Aliens in the Desert

First a side note…I’m really sorry that there were real comments that didn’t get approved until now.  They were buried in my “moderation” folder under a bunch of spam!  The good news is that if you have commented it automatically accepts future comments from you.  I guess I better pay more attention to my moderation folder too.

So…Kickstarter.

Kickstarter is an amazing idea — ask people to fund a project, ala a PBS pledge drive.  At different pledge levels, the backers receive different gifts.  This allows for a respectable framework in which people can ask for money to pursue their various pursuits.  The backers can spread the responsibility among many many people, get neat gifts, and get to be a part of something cool.  Win win!

I was super excited to join Kickstarter with my own game project.  But what I didn’t realize when I posted my carefully-crafted profile was that its not enough to just show up.  You have to become a champion of self-promotion.  Here’s what I tried, and how its working out so far.

My game ( http://bit.ly/dreamgame ) is currently 31% funded.  I have 13 days to go to raise an additional $6000 or so dollars.  I knew my target goal of $8500 was ambitious, but I decided to go for it because that was genuinely the amount of money I thought it would take to be able to just make this game for two months.  It was also not the highest amount any successfully funded game project had asked for, so I figured “what the heck?”

My first stop on my self-promotion bandwagon was the Friends and Family tour.  I posted to Facebook, I tweeted, I let all my friends know.  I had an immediate outpouring of love and backing, and it was euphoric.  It felt so good to know that my friends wanted me to succeed, and believed in me and my project.

Next, I posted a forum post on Adventuregamers.com, figuring that the adventure gamers who frequented that site might remember me from the Telltale days and be interested in what I was doing now.  This did garner a bit of interest and I got a few more backers from it. I also wrote to another big adventure game news site to ask if they were interested in writing about this, but never got a response.

Then I made a huge mistake.  I let it sit.  More backers came in here and there in a trickle, but the numbers were small.  I see now that what I SHOULD have done is keep up the self-promotion.  I was distracted by other things, and mistakenly thought that if the Kickstarter funding was meant to be, it would take care of itself.  Yeah, right.

In December I contacted the alumni list for my graduate program.  Some of my fellow alumni stepped up in a big way.  I also tried a clever ploy to encourage people to fund the project on behalf of other people as a holiday gift.  I got no responses from that.

This month, I started getting concerned and started finding ways to push the project again.  A friend and mentor of mine, Sheri Rubin, posted on my behalf to the Women in Game Development List.  I got some tweets out of that and a handful of new backers. I contacted a couple friends who have blogs that I believe people read and asked them to post about the project.  One of them did, but I’m not sure anything came of it.

I started reading Get Slightly Famous. I decided to hold a live chat, and was deluged with new ideas for promotion.  I made a list.  I started by fixing up the game’s proposal page to incorporate some suggestions, then made a fan page on Facebook.

Then came the break I had been waiting for!  Except so far, it hasn’t been.  I was super excited that I got to be featured in an Ars Technica article on alternate funding for independent games.  I thought “Yes!  This is it!  I am going to have a ton of exposure and everyone in the WORLD will come pledging me money!”  But that’s not what happened.  I put the article title in Google last night to see how many times it had been re-printed, and its all over the place.  But I got one backer out of it, as far as I can see.  I am incredibly grateful for that backer, don’t get me wrong!  I think the reason the results were so low for me has to do with something very key to self-promotion that I read in Get Slightly Famous.  You have to find the audience that wants you.  I think the Ars Technica readers, especially if you read the comments, are not my ideal audience.   (But big thanks nonetheless to Mike Thompson for helping get my name out there.)

So what have we learned?

1. Either name your project something short, or else get a bit.ly url right away.  The url Kickstarter gives you is based on your project name, and mine was way too long to easily put in tweets.  I didn’t understand how you got bit.ly urls.  Now I do.  Good to know.

2. Promote the hell out of your project, even if it makes you uncomfortable.  I hate the feeling that I am cramming something down people’s throats.  But I am slowly (slooooowwwwly) learning to be more comfortable with self-promotion.  The people on Twitter and Facebook are my friends, and want me to succeed.  Other people might be interested in what I have to offer and have no way of knowing if I don’t tell them.  As a good friend of mine recently told me “think of it as you enlightening them.”

3. Self-promotion is HARD.  Its hard to come up with places and ways to pitch your wares.  Ask for help and suggestions, and don’t try to do it alone.  Also help out other people when they are trying to self-promote something of theirs.

4. Self-promotion takes alot of time!  I started earnestly pimping my project way too late in the game I think.  I believe that if I had worked harder at it from earlier on, I would be in better shape right now, funding wise.

5. Find your audience and put your efforts there.  Think honestly about who is MOST LIKELY to be interested, and focus on getting the word out to those people.

I still have 13 days to go.  We’ll see what happens.  And if you can, spread the word to those who would like to be enlightened!

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