Being A TTRPG Publisher Sucks, Actually

Lessons learned & my advice for crowdfunding

If you’re here for how to manage a project, this is not the blog post for you. I do management as a project lead (Director) but if you want great advice about management, I suggest you check out Lyla’s blog series on it. We brought Lyla onto the Vineyard Project around the Kickstarter campaign timeframe to clean up our act and boy DID SHE. Highly recommend her for work and if you’re trying to be successful as an indie publisher - you need to read her articles.

Why Being A TTRPG Publisher Fucking Sucks

Vineyard RPG is a passion project. It doesn’t make me money, yet. (Until I’ve sold about 500 more copies.) I’m okay with that, in theory. Ultimately, I’d prefer to not be bankrupted over this but that’s always a possibility. Like most Americans, I’m one medical emergency away from bankruptcy. Due to my life situation with divorce and being a queer, if I didn’t have the support structure I do have - I’d be homeless.

Most of my monetary issues (read: being poor) stem from a decision that I naively made two years ago. I made that silly first publisher mistake. What was I thinking trying to pack in all of my favorite things to one book? Simply put: scope creep can and will kill your project. It has almost killed mine.

I was thinking initially that our campaign would hit $100,000 in funding. It barely scratched $58,000. The scope (content) I had promised is way more expensive than $58,000 to create. So who is making up the difference? Me.

My advice? Don’t do this on your first project. I wish I had been more diligent with this - I definitely had great advice from others to keep scope small. I ignored them at my own peril. Sticking to a small scope and building from there would have saved me a lot of issues. Let big companies take on the risk of a large publishing project.

I could have kept the book to just the villains, cut locations, cut extra stuff - and delivered a great product. That is, if I had initially planned that scope in my pitch to accept peoples’ money. However since I did what I did, I promised what I promised - I am planning to deliver.

Then there is the feeling of not wanting to deliver a terrible product. It horrifies me to think of what would happen if we deliver a low quality book. Not that I’m afraid of 1 star reviews (okay, I am) or mean comments on Twitter (not as much anymore). I have wanted to do something like this my entire life. Finally, after 20 years of dreaming of a moment in time like this, I have the opportunity to really do it.

Don’t I have to do it right? Don’t I have to be perfect? I have to pay people well and do things as ethically as possible. All of those things are expensive.

But that’s my job as the publisher. I have to find the money.

And that’s enough for me. I’m content. I have a beautiful work life where I run games for money and make games for fun. Nowadays I’m doing my best to forget about the financial stress and just enjoy the creation process. I don’t need to make a ton of money, I just want to make enough, you know? I think the only major expenditure in my future is fem surgery, but I live frugally.

Do I think I’m fucked?

Nah. I’ll be fine. It’ll just take me longer to make the book because I need to pay people back in as tight a timeline as I can muster after they turn in work. As the investor, I need to hold myself accountable to the real people who are spending their hours to work on my product.

I’ve dropped the ball on some payments and will be pausing future contractor work so I can catch up before I continue on Vineyard RPG. I’m estimating with my outstanding requests and soon-to-be-invoiced, I’m looking at leveling out in May. I’ll just be working off the invoices I have in the meantime with my other freelancing work.

Do I think I’m returning to 12-15 games a week on Start Playing Games? God, I hope not. I’m very comfortable only running 8-10 games a week, now. I don’t ever want to have to grind like that running games. It was terrible for my mental health.

Still, my income will be supplemented by my freelancing writing and other work for different publishers. I’m thankful for the opportunities, honestly.

In truth: I’ve known about this problem since the campaign funded last year. I knew right away that I was in trouble because of my poor scope decision. I guess now I’m just saying it out loud and in public. Maybe I was in denial?

I think back to when I was running the Kickstarter and we had our terrible start. I was working 6 hours a day that month just on trying to figure out ways to promote it. My eternal thanks to our backers who helped us pull out a victory and fund.

Thank you

I’m a humble small-time publisher and grateful for the opportunity to do this. I won’t let you down.