After a flurry of activity last week, I realized that I had gone rather quiet for the past few days.
I had a Deal of the Day on DriveThruRPG on Tuesday/Wednesday, for me these happen at 3pm in the afternoon through to 3pm the next day. A publisher is given less than 24hrs notice of when it is going to happen.
The way that Deal of the Day works is this:
OneBookShelf, the operators of DriveThruRPG and about 20 other sites, give publishers a reward point scheme. We earn 1 Publisher Promotion Point for every $10 of gross sales, plus either 10 or 20 depending on whether you are a non-exclusive publisher or exclusive publisher. They want to reward those that are exclusively tied to their network. I am in the transition between exclusive to non-exclusive.
Publishers submit titles for Deal of the Day and they go into a pool of eligible titles.
They are then drawn on a semi-random basis. Emphasis is given to exclusive publishers, meaning that it is not random at all but weighted. My first DotD only took 5 days between submission and going live. My second one was pretty quick as well. Then I told OneBookShelf that I wanted to go non-exclusive, and the next DotD took 81 days. I had assumed that I was now in the non-favored pool.
I was somewhat surprised when this latest DotD only took 15 days from submission to going live.
When you submit a title for DotD you are told how many titles are in the pool. You can actually work this out at any time anyway as the price is 1 + (titles x 8) or pretty close to that ratio. One the 1st of the month, when everyone has been awarded the previous month’s PPP, the price rockets, and it generally drops by 8 or so per day, with a little fluctuation. A little tip if you even want to submit a title for any kind of promotion on DriveThruRPG is to do it on the last day of the month.
I had assumed that I have plenty of time between submitting the title and before it went live, but when I got the notification I had to get my act together and do everything that I had planned in just 24hrs.
One of those was updating all my covers, and highlighting the metal awards. Updating just those took about 12hrs of work.
I also run a sale immediately after each DotD. I run the sale from the end of the DotD until the following Saturday, to catch people that missed out but get paid on the Friday or Saturday. Sometimes that means a longer sale and others quite a brief one. This sale is for four days.
What this does is turn a one-day spike into a five-day boost.
The end point is that this has consumed a lot of my working hours.
DCC
I made that first instalment of the video. I am going to make more parts to this, but I don’t know how to edit videos beyond the absolute basics. I record them using OBS. I have an open source video editor called OpenShot but it is far from easy to use, and the video files are either extremely low quality or multiple gigabytes in size. I need to find something competent, for an enthusiastic amateur, and then learn how to use it. HitFilm Express seems to be highly recommended.
I have been given permission to use some new art by W Caddell. I need to browse though the library of art and do an art upgrade.
I still need to finish the actual play. With those in place, I can get on with the layout and get it to Goodman Games for approval. I am hoping to get a good chunk of that in the next week.
Alien
I am still in the reading and making characters stage with this. It is most definitely in progress. Typically, a ruleset takes an average of a month, from start to finish. This is 5 days in, so I am a little behind where I wanted to be, but still on track.
Rogue Handler
The PDF went live, and Arc Dream did not object. This is good. In the shared folder is a draft of a card deck. These cards will be live as PDF + images on Monday, to keep up my weekly release schedule. They will also be sent to the printers for a physical deck. That takes a month or so.
The goal here is to improve my skills at creating card decks, and these will be printed through DTRPG and using the Game Crafter. I have never done that before.
These will be the first print-ready files and at-cost print files for the top-tier patrons.
So that is what I have been up to, and the progress being made.