3 Advertising Frustrations Plaguing this Independent Publisher
Advertising sucks, but we all need attention to succeed. Thus, the small, independent publisher grapples with forces magnitudes greater than itself to eke out a measly audience. Here’s some issues I’ve been running into recently.
1. Previewers / Reviewers not Responding
At a point far along in a game’s development, someone must look at it besides the testing clique. Hence, you must interact with influencers. Reviewers serve a broad range of functions; exposure, earnest critiques, and vouching for the game’s experience to their following. They’re abundantly important and so finding good previewers is a pain.
Unless you’re already consuming a vast amount of board game review content (something I don’t do) or you’re tapped into a platform’s board game account network (we try our best), finding potential candidates is tiresome. Selecting ones with credible reputation and getting their attention is another task entirely. I’ve had accounts ask for thousands of dollars to cover a game but sinking that kind of cash flow into a single creator just isn’t viable for first-timers like us. So, we’re left whoever will respond.
Now don’t get me wrong, this has led to me interacting with some very pleasant people, but not everyone is so cooperative. A particular account (who we’ve had lined up for some time) was slated to receive a copy of Mana Mania for preview. I confirmed their address, cleared that it was en route, and have not received a single response since. I have no confirmation that they received the package (other than USPS), and the messages I’ve sent over the last 4 weeks have all been left on seen.
With only a handful of preview copies available at the moment, this is big setback. Not only do I have to assume that copy is lost, but that’s also the loss of one of the few previewers I had. Now, I must arrange for another copy to be printed (at least 3-4 weeks delay) and delivered to the next previewer (another 1-2 weeks), only to wait and hope that they won’t ghost us too. Custom prints aren’t cheap, so this one account has cost us at least $30-40 in printing and shipping, with nothing to show but lost time and headaches.
If you’ve got a trustworthy reviewer based in the states who might be interested in working with us, please shoot us a DM.
2. Firms want Scale
A potential distribution partner recently gave us some projections on pre-campaign performance, and recommended we reach out to several advertisement firms to consider a more in-depth campaign. While necessary, It’s always frustrating to be told by seasoned professionals that you’re not at the scale needed to succeed yet, primarily because so little of it is within your direct control. Followers aren’t cheap to gather! It takes time or money or both to foster genuine connections with players.
But we obliged and spoke with two highly recommended services, whose supported board game projects have amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars each. That meant initial emails, waiting for responses, setting meeting times, clearing schedules, watching their 10-to-20-minute preparation videos, and agonizing over what you’ll need to know going in. It’s not fun. AND THEN, you get into a facetime call in the middle of the workday, tucked in a spare office, during your breaktime, putting on your professional happy face. After 5 minutes of spieling dialog, you get the bad news.
“Your goal is too low. Your backer tiers aren’t expensive enough. You don’t have the right product to bring in audience whales. No influencer is going to become obsessed with your game. You need an entire ecosystem of mail lists and landing pages to stand a chance of success. It’d double your budget to bring us on-board for a month. And therefore, we don’t think this is a good fit for your project. Thankyouhaveanicedaybye!”
Which means now, we not only have to explain to that distribution partner that we’re going to move forward without external help (likely lengthening our prelaunch period), but we also have to navigate advertising by ourselves. I appreciate the experience of these firms, and that they select for projects that can support their overhead costs. But at the same time, how is the little guy supposed to compete?
I don’t need/want to raise $50,000+ for a simple game project! That’s well and beyond my definition of “successful limited-production publication.” So, we’re left to our own devices to try and figure things out. Except, we ALREADY HAD THAT EXPECTATION! Other microgame publishers have told us as much! But at the behest of pleasing our partners and checking every box, we had to divert our attention for roughly a week, all for the sake of confirming that we are, in fact, a small business. It’s exasperating.
3. Squarespace, Feature-Gating, and Meta Ads
Squarespace, you host this blog, but you are miserable to work with sometimes.
I've been banging my ahead against the wall for the last week.
In pursuit self-advertising through Facebook ads, I was required to set up a business account with Meta for Diceratops games. We already had a Facebook group for Mana Mania (you should join). Our new business account, although connected to the “personal page”, required we basically build it from scratch. New profile pics, new details, new page, everything. That’s not to mention the process of wading through Facebook’s endless menus to create the bones of an advertisement itself. Meta may have some of the foremost effective advertising technology in the world, but it is nightmarish to navigate as a newcomer.
Want to redirect people to your website? You’ll need a “Meta Pixel”, which is a piece of traffic monitoring code you place in your website’s header to monitor what visitors from the ad do on your website. Squarespace has the handy ability to connect a Meta Pixel already built into the platform! That is, if you have a business plan, which is an extra $80 a year more than the basic plan (already $200/year) that we use. I ran into a similar issue when trying to integrate MailChimp into our website, but there was a workaround in manually inputting the code into our footer. However, no such thing was possible for the Pixel. So, on top of what we’d spend on advertising itself, we need to fork over more cash to gain access to basic integration measures. Great.
Technically, you don’t NEED a Pixel to advertise your site, but without it, you get absolutely no information about where customers are coming from, what they do, or ultimately, what your ROI is for the ad campaign. Critical details. I tried looking into using traffic analytics on Squarespace’s end to track visitor origins with specific URL queries, but that was a dead end of technojargon too.
So maybe I could use a form-based advert instead of a website redirect? This was even less promising. Beyond the debatable effectiveness of redirecting interested clickers to a questionnaire, I had to build a form in the first place. This could be a great way to enroll new people in our mailing list, but collecting that information raised the ethical and legal concern that Diceratops needed a privacy policy. S then I had to pause and research how to implement one of those. That meant legal research, generating a policy, putting it on the site, and implementing it into the needed places.
After getting back to the advertisement manager, I was still unsure which of the two routes would give the most bang for my buck. Not to mention the fact that I didn’t have actual advertising material on-hand yet: this was all prep work! This entire process was messy web of reddit threads, Squarespace FAQs, and Meta menu navigation, started at 7:00 on a weeknight. Our annual subscription renewed this week too, so it’s too late to find an alternative host. Maybe I’ll upgrade and be done with it, but the entire process feels miserably fruitless.
What do you think? Have you run into the same issues in your publishing pursuits? Any good advice to offer? Leave a comment below.
In the meantime, we’re still preparing to launch Mana Mania on Kickstarter! Click the button below to follow.
