Toilet Skeleton postmortem
(copy pasted from Cohost, rip cohost, you were too good for this world)
About 2 months ago I released Toilet Skeleton, a solo journaling game about becoming a piece of environmental storytelling. Incidentally you can still buy it, it's actually really cool to give me ludicrous amounts of money. I thought a small postmortem would be useful to me and also you, the reader, about what I've taken away from this.
First off, the tags on itch.io were (and continue to be) my number one source of page views and downloads. Tag your games! I was very briefly the number 5 most popular game tagged solo-rpg, gmless, journaling, and singleplayer in the Physical Games page. My other top 2 sources of page views were cohost and my appearance on the Soloist, which each generated a few sales. My lesson here is that a press kit and sharing on social media works wonders. I also had a direct sale from a friend sharing my game on LinkedIn of all places, which is the only time LinkedIn has ever generated a dime for me. BlueSky didn't produce much interest though I suspect that is at least a little bit a product of the circles I have access to there.
Printing the physical zines was a lot of fun and quickly recovered the cost (about $80 for 15 copies). I priced those at $15 because I figured (correctly) I'd only be able to sell a few and those needed to cover the cost of the rest. Furthermore, some copies were spoken for as barter for my editor CoDele (please consider CoDele if you need short RPG work edited) and my investor (I was broke enough that I did not have 80 clams at the time) plus I kind of figured I'd fuck the first one up because I'd never made a zine before and would keep that as my personal copy. With 12 copies available for distribution I settled on $15 as that allowed half of the sale copies to cover the cost of printing and mailing. I am actually thankful to my business degree for helping me figure all of this out. Note that I also had to purchase some zine-making materials (big stapler, bone folder, envelopes) but I reckon those are start up costs and ate those. Overall I do think the print copies were worth it and I also think that run size was about right.
I do all my layout on MS Publisher, an absolutely dogshit program, because I am extremely familiar with it. I found that assembling the cover collage was the catalyst that made me immediately jump into the project and was able to move it from that to finish in about a week. The two trickiest parts of the entire layout process were filling 2 more pages of writing in order to bring the page count up to a folio length and finding a public domain image of a toilet's internal workings. I spent the most amount of time on the latter process than any other part of this, essentially an entire day of work. Citing images correctly was also a challenge for me because of the sheer room that citations take up.
Toilet Skeleton made $178 gross revenue1. Not bad at all. Most importantly I'm very proud of it and I hope I can bring that discipline and enthusiasm to another project next year.
as of this update now $195.↩