s free and people do use it.
Maybe this is a bit off-topic but I think the games section on the CoG websites are now too large, several games are shown in the same page in a huge list.
I think the usability would improve if the games were categorized by genre and maybe better organized. It was fine the way it was when there were less games but now there’s just too many to navigate with those large images.
As for me, I am going the tumblr route because it is the medium I know. I’ve been on there since 2008, so while it does take time to nurture a fandom, it’s time well spent to me. Just the ability to see what people do with my story has increased my productivity a lot.
But word of mouth is very hard to predict, I’m still amazed I pulled it off.
Totally feeling everyone here. I have market training/contacts in the indie book world that I thought would be helpful, but are ending up void due to lack of review copies.
@malinryden I’ve asked around before about using tumblr for CoG promotion. I checked it out and the tag seemed dead, with posts dating months back. I checked again last week and there are more posts and even lively discussions. So IDK if I want to start a platform on there or not. Have you tried Pillowfort or one of the other Tumblr 2.0 apps?
I think that most people on tumblr use the tags for the games, not really for a central tag like choice of games sadly.
I haven’t tried Pillowfort, waiting for them to stabilize. I checked in when I was concerned that tumblr might go belly up last year, but so far I haven’t taken the step to go anywhere else. There seems to be no consensus on what the next cool site will be, but I’m keeping an eye on things. I ended up on tumblr after the livejournal strikethrough scandal, but it took some site hopping until tumblr (and AO3) became the place people went.
We’ll see, So far no other place has the feel I want. And I have no time to establish a new place, that’s why I picked tumblr. I already knew it. Could probably have made a case for Instagram too, but I can’t stand it. And Twitter is… twitter. I’m on there, but…
I’ve always been a bit leery of Instagram. I’ve been told many times to get one for my photography, but the TOS make me a little nervous. If you read it, it basically says you give instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free transferable, sub-licence to use the content uploaded to its platform. So basically they can do what they want with your content without breaking copyright laws once it’s uploaded. Would they do it? Probably not (past use in advertising for themselves) as the backlash would be huge if people found out. Could they sell off your work or allow others to use it in some fashion if they wanted to without asking you for permission first? The wording of that licence makes me think they potentially could. (People can correct me if I’m wrong here.) Anyway, it’s unlikely to happen, but the wording of that licence has always struck me as unnecessarily broad in the way Instagram can use anything you post.
@Jacic Agree on all counts. I never really got into Instagram to begin with, because my visual sensibilities struggle. Then I learned they’re owned by Facebook and I was definitely like naaaaaaah.
Hey friends! Got a successful shout out so I thought I’d share. If you’re not familiar with Writing with Color, they’re a tumblr blog with a ton of great resources for writing characters of color. I read them a lot.
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