@Headhunter180
Thanks! I’ve also created merchandise which I’m sure will help promote my novel at least a little.
I would suggest promoting those mainly on the backend of your games and on social media (via “check out my blog” and on your blog have a “merchandise” tab or banner, thereby “selling them, without REALLY selling them”). Your game should be the front end offer. Also (a thought) it might be a great idea to buy some backend adspace on an official COG game or on the COG website, you can buy “click packages” and track them to the most minute detail with Clickmeter (like bitly but way better).
@Headhunter180
Yeah I just have one sentence on fb and onn the end of my game saying “Check out Demons Among Men merchandise.”
And I’ve thought about paying for ads, but @JimD says they generate hardly any of his sales.
@Samuel_H_Young Depends on where you get your traffic from, so far I haven’t seen anyone try out official COG traffic, I am however assuming that since it is possibly some of the most targeted traffic in this particular niche (aside from maybe Chooseyourstory.com traffic) it would probably work well.
@Headhunter180
That’s true! I might try it out. However, I’m hoping most of CoGs fanbase will become aware of my game through the forum, their blog and from searching for new CoGs. After all, most people who read the CoGs also read the HostedGames.
@Samuel_H_Young Do you have only one checkpoint per scene/file? If you do, no need for variables to tell the game which checkpoint to return the player to because the game can’t go to another file unless you use a *finish or a *goto_scene.
@DSeg
The checkpoints are at the beginning of the scenes, so I have the code like this for the death scene
*page_break
It seems your journey has ended prematurely. Do you wish to restart completely, or return to the previous checkpoint?
*choice
#Restart completely
*goto_scene startup
#Return to my previous checkpoint
*if witches
*goto_scene witch_fight
*if traps
*goto_scene traps
*if vampire
*goto_scene vampire
@Headhunter180 Ads for Hosted Games are a risky proposition. If our game costs $1.99, we make $0.35. A targeted mobile ad can cost 5-15 cents. We’d need conversion rates of 15% or higher (at 5 cents a click) to break even.
Yeah and I’d expect to only get a conversion rate of around 1% (at least that’s what I’m counting on for merchandise)
Yep. When I did $0.01 untargeted ads, I got around 1%, and that was click-through, not conversion.
@JimD
So I think it’s safe to say that I’ll stick to free forms of advertising such as blogs, facebook and the blurbs that you and I will be doing at the ends of our gamebooks. It’s risk free and probably pulls in almost as much people
I think your strategy is sound – use those methods to promote, build a loyal following, and continue to write at a steady pace.
@JimD
Thanks! I work on my games about 40 hours a week, so I hope to have them released relatively quickly after each other. The sequel will probably be released in early summer because I’ve already got a good portion of it finished.
@Samuel_H_Young Do you know the release date of the first book?
@DSeg
Not officially, but @Nocturnal_Stillness told me that any game submitted before the end of this week gets a late December release, and I’ll be finished by Friday at the latest 
@JimD That depends, if you are sending them straight to a sales page, (which is NOT smart to do) then yes your traffic to sales would be around 1% EDIT:(just saw your earlier comment, if you are getting a 1% CTR then its the ad banner itself that needs tweaking, also so we don’t get confused, I’m referring to the COG game “endorsing” your game not a banner ad on the back end) if your lucky, but there is a severe flaw with that way of marketing. Let me ask you, assuming traffic does click thru to the sales page and you get a one percent conversion, where did the other 99% disappear to? Most likely they will never see your ad again. Also, do you have access to the emails of those whom actually bought your product? Probably not, and even if you did, you did not get them to opt in to your email list from the get-go so if you do somehow manage to get the buyers to opt in you will have an even smaller fraction of that one percent that bought actually opting in, and that you can market to over time. Does that sound like too much work for too little results? Therefore the better idea is to get the raw traffic to opt in to your list FIRST before they see a sales page. And the conversion rate is actually better that way, I’ve had capture pages that have hit over 50% conversion from raw traffic to subscriber.
@Samuel_H_Young (in reply to your earlier comment on people knowing about hosted games) If that were true then ZE would AT LEAST have grossed $5000 in sales (a quarter of what HR sold if I’m not mistaken).
@Headhunter180
Well, @JimD has like 200,000 downloads on his first installment (from what I can tell basing off of Google Play’s data for it), and then 3 more installments costing $1 each, which I’d surmise would get a lot of downloads since he has a pretty big fanbase. So I would be surprised if he hasn’t made as much as Heroes Rise.
@Headhunter180 I’ve done both, sending people to zombieexodus.com where they sign up and direct to app store pages. And for those people who download the app, I ask them to sign up for email, facebook, and twitter. It really comes down to cost. We make (for example) 35 cents a download. Acquiring one customer who will opt-in and download is risky. Also (as far as I know), we have no real way to measure if they actually download it. We are not privy to that.
Believe me I am not trying to say I know marketing that well but can share my experience. If you can give a recipe for getting more downloads at the rate our games make, I’d cut you in on the profit.
ZE has around 75,000 downloads and I am not sure how many sales of IAP occurred.
@JimD “We have no way of tracking if they actually downloaded”, then if I may, I’d recommend using Clickmeter. They can track almost EVERYTHING if you use thier shortlinks. EDIT: Or Hypertrackr, one of the two.