Sparks onto an oil-soaked cloth

I am a huge fan of the weird stuff Janelle Shane coaxes out of the neural networks she trains.  She feeds the machines all kinds of inspired fodder, which they then cough up into interesting shapes, including D&D spells, character bios, adventures. What the machines make is often the perfect spark to ignite our human elaborations, e.g. Swamp of Monsters fleshed-out spells.

Her latest post, my new favorite, is specifically about prompts to human creativity  - a word each day in "Inktober" to inspire 31 ink drawings by the end of the month.

Lynda Barry in similar inky exercise - www.drawnandquarterly.com/one-hundred-demons

To me, things like this should spur the captions of moist, oozy, severely D&D comix by somebody like Karl Stjernberg of Spores of the Sad Shroom fame - or Tim Sievert's Intrepideeers or Clandestinauts:


Future adventure prompts, or play reports scrawled on napkins stained with orange Cheez Doodle dust from another planet.

If you want to have visions, inhale deeply at AIweirdness.com...

 If you make something, words or pictures, please tell me and I'll link with your permission.

Lost Lush: RELOADED is out

I put my new, expanded, and improved Lost Lush: RELOADED up at the Coiled Sheets of Lead storefront  at DriveThruRPG.com.

It's fun and should appeal to fans of gritty but humorous low fantasy urban picaresque. Like the first version, it's a medieval pub-crawl in search of a drunken buffoon, traceable through the wreckage and outrage he leaves in his wake, through weird nightspots inspired by 1990s Prague (where I once lived) and 1890s New York City (which the excellent Luc Sante's Low Life can tell you about in detail).
 
It is now 54 pages long but I'm selling it for the same $4.99 price I sold the original The Lost Lush: Extracting a Carousing Fool for.  I will have to start a new entry sometime soon, in order to get the buzz of "New Today at DriveThruRPG," but I wanted to get everyone who already bought the tiny 20-something-page original version to get my expanded update free.  

I'm trying to avoid tedious kvetching, but it has been weird wandering through the wilderness hexcrawl of marketing.

Two meditations on marketing by people with more coherent skulls than mine:

1.   Cecil Howe  
Thanks to Florent "KillerKlown" Didier for spotting the broken link! 
It looks like Sword Peddler blog keeled over and died since I posted this!
It also looks like Nick LS Whelan was kind enough to convert Cecil Howe's blog entry into a podcast... 
This is like getting your consciousness uploaded into the Singularity Universal AI before your body dies:
Blogs On Tape: How to Become a Godzillionaire on DriveThruRPG


2.  Necropraxis  Correct Link for Necropraxis's post on Marketing Imagination


Anyway, I tried to get my new version playtested among various boards and contacts online.  No dice.  So I printed tearsheet flyers and tacked it up on the physical corkboards at friendly local game shop The Source  - I had it OK'ed by managers and employees.

Nary a nibble!  What's up with people?

Does nobody want a hard-copy spiral bound thing to test for free?  Is it because I lack the requisite full-color dungeon-punk anime-influenced art and 5E compatibility and Hasbro/WOTC livery that people want these days?

OK, kvetching over.  But I felt compelled to mention this phenomenon.

I'd better put up better free maps to promote Lost Lush on DTRPG.  Sure, people might just take the free maps and ignore the paid thing they might have paid for to get the maps, BUT my maps should be as good as I can make them as a matter of pride and should be free as a matter of principle.

UPDATE from 11-19-2019:

One of the points of advice Cecil Howe's advocated was that creators should spend DriveThruRPG Publisher Promotion Points (PPP) on submitting their adventures for the Deal of the Day cue. He said that people should immediately plow all of the PPP earned from this success into submitting their adventure(s) back into the Deal of the Day cue... and again... and again.

This seems like sound advice (I also liked his warning to forgo wasting PPP on banner ads, because nobody ever clicks them.)

I get the feeling it was easier to do the PPP to Deal of the Day cycle this when DriveThruRPG was a few years younger.
 There were fewer products, fewer creators.  Fewer PPP were needed to submit a Deal of the Day.  There was a shorter wait time until one's adventure was featured as a Deal of the Day.

It took me from 11-1-2017 until August 2019 to earn enough PPP to hit the fluctuating quota required to submit a Deal of the Day.  I paid 473 PPP to put my adventure in the cue. 
I returned from out of town in late October to discover STATUES had been the Deal of the Day while I was gone- I had to grin to my chagrin!

72 people bought STATUES during October 2019.  I think maybe there was one purchase before the Deal of the Day, earlier in October.

Now I have 88 PPP.  If I can add another piece of advice to Cecil's, it's that a creator should price their creation a bit higher than I did, if they want to do the Cecil Howe tactic.
Cecil Howe's $10 offering probably generates more PPP than my adventure with every sale, so that he can plow the PPP earned in the wake of his Deal of the Day immediately back into submitting his adventure for a Deal of the Day again.  I can't do that with my $4.99 adventure.

It also helps that Cecil Howe's creations are beautifully designed.