Feck All on Friday 21/07/23: Self-Publishing Progress

I’m travelling at the moment and my usual 5 on Friday posts are an absolute pain to format on a phone. As is traditional on these occasions, welcome to Feck All on Friday where I just pick something else to blather on about.

This time, let’s talk about self-publishing, and how that’s going for me.

I’ve been messing around with publishing some homebrew content on DriveThruRPG for a few months now, ever since publishing a Fiasco playset, Creative Intertia, back in December of 2022. Since then, I’ve published another 3 items, including two player classes and an adventure, each for different RPGs.

This has mostly been a hobby experiment, but I can’t pretend I didn’t like the idea of earning a few quid out of stuff I put together. I also wanted to put something out from this blog. I don’t think there would be much of a market for merchandise, so this seemed like a cool alternative. That said, if I get any cool ideas for shirts or the like, I’d love to chuck something up on RedBubble. I just don’t see the point in going to it with nothing but a logo.

What I love is how much I’ve learned along the way. For one, I learned to use Affinity Publisher. I also learned that just going for ‘cool’ in layout doesn’t necessarily translate to ‘good’. I like what I did for Bio Hacker and The Outlandsknecht, but trying to make the documents look interesting and anarchic also made them a lot less easy to read. Creative Inertia and The Call to Adventure are far better presented, despite being a bit simpler.

The cumulative sales figures for the four items thus released were, as of the end of June 2023, sitting as follows:

• Creative Intertia: 95 (released December 2022)
• Bio Hacker: 25 (released January 2023)
• The Outlandsknecht: 11 (released February 2023)
• The Call to Adventure: 16 (released May 2023)

Now, bear in mind that Creative Inertia is a ‘pay what you want’ product. This means that people can choose to play the suggested price, a different price, or take the item for free. The vast majority of those who have ‘bought’ the item have taken it for free. And that’s fine! I love that people are downloading and reading it.

I’d like to keep on going with this stuff, as I’m enjoying it a lot. I’m delighted that people are picking up what I’m offering, and I hope that I can keep going and do at least one item every couple of months, if not more.

I do have a preview coming up for an item that I didn’t quite manage to finish before going gallivanting across Scotland. It’ll be finished off when gey home in a wee while.