The algorithm is the strange (and often malignant) god of the Internet age. It determines who lives, dies, who fails and thrives. Its decisions appear utterly random, and while it purports to be all-knowing, it never seems to actually be able to give you precisely what it is you want.
The truth is that the algorithm is a blind, idiot god. It sees everything, but truly understands nothing... but if you wish the blessings of the attention economy, it must lift you up as a creator. I talked about this more in-depth recently in As An Author The Algorithm Controls Your Fate (And It Determines Your Success), but this week I wanted to ask for your help in binding this technological force in order to use its power.
In short, the year is drawing to an end, and Azukail Games could use your help!
We won't be able to do this without you!
But before I get into the meat of today's post, remember, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Also, be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree.
Lastly, for hundreds of extra articles on gaming, weird history, and for more free fiction, check out my Vocal archive, too!
How You Can Pull Us Out Of The Mud!
So, full context for folks who haven't been around these parts before, I am one of the major contributors to the Azukail Games YouTube channel, which is where I host 3-4 regular shows with occasional dramatized stories from the TTRPG supplements I write. And while the channel got monetized earlier this year, it's been a slog for us to actually climb up the hill and get noticed.
And there are two major reasons for this:
- YouTube changes to the algorithm, which has taken our average views from 300-400 per video, to 100, and sometimes as little as 50 views per video.
- Subscriber slow-down. Unless your channel is constantly growing (or reaches a massive subscriber level in the hundreds of thousands) the algorithm hides/de-prioritizes your content, and doesn't share it with people.
The issue that we're running into is that while we can make all the videos we want, and try to share them around as much as we can, we can't tap a magical button and increase our views, or get people to subscribe to us as a channel. And that is what this post is for today... because we could really use a few helping hands before the year is over.
And best of all, it won't cost you a dime!
All we need folks to do is, basically, help us fight the two issues I mentioned above! So, if you want to help us keep pushing forward:
- Subscribe to the Azukail Games YouTube channel. For bonus points, hit the bell to be sure that you get notified so the algorithm can't just bury our videos when they drop.
- Watch our videos. If you're already subscribed, just take a few minutes out of your day to watch at least 1 video. Or, if you enjoy a particular show on the channel, watch one of the full playlists!
- For bonus credit, upvote videos you like, and leave comments of at least 7 words on them. Those are signals to the algorithm that a video is popular, and it makes a difference regarding how much attention our content gets. You could also share links to the videos on your own social media pages, which can have a surprisingly large impact.
And that's it!
My personal goal is to get the channel over 2,000 subscribers by Christmas, and we're currently at around 1,760. So if we can find about 240 folks, more or less, that growth will be a big help that will allow us to regain some of our momentum. And if we could also get a bigger percentage of folks to hit that bell and watch our new releases (as well as sharing older videos they think more folks should see) that would be huge for us. Because while the channel is monetized, it isn't exactly pulling down notable ad revenue... which is something you can help us do just by using your eyes and ears to send a message to the algorithm on our behalf.
Thanks for reading this far. This has been an ongoing project, and I have so many topics I still want to cover, and more involved videos I want to make. But to justify the cost in time, energy, etc., I'm going to need all the help I can get!
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!
To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Blue Sky, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Pinterest as well! To support my work, consider Buying Me a Ko-Fi, or heading to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. That one helps ensure you get more Improved Initiative, and it means you'll get my regular, monthly giveaways as a bonus!
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.
As always, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Also, be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree.
Lastly, for hundreds of extra articles on gaming, weird history, and for more free fiction, check out my Vocal archive, too!
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:
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!
To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Pinterest as well! To support my work, consider Buying Me a Ko-Fi, or heading to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. That one helps ensure you get more Improved Initiative, and it means you'll get my regular, monthly giveaways as a bonus!
I had planned to write this up over on my sister blog The Literary Mercenary, but I know that this blog gets far more eyes on it, and this is a topic I feel quite strongly about. Not just because it affects my life, but because it is the way the entire publishing and entertainment industry works, and so I feel it's important for as many people as possible to really understand this struggle, their place in it, and what the creators they love need from them in order for us to stay out of the grave for one more day.
In case you haven't heard the term, we're all stuck in the Attention Economy... and it's drowning a lot of us.
As always, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Also, be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree.
Lastly, for hundreds of extra articles on gaming, weird history, and for more free fiction, check out my Vocal archive, too!
The Attention Economy: What It Is, And How It Works
The short version, as Coursera explains, is that the attention economy is just that; attempts to get people's attention (their engagement in social media parlance). There are only so many hours in a day, after all, and there's only so much content someone can consume in that time period. With millions of books, thousands of TV shows, decades of archived films, and untold hours of uploaded videos on the Internet, there's only so much that people can look at, and be engaged by before they run out of steam, and give-a-damn.
This is not, strictly speaking, a new phenomenon. It's the same basic principles that were used by TV and radio stations, as well as by movie studios and publishers in days gone by. People only have so many hours in the day, and with all the things they could be doing with what free time they have, how do you make them engage with what you're making? Especially since that engagement is what determines whether you have enough to eat this month, or if you have to pack it in?
After all, if you sell more copies of a book, then you make more royalties. If you can prove you have more people listening to your radio show, or watching you on TV, then you can sell more advertising spaces and get more sponsorship. The concept isn't new... but like so many things in our day and age, it's been pushed to such an extreme that the magnitude of it can feel insurmountable.
Gimme, it's mine!
That last part is important. Because your attention has always been a resource... but now it's more limited than it's ever been before, and there are more people using more tricks to try to get it through means that feel like something out of 1984. You receive notifications for every app you use, social media blasts you every day, advertising blares before nearly everything you consume, and there is so much happening so fast that you can only absorb a small part of it before you're utterly spent. Add to that all the misinformation, cickbait, and out-and-out bad actors stirring up drama solely because more eyes on them means more money in their pockets, and it's like being at a rave, in a concert, being held inside an active combine harvester.
Your attention is valuable, and this economy turns every minute you watch a video, every click of the Like button, every review you leave, and every follow on a page into a transaction as you signal what you want to see more of... but at the same time, that economy moves the goal posts for creators, and makes it even harder for us to reach our perpetually more tired audience. Because it also refines your searches, your feeds, and what you see and hear based on your previous activity. So if you don't take control of your own behavior, you're only ever going to see and hear the same things over and over again, because that's what this modern media landscape (and the algorithms that power them) are designed to do; keep feeding you whatever it is that will keep you reading, watching, or playing.
Attention and Exposure
I've said this before, but creators are like gladiators. If the audience isn't watching us, and isn't cheering for us, then no one cares what we do, or what happens to us. The more you cheer for us, and the more you follow our careers, and talk about us, the more successful we become. Your attention, your raised voices, make or break whether we live to fight another day, or whether we die on the sands to the indifferent silence all around us.
And that is true... but it's not the entire story.
There is no signalling for mercy in this economy.
Take a moment, and think about the creators you follow in the TTRPG space. Maybe they're bloggers, or YouTubers, or podcasters. All of those watched hours of content, all those reads, all those listens, as well as the likes and comments on social media, those are worth something in the attention economy... however, it is often not worth as much as you think.
It is, to use a dreaded word to every artist out there, exposure.
Consider that Weird Al Yankovic, arguably one of the most accomplished musicians of an era, was paid $12 for 80 million streams on Spotify. Consider the fact that, according to Descript, YouTubers need to get hundreds of thousands of people to subscribe to their channels, and to get hundreds of thousands of views on those videos before they make anything approaching a living wage. And that's on top of the fact that YT doesn't pay creators at all until they have at least 500 subscribers and 3,000 hours of watched content on their channels... until you hit that point, the only person making money is them. Over on Vocal, if you're a Vocal+ member, it takes 90,000 reads on your articles just to make $500. And that's the good rate.
We are competing for eyes and ears every day, yes... but to add insult to injury, even if we get the input and attention from people that the platforms and publishers want, that's still no guarantee that we actually get anything out of it. Because unless that attention is mystically transformed into dollars through ad revenue, sponsorship deals, or merch sales, it's the same as getting a million upvotes on Reddit.
Utterly useless if you need to pay your rent.
As I said in Writing Isn't What Makes Writers Succeed, this is a two-pronged problem for us. Because we need a sizable audience to know about us, and our work, and to give us all the things that make social media happy (clicks, follows, likes, etc.), because when that happens it means we get promoted by the algorithm. Which means that more people will see us, which means more people will find out about us and our work. But even if you manage millions of shares and a huge following, that exposure is no guarantee of income... and it's exhausting pursuing fame, but then having the powers-that-be refuse to give you fortune to go with it.
Which is why, as a consumer, you need to know the value of your attention, and your power, but also its limitations, and the reality creators you love are dealing with. Because as I've said, your actions are all tallied on the board by the machines that run the media landscape. They count your likes, your follows, your retweets, comments, and all those other social transactions. At the same time, if the 700 and change people following my Facebook author page all gave me $5 a month on my Patreon page so I could keep doing what I'm doing, I would never need to bother with social media again.
Just saying.
I want to end this with some words of commiseration. Because I know it is frustrating as someone who just wants to play a game, or just wants to watch videos or listen to podcasts that you are constantly bombarded with the knowledge that your support is what determines whether or not a creator can afford food, and pay their rent. You are often more interested in whether a novel is entertaining, or a comic is funny, than what your impact on the creator's life is going to be.
I get it. Feeling responsible for other people, even if you have a parasocial relationship, is exhausting. However, this is the unfortunate reality we live in. If you want to see creators you like keep making games, videos, podcasts, music, art, or whatever other product you want to see from them, they need your support in order to make that happen.
It is your decision when it comes to what kind of support you want to give, and what you are comfortable with. But there is no secret hand of fame and fortune that will pluck only the worthy and the talented from the dirt and ensure their success. 50 Shades of Gray isn't a bestselling record-breaker because it was an amazing work of literary brilliance... it got where it is because people bought copies, talked about it, left reviews, and supported it. The same is true of Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and every other rich fraud, dodgy host, and terrible person who made fat stacks of cash.
It wasn't the quality of their art. It was the support of their audience, plain and simple.
On that note, if you haven't heard about the changes of on the Azukail Games YouTube channel, a fairly recent update talks about some of the things you can do to help support us if you want to be sure we keep making videos going forward!
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!
To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Pinterest as well! To support my work, consider Buying Me a Ko-Fi, or heading to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. That one helps ensure you get more Improved Initiative, and it means you'll get my regular, monthly giveaways as a bonus!
People asked me for ages why I didn't make video content, and a few years ago I finally bit that bullet and started making stuff for the Azukail Games YouTube channel. While I've been working hard on making videos talking about my Sundara: Dawn of a New Age setting, dramatizing stories from my various supplements, and running shows like Discussions of Darkness and Tabletop Mercenary, there's only so much that I can do on my end to make the numbers go up.
Which is why today I wanted to talk about one number that's been going up pretty high... and one that I need your help to push up so I can keep putting out content for everyone!
Programming like this is literally made possible by viewers like you!
As always, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Also, be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree.
Lastly, for hundreds of extra articles on gaming, weird history, and for more free fiction, check out my Vocal archive, too!
The Good, The Bad, and The Frustrating
So, first things first the good news! At time of writing the channel has 985 subscribers, meaning that we're only 15 subs away from hitting that first major milestone of 1,000 people! So if you haven't done so yet, please subscribe to the Azukail Games YouTube channel to put us over that goal!
Okay, now for the bad news... which is a little more complicated.
This is where the algorithm gets involved.
For most of 2023 things seemed to be going pretty good for the channel. Videos were being well-received, the audience was growing, and I was doing my best to diversify the content. Changes were being made to tweak and improve as I picked up new skills, got new equipment, and generally tried to make things better for everyone. For a while it seemed that we were getting between 200 and 400 views on an average video, with occasional outliers climbing to 700, 800, and in a few cases with videos even breaking 1,000 views. Small views for the site in general, but still a positive trend for a small gaming channel.
So what happened? In short, the algorithm happened.
Around November of 2023 we experienced a big slow down in our traffic, even as the number of subscribers to the channel grew. For the past several months we've had to fight tooth and nail to get any of our videos up over 100 views, with the only one doing notably well during that time period being my unboxing video for Army Men because... well, the algorithm likes unboxings, it seems.
What that means is that, while we were making slow but steady progress toward actually getting the channel monetized (which requires a minimum of 500 subscribers and 3,000 watched hours of content in the past 365 days), we've hit a big bump in the road that's trying to become a full stall. Last month we needed about 800 hours and change of watched content to get across that line... but now it's fallen to the point where we need a full 980 hours (because if your traffic slows down, you start going backwards on this count)!
Unfortunately, whatever was done to the algorithm doesn't seem to be something that making more videos, or sharing more links on social media, is helping with. We've got a wet blanket thrown over us, and we don't have the power to do anything about it all on our own.
That's Where You Come In!
At time of writing, there's a couple hundred videos on the Azukail Games channel. And while a majority of them are previews for the various supplements the publisher has put out, there's also a lot of other content I'd recommend checking out!
First and foremost there's my rather long list of audio dramas! These cover fantasy stories from my Sundara: Dawn of a New Age setting, as well as stories taken from supplements for Vampire, Changeling, Geist, and Mage from the World of Darkness! There are also miscellaneous fantasy and sci-fi stories in the mix, many of which are connected together into various serieses, as I talked about in my older posts My Sci-Fi Audio Drama Trilogy is Now Complete and My Cyberpunk Audio Drama Trilogy is Now Complete!
Another series of videos I've been working on is my Discussions of Darkness series, which talks about the World and Chronicles of Darkness setting, and which shares advice (much of it hard-won) about how to really make these games work. The most recent episode, linked above, actually started a decent amount of conversation regarding mortals in the World of Darkness, and how strong mortal weaponry is... but for all that conversation, very few people actually watched my video on the subject.
This has been something of a pattern for the last little while, actually. Because while there have been some rather impressive comment threads, and a few folks have expressed interest in the topic of particular videos as well as the channel overall, that interest doesn't usually translate to views... and views are kind of what we need right now!
My most recent series, Tabletop Mercenary, is all about what happens behind the curtain when it comes to being a professional TTRPG designer, and about giving folks advice on this career path should they choose to seek it out. While there were a lot of folks who said they wanted something like this to exist (and I've got a decade of experience in the industry at time of writing) I've had trouble getting eyes on these episodes.
So if you would like to see more of this series, by all means, share any of the videos that exist right now, and leave comments telling me what topics you want to see going forward! Audience feedback is how I decide what questions to answer, and what topics to research (if I can't speak from experience)!
Lastly, we have my Speaking of Sundara series. These were actually the first videos I made for the channel, and the ones where you can see the most growth and change in my presentation style, my setup, my equipment, and more. These videos cover the supplements I've released for Sundara: Dawn of a New Age as a setting, discussed some of the ideas that have slipped between the lines, and what I'd like to do with the setting going forward. While Sundara has a few fans, it could always use more love... and for folks who are curious, the above video is all about how ideas get recycled in some of my projects, allowing me to keep turning out fresh material while saving myself creative juice in the process!
Whichever videos interest you, and whatever you prefer, please go check out some of our content over on the Azukail GamesYouTube channel today! If everyone who is currently subscribed to our channel just went through and watched 1 video per day, we'd have ourselves monetized by the end of the month.
It might not feel like the handful of minutes you spend listening to an audio drama, or watching me talk about TTRPG design, makes a big impact... but nearly 1,000 people all doing one, little thing consistently can make a big damn difference when all is said and done! So please watch, like, and share videos around if they're the sort of things you want to see more of! Lastly, make sure you leave your thoughts and comments on our videos in order to give us feedback, boost us in the algorithm, and to let us know the direction you want us to go in.
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!
To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Pinterest as well! To support my work, consider Buying Me a Ko-Fi, or heading to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. That one helps ensure you get more Improved Initiative, and it means you'll get my regular, monthly giveaways as a bonus!
The holidays are upon us once again, and now that Spookyween and Turkey Day are behind us, we move onto the expensive one. However, with everyone out there getting their last minute shopping trips in, I wanted to take a moment to remind folks out there that independent creators need your help more than ever around this time of year.
So please, take a moment, and consider what you can do to help support the TTRPG creators, writers, artists, YouTubers, and others you depend on for entertainment and content so that we will still be here once 2024 rolls around, and we can keep giving you what you've come to expect from us.
Any and all help you can provide is much appreciated.
Before we get into the nitty gritty this week, don't forget to sign up for my weekly newsletter to get all my updates right in your inbox. Also, if you've got a bit of spare cash that you'd like to use to help keep the wheels turning, consider becoming a Patreon patron! Also, be sure you're following all of my followables, check out my LinkTree.
Lastly, for hundreds of extra articles on gaming, weird history, and for more free fiction, check out my Vocal archive, too!
The Struggles of The Year
Being a creative professional is no cakewalk. We're called "starving artists" for a reason, after all. However, 2023 has basically been kicking most of us in the stomach while we're trying to get up off of our hands and knees... and a majority of this is related to recent changes in the social media landscape, and the fresh set of hellish problems this has given all of us to overcome.
What was once a boon has turned to poison in our mouths.
At the top of the list, we have the dumpster fire that Twitter has become. This website was a central gathering place for authors, RPG creators, and YouTubers (along with a huge number of other creative professionals), and it has been absolutely gutted since the owner-who-shall-not-be-named acquired it. This completely destroyed the platform that a lot of us had built over years of time, and even those of us who didn't use Twitter as our main source of social media promotion still felt the impact as it damaged all of our efforts to share our creations with an enthused and engaged audience. It still exists, but only as a shadow of its former self.
That would have been bad enough, but then things got worse.
This past spring, Facebook underwent some major changes to how the site works. While we've always had to fight the algorithm to get seen on that site, it's been absolute mess for most of 2023. Only a handful of posts actually get through into groups, and the rest are pushed into spam folders that many admins don't even see, effectively throttling your signal as a creator. On top of that, the site has grown even more restrictive with who sees your posts on your personal or business account, with the latter prodding creators to buy a signal boost with every post we make if we want our followers to actually see them.
Even Reddit hasn't been immune to this. Dozens of subreddits were shut down over the summer, and there were blackout protests over the tools being removed from the moderators. The list of websites and content varieties that the site's spam bots automatically removes grows daily, or so it seems, and there are several communities that were once oases that are now dry as deserts, as far as creators are concerned.
When you add in the massive surge in generative engines that are plagiarizing work left and right, the sectioning off of audiences under platforms like Discord and Mastadon, and how even the YouTube algorithm is making it more difficult for smaller creators to get their voices heard, the end result is that only those people who already had a large, vibrant following are still being seen and reacted to... and even they aren't immune to the squeeze being put on all of us by platforms that are getting more and more restrictive by the day.
What this means is that our reach has been cut, our views, our reads, and our sales (to say nothing of patronage and sponsorship) is drying up all across the board because no one can find us, and attempts to actually get seen are shut down almost before they begin. And if no one follows us and supports us, then creators simply cannot afford to keep making things.
Direct Support is The Best Support
If you want to help the creators you care about keep a roof over their heads, and food on the table, there are some specific actions you can take to make that happen. Not only that, but you should do as many of these things as you possibly can, because we need all the help we can get!
You've likely heard the numbers recently regarding how Weird Al Yankovic, who had millions of streams on Spotify, was paid $12 for all of that listening time. That is the unfortunate reality that a lot of creators are currently dealing with. We might have gigantic numbers when it comes to pages read on Kindle Direct, or a huge number of reads on our blogs, or a massive amount of streams... and when the year is over, all of that effort is good for a sandwich. Whereas if someone pays to download one of Al's albums? Or buys a tee shirt, or other piece of merch? That single sale likely pays him as much (if not more) than 80 million streams on Spotify.
So whether you buy an album, a tee shirt, a novel, a TTRPG supplement, a patch, a pin, or even a sticker, you will have done more to support a creator with that single purchase than if you left their podcast or YouTube channel running in the background every hour of every day for an entire month!
And if a given creator doesn't have something for sale that you want? Well, you can sign up to become a Patreon patron, or buy them a Ko-Fi to essentially just put a tip in their jar so they can keep things going. This is especially important for creators who produce mostly free content (like my blogs, YouTube videos, etc.), because it's a form of direct support that has immediate consequences for us.
Incidentally, check me out at The Literary Mercenary on both Patreon and on Ko-Fi if you want to help me weather the holidays in one piece!
There Are Other Things You Can Do, Too
If you don't have the spare scratch to buy merch and leave tips for every creator, does that mean you just can't help anyone? Of course not! However, it is important to remember that these steps are the next tier down... so they do help, but not as much as just giving artists money to help pay their bills.
We must do battle with the algorithm.
First and foremost, do interact with the stuff made by creators you love. If someone makes a video or writes an article you like, watch it, upvote it, leave a comment (even if you're just saying, "I'm so excited to see where this series goes from here!"), and share it on your own social media pages, or in your groups. If you bought a book or a TTRPG supplement, do all of these things, but also leave a review on Amazon, Drive Thru RPG, Goodreads, or whatever other platforms you can find it on!
As I explained in Leveraging The Algorithm: How You Can Help Creators You Love Get Seen, while your individual interaction may be very small, every one of these things helps meaningfully boost a creator's signal. Each interaction makes us more popular in the eyes of the algorithm, and that makes it more likely to work for us, rather than against us, helping us actually reach more people. The more people we reach, the more fans we can find, and the more interactions we will get... it's even possible that we'll make more sales, too!
Perhaps most importantly, though, is to remember that even if the traffic we generate doesn't pay us a lot of money (whether it's a Spotify stream, a Twitch chat, or a YouTube video), creators who have a sizable audience are also the ones who get approached by companies with sponsorship deals. So while we might only get a handful of dollars in exchange for hundreds of thousands of views, a sponsor might pay us a thousand or more to mention their product, or even to create a piece of content around it to help promote it to our audience, if we have enough reliable eyeballs on us.
Lastly, make sure that you're connecting with the creators you want to support so that you don't miss when they're releasing new stuff, or working on new projects. Whatever social media sites they're on, follow their pages. If they're on video platforms, subscribe to their channels, and turn on your notifications. If they have a newsletter, subscribe to it (and make sure you actually get it, and it isn't just being eaten by your spam folder).
We don't ask you to do these things for funsies... we do it because these are literally the lengths we have to go to in order to make sure our audience actually sees the posts we make, and that we aren't being throttled to death by the algorithm!
Where You Can Support Me!
So, everything I've said up to this point could apply to any creator out there, and I fully support everyone who has read this far in going and helping as many artists as you can so we can all get through the holidays, and start 2024 off on the right foot!
But if you're someone who specifically wants to help me, first of all, thank you. Secondly, please consider the following:
First, check out the Azukail Games YouTube channel, which hosts a lot of my audio dramas, in addition to the shows Speaking of Sundara, Discussions of Darkness, and now Tabletop Mercenary! We're about a thousand watched hours out from getting monetized by YouTube, so please put on a playlist while you're wrapping presents, or just trying to avoid awkward family discussions!
Also, If you want even more content (particularly bigger, more expansive audio dramas) you should also subscribe to my Rumble account, The Literary Mercenary!
If videos aren't your thing, though, I've got plenty of other options for you!
For example, in addition to my blogs The Literary Mercenary, and Improved Initiative, I also have a Vocal Media archive! It just hit 300 articles this week, and I make $6 for every 1,000 reads those articles get. So if you want something to scroll through on your lunch break, consider checking out some of my stuff over there, and sharing it around if you find something you really like!
And, of course, you can always buy some of the stuff I've written!
My novels and short story collections are all listed on my Amazon author page, and there should be some new releases getting added there in the near future! These are particularly nice stocking stuffers, which is worth keeping in mind this time of year. Additionally, I currently have 168 titles on Drive Thru RPG, which vary from World/Chronicles of Darkness, to DND 5E, to Pathfinder, general genre supplements, modules, and more! Whether you buy one, a few, or a slew of them, that would go a long way to keeping the wolf from the door!
Lastly, you can follow me on all my social media spaces. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Pinterest are the places where I'm most active, but you can also get a bunch of my news and updates by checking out my Link.tree, or subscribing to my bi-monthly newsletter... that's twice a month, not once every two months, to be sure you know what you're in for!
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!
To stay on top of all my latest releases, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now Pinterest as well! To support my work, consider Buying Me a Ko-Fi, or heading to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page to become a regular, monthly patron. That one helps ensure you get more Improved Initiative, and it means you'll get my regular, monthly giveaways as a bonus!
