I mean, that’s the main problem we had since the OP: Technology doesn’t help here. You’ve got your local business & tax laws, and then the added complication of selling & potentially shipping internationally.
On top of that, the issue of getting the eyes on your product in the first place, where you’d have to improve upon the itch corp / Wolves of Freeport model.
And finally, the vast majority of products fall into the “here’s my zine” category, not the more successful and Kickstarter-savvy mini-companies and co-ops. There’s even less financial self-management possible here.
This is basically “Just run your own blog” vs. “Post on MyInstaFaceSky”, but with taxes on top.
I mean at the end of the day all these things are really just bandaids for how shitty discovery has become online. You either opt into the walled garden and pay the fees, for marginally better discovery or you post it on your private site and have to market the shit out of it. Most people take a blended approach because the opportunity costs are low.
Because I highly doubt that google search is going to meaningfully improve any time soon, I wonder if an approach might be for someone to build some sort of plugin that standardizes product categorization in the TTRPG space and offers a searchable index? The borgs have https://exlibrisrpg.com/ unfortunately it is slow to update since they need to manually do it. And I believe that Mausritter has a similar site that is moderated but initially updated by creators. What if it could be elevated to the level of all TTRPGs and automated more?
agreed, would be a nice service to have a 3rd party improve discovery. sadly, likely a thankless $$$less job to do…
sometimes, I am totally shocked by how different the experience is, being in like AN ACTUAL STORE that carries indie RPG stuff I love. so fun to browse. I end up buying very different things that I expected. to replicate that experience online? would be very valuable to me. I would leave a tip if I could to a person that did that!
I used to own and run a game store. I don’t think the experience can be replicated or emulated online. In-person is a whole different thing.
That said, I think the best bet to get exposure is to run games at conventions and sell your stuff to the tables you run it for. Did you like my adventure? Here it is, $5 for this cool zine. Yes, I have a laser printer! Here’s my Venmo, and I love cash, too. Here are my house rules. $10, 50 pages spiral-bound to lay flat at your table.
Isn’t this what the people with the million-dollar Kickstarters did? They ran games at conventions for people and took down their email addresses and sold them copies of their work on the spot. At least I think they did! Now it’s All Hail Shadowdark. (all hail!).And rightly so! That game is amazing! I hear Ms. Dionne is an amazing GM, and I look forward to one day having her run a game for me.
I look at how she did it, and it seems to me it was all direct marketing: here’s my game; I’ll run it for you. This how TSR did it with D&D, too. They ran it at conventions and it caught fire. They sold the rules on the spot, and through their mail-order catalog. Pretty soon it was over 100,000 copies.
I think this is the model I’m going to follow and I’ll see where it leads me. This chasing eyeballs on the Internet thing seems like a sucker’s game to me. I think there was a time you get enough buzz to break out just by being on the right platforms, but I think that time has passed for normals and the world is much more pay-to-play than it was before.
See, I think a centrally managed library management tool is actually the kind of thing that people would really like. A tool that keeps track of all of the available rpgs/supplements/adventures, is properly tagged, and knows which ones I own so I can just download from there.
I would want to be able to, through a few clicks, see a list of e.g. all the adventures I own tagged with Cairn compatibility, and download the pdfs, without having to do all the hard work of tagging them myself.
Ideally, it would also keep track of all the metadata: author(s), editor(s), artist(s), publisher, etc.
I do have a local system that does all of this, but it only works for the games I have downloaded and entered manually, so it requires labour on my end, and doesn’t e.g. have everything I have gotten from the big itch.io charity bundles, because that would require me to manually go and download and tag every one of those hundreds (thousands?) of pdfs.
For whatever it’s worth, I’m kinda drowning in PDFs (and lots of other file types) myself and have resorted to just classic nested folder structures, roughly by game, managed through my local file manager and then archived to an external HDD for stuff I’m not actively playing. I’ve lost so much over the years. I’m sure I’ll lose more stuff. I had digital content going back to the 1990s at one point. Not to mention the usenet text files from even earlier.
I’d like to have a better filing system for all these different works in different formats. It can be daunting to crawl through the “stacks” sometimes and realize that I had something I’d recently purchased or just how many (100s) PDF 'zines I had that contained a wizard tower “dungeon” (several).
This is a hard problem, this data sorting, ontology, file management thing.
Mausritter has the library under the official website. You can explore tags, explore by language, submit your work (though it has to be approved by the admins), etc. You can even register so you can save your favourites. It’s really really good.
By the way this library is the same used by Liminal Horror, it was developed by Hugh Lashbrooke (I’m a big fan of his Mausritter adventures), and he has it available for subscription/purchase on:
Here’s my Venmo, and I love cash, too. Here are my house rules. $10, 50 pages spiral-bound to lay flat at your table.