Monday, September 23, 2019

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.

10 comments:

  1. Just bought myself a copy. Will dive deep into it once I'm finished with a few reviews I was asked to do.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's great! I'll be very interested in reading your perspective when you get around to it.

      Delete
  2. Pretty interesting!
    Purchase holy removal
    secondary sheeting extra
    Role play rpg capsule

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    ReplyDelete
  3. The main idea is great !
    I'll have to think about buying this, since it really sounds cool.
    Sadly, the 2 links on Marketing are dead :'(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you very much- I'm especially interested to hear what you think of it as a European and as a German. There are several layers of tension in the setting: German vs. Czech, rich vs. poor, sober vs. drunk, tourist vs. native. I was inspired by the tensions I felt on the streets of Prague in the mid 1990s, where I was a foreigner myself.
      So anyway, please tell me what you think of the adventure when you get a chance.

      So you come from Germersheim in Rheinland-Pfalz? I studied at the Goethe-Institut in Schwaebisch-Hall not extremely far from there.

      Delete
    2. I studied translation in Germersheim and live in Landau, but i'm french :-)
      I found a nice job after long studies and staid in the region. But i love Prague and i'm happy to see there is a roleplaying community there (you must be the tip of the iceberg :-) )

      Delete
    3. Being French is also a fine European background! I saw your multi-lingual array of blogs and assumed you were a German who spoke all those languages, rather than a multilingual Frenchman. In any case, it sounds like you have built an excellent multilingual international life!

      After living in Prague from 1994-1999, I returned to Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, USA, where I have lived since I was 1 year old. I read my child Czech ghost stories and fairy tales as bedtime stories and teach her Czech phrases for a family visit to Prague at some future date.

      I'm afraid I can't claim to have been a part of the Czech RPG scene when I lived there in the 1990s. I was in the throes of avoiding anything to do with RPGs at that time because of my extreme dislike of the aesthetics and culture around D&D 2nd Edition. But I knew some Czechs and American expatriates who were into D&D 2e. Some of the students I was teaching English to were interested in Vampire: The Masquerade. Others liked a Czech version of D&D called Dračí doupě ("Dragon's Den") wherein the Dungeon Master is called Pán Jeskyně or "Lord of the Caverns".

      Delete
  4. I apologize, Mr. Killerklown, about the links!

    It looks like Cecil Howe, who did Do Not Let Us Die in the Dark Night of This Cold Winter, among other fine things, has discontinued his Swordpeddler blog. The only place I can find that has that article is this apple.com podcast OSR Mix:

    https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-62-how-to-become-godzillionaire-on-drivethrurpg/id1444712680?i=1000431571164

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oops- now I found at also at the corrected link in the post above.

      The Necropraxis link to the blog post "Marketing Imagination" should work now up there, too.

      Thanks again for telling me about the broken links!

      Delete
  5. Your Update, including pricetags and PPP spent in comparison to sales is also very interesting!
    Thanks for that!
    You might want to create a new post with that kind of information... Not sure how much readers you'll get with an "old post" ?

    ReplyDelete