Drive Thru RPG's New Site Isn't Great For Smaller Publishers (Now With Numbers!)

Making a living as a writer of any stripe is hard as hell, and if you want to make tabletop RPGs for a living you have an uphill battle of Sisyphean proportions ahead of you. With that said, I've been in the game for over a decade at this point in my life. I've got nearly 180 products with my name on them, and I've worked for more than a dozen different publishers during my stint as a creator. I've released supplements that were smash hits, and topped the bestseller list for over a week when they came out. I've also released supplements that moved a handful of copies, and then vanished into the void, rarely to be seen again. However, with every year that's gone by I've had a bigger catalog of material, and that has translated to a larger, more reliable set of earnings.

Until this year.

And while there are always going to be fluctuations in the market, changes in what the audience wants, etc., this is far beyond those normal fluctuations. I've recently had my monthly earnings cut in half, and I've been struggling with it for the latter half of 2024. After discussions with other creators who operate on my level, I kept hearing the same stories. So I put my head together with Adrian Kennelly, my publisher at Azukail Games, and we started looking into things.

This week I wanted to explain to folks what we've found, and to present some solutions for those who want to help the creators they love ride out this storm so we can keep making stuff for you and your tables.

The numbers aren't great, I'm not going to lie.

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All Right, What Are We Looking At?

Let's take one of my most recent releases, 100 Helpful Hirelings. This NPC list actually performed far better than a lot of my other recent releases in terms of numbers, which landed it on the Top Sellers Under $5 bar on the front page of the site. At the time I checked the numbers, the supplement had sold 58 copies, with 35 of them coming from the Azukail Games newsletter (which is roughly 60% of sales).

Now, that is an outside performer that did better than average... but in the past if I had a supplement wind up on that top sellers bar, it would be because it crossed the 100 sales line in either the first day, or the first weekend. The fact that I got onto that bar with less-than-triple-digit sales tells me that sales are likely decreasing across the board, and showing up on the front page isn't enough to cover the deficit.

If that's the outsized numbers, and something that would be considered a successful release, then what does an average release look like?

Well, I'm glad you asked.

The numbers don't get any better.

Let's take page views. In the past when a new supplement dropped, we could regularly expect 60 page views on it in the first hour. That was what we got when the algorithm was working, and the site was encouraging organic discovery. Now? It takes several days for the page view count to get that high. And this isn't a one-off thing with a couple of supplements... this has been going on for months! It now takes Azukail Games products days to get the kind of views they used to get in a single hour!

As if that wasn't bad/frustrating enough, sales have absolutely cratered for our supplements. Our numbers are down so low because it seems that 90% of new release sales are coming from the Azukail Games newsletter, rather than due to traffic on Drive Thru RPG itself. This is damning in multiple ways, because it means that not only is organic searching on the DTRPG site itself tanked to the point where it is nearly useless, it means that all the social media platforms where supplements are announced (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) also have terrible organic discovery. So it doesn't matter how many places we share our releases, or who we tell about them, a majority of our sales are coming from people who actually open the Azukail Games newsletter and read what's inside.

That's a lot of numbers. But what does that mean for me, personally, as a creator? In short, my sales/royalties income has been cut in half.

Around this time last year, I was regularly pulling in between $350 and $425 a month in combined royalties and affiliate earnings from DTRPG sales. My projection at the time was, if I kept growing the way I had in the past, that I'd be earning between $450 and $500 a month around this time this year.

However, I'm barely pulling in $150 to $220. And given that I already live below the poverty line, that was not the kick in the crotch I needed.

How You Can Help

If you are reading this, you probably can't stop the enshittification of social media platforms, or undo how DTRPG has completely screwed up the ability to connect creators with their potential audience. However, what you can do is choose to plug-in to the creators you care about to make sure that you don't miss any of our releases and updates, and to do your best to make sure you don't have to depend on the random and inexplicable tides of the algorithm to find out when we're releasing stuff.

And if you want to help me out, specifically, please do the following:

- Follow My Facebook

- Follow My LinkTree

- Follow Me On Twitter

- Subscribe To My Weekly Newsletter

- Subscribe To The Azukail Games YouTube Channel (where I contribute video content)

- Subscribe To My Rumble Channel (longer videos that won't show up on YouTube)

Lastly, if you want to hear about all of the releases from Azukail Games, go to the Azukail Games website, and sign up for the company newsletter! It's on the right-hand side of the page.

With all of that said (and I cannot stress this enough), make sure that you stay plugged-in to the creators and companies you actually follow. Subscribing to our newsletter does neither of us any good if it just goes into your spam folder and you don't see it. You don't have to buy everything we release, but every purchase, review, like, and share on social media helps us overcome the algorithm, and try to make up for the damage it's causing to us.

As always, we can't do any of this without you!

Like, Follow, and Stay in Touch!

That's all for this week's Moon Pope Monday. To stay on top of all my content and releases, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter at the bottom of the page!

Again, for more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, and stop by the Azukail Games YouTube channel, or my Rumble channel The Literary Mercenary! Or if you'd prefer to read some of my books, like my dystopian sci-fi thriller Old Soldiers, my hardboiled gangland noir series starring a bruiser of a Maine Coon with Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife or my latest short story collection The Rejects, then head over to My Amazon Author Page!

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