In the work in progress folder is a new subfolder called The Happy Soloist. This is a working title, it could just as easily have been Confessions of a Solo Role-Player. The final title is to be confirmed.
What you have is the first 40 or so pages of a book. Not a set of solo rules, but rather just tips, advice and experiences from many different solo games and situations.
If you have watched any of my solo tips and advice videos, they are all part of the same project.
If you want a bit of industry background I can share how this fits into my business ideas.
Many people will tell you that social media is key to success in 21st century business. This is an idea mainly put forward by social media companies and consultants that sell how to build a social media following.
The flaw in social media followers/friends/likes is that the social media platform owns that audience. I could not decide to leave Twitter and take that audience to Instagram. Once upon a time My Space was king of the social media hill, then it was Facebook. At the moment it still is Facebook, but the Facebook demographic is getting older year on year, as less younger people join it. The younger generation are more likely to use Instagram than Facebook.
It is also extremely hard to sell books to people on social media. You go on social media to socialise, to see what your peers, or those you wish were your peers, are up to. When you are on social media you are not in the frame of mind for buying things.
These are grand generalisations but they mostly hold true.
Email marketing and especially opt-in newsletters are still the single most effective way or reaching customers.
With an opt-in list, I own my mailing list. I can take it from one email provider to another. I can tell my newsletter list if I create a new social media account and those members that use that platform may become followers. It rarely works the other way around.
One of the most common techniques for building an opt-in mailing list is to offer a free ebook in exchange for signing up. Most of these ebooks are very poor quality and would not cut it as an actual book.
I want to follow the best practice, but I don’t want to produce a crappy ebook. So my plan is to create something in the same vein as Sly Flourish’s Lazy DM books. This isn’t going to be some cobbled together ebook, I am going to create this as a real book and list it on Kindle, Amazon and DriveThru as a physical book and ebook.
Then I will give it away as a sign up gift, and offer the physical book at a big discount.
It may not be the most efficient way of working, writing an entire book just to give it way to people who join my mailing list, but then I am not known for doing things the easy way.