The Literary Mercenary's (And Improved Initiative's) Recent Newsletter Change

The chaos of the year keeps on shifting, and over here on Improved Initiative I'm doing my best to roll with the punches. Which is why, first off, I want to give my monthly shout out to my patrons Phillip Litherland and Tracy for being my VIPs over on The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page. I'm still reeling from the changeover (I lost more than half of my Patreon earnings switching from a per-item account to a single, monthly fee account), so if you want to help me keep my bills paid while working on stuff like this blog, please consider becoming a paid member this month!

However, as if that wasn't enough to deal with, it seems that a certain Digital Ape wanted more bananas from myself, and a bunch of other creators who were just trying to get the word out about our work. Which is why I recently had to switch my bi-weekly newsletter to a new service. So, keep an eye out for Email Octopus, if you haven't seen it yet!

Come, friends. Let me tell you the latest happenings!

But before I get into the meat of today's post, remember, don't forget to sign up for my 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!

So... What Happened (And What This Will Change)

For folks who haven't been with me for a while, a few years back I took the advice from various folks, and put together a newsletter to keep all my interested readers updated on all my recent releases. The idea was that people who like my work could get personal, up-to-date content round ups coming straight from me, rather than depending on social media algorithms to see my posts (since these sites have been blocking, strangling, and silencing creators across the board). I never had a big following (10,000 is generally the number you need for a newsletter to be a money maker), but there were 300-500 folks subscribed to my newsletter at any given time.

And for all the time since I started this newsletter, I was a Mail Chimp user. You could send out up to 1,000 emails or so a month on your free account, and since I never really grew large enough to worry about going over that (as long as I did bi-weekly newsletters), it was a business arrangement that worked for me.

Until last week, when I settled in to send out the latest, and found the monkey with his hand out, demanding that I pay to play.

Your subscribers are waiting... what's it gonna be?

It seems that when I wasn't looking that Mail Chimp changed their policy so that anyone with over 250 subscribers on their list (I believe that was the number, at least) now had to pay to use their service. Well, given that only about 20% of my list actually reads their messages, and I don't really make any money from sending out these two newsletters a month, I wasn't going to just start tossing cash into a hole.

So I decided to use a different service... and that was why I've migrated my service over to Email Octopus (and you can sign up for the new location right here)!

I was fortunate in that all my previous users were downloaded and slotted right into the new service (so if you were already on the newsletter, you don't have to sign up again), but I'm going to be changing over links and trying to make sure that new folks don't end up on the old service as best I can. Sadly, that's a LOT of posts, so it's possible a few will slip through the cracks. My apologies in advance, but having to go through and change everything individually is going to take me a bit of time.

On A Final Note...

Speaking of going back through and swapping out links, I'm going to be replacing a lot of video links in both this blog, and over on The Literary Mercenary. For folks who haven't seen any of the updates, I recently launched a new YouTube channel with Alice Liddell called The A.L.I.C.E. Files, which is going to have a lot of my older RPG audio dramas on it, in addition to all the fresh content we're going to be making for it!

You'll see videos like this latest Deadlands-inspired tale Dead Man's Bluff, which appeared in my collection The Rejects. So stop on in, give us an extra view, subscribe if you like what we're doing, and consider sharing it around so I can keep making more stuff just like this!

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 additional audio dramas over on The A.L.I.C.E. Files! 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!

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!

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.

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:

- 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!

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!

In These Harsh Times, Game Designers Need All The Help They Can Get

Unless you live down among the dark elves (in which case, welcome to the Internet, glad you could finally join us), then you're no doubt aware that this pandemic has been a trying time for all of us. Creators in general, and game designers in particular, have been feeling the squeeze, though.

 

And we could really use your help right about now.

 

You literally are our best hope.

 

What I'm about to lay out are some simple things you can do to help the creators out there that you want to support through this pestilence. Not every option will be available for every individual, but go through the list and see what you can do to help. Because most of us were barely scraping by before all of this started, and now we're basically holding on by our fingernails.

And while it should go without saying, you can basically swap my name and details for most other game designers out there. I would really appreciate any and all help you can kick my way, but I also totally understand if there are other creators out there you'd rather support. Just remember that a lot of the stuff you can do is free, so you can be pretty generous with your actions!

How To Support If You Have Money

Gold makes the world go round.

This pandemic has led to a lot of us losing our jobs, or taking pay cuts. However, there are some of us out there who've managed to maintain our positions, or even to find new demand for our skills. So if you have spare money in your budget, and you want to help game designers out there, here are some simple things you can do.

First and foremost, buy their games! Whether you grab my 100 Kinfolk Bundle off of Storyteller's Vault (1,400 kinfolk NPCs for Werewolf: The Apocalypse), snatch a copy of one of my modules like The Curse of Sapphire Lake or Ghosts of Sorrow Marsh for DND 5th Edition, or download one of my DM supplements like 100 Cults to Encounter, 100 Fantasy Guilds, or 100 Secret Societies. Every purchase makes a difference when sales are down, and they've been steadily declining for a lot of us during this time.

Also, for ease of browsing, I've put the more than 80 modules and supplements I've written and been a part of into two archives. One gallery is on Pinterest, and the other is on Flipboard, but both of them have the same content. So take a moment, stop in, and see if anything appeals to you!

Alternatively, if you want to support a creator directly, consider just giving them a tip, or setting yourself up to support them. I'm on both Patreon and Ko-Fi, as an example, so if you want to help me keep the lights on while I keep these blogs going, any and all donations are greatly appreciated!

Lastly, check to see what other projects your favorite game creators have on the market that you might not know about. For example, if you're a fan of Clinton Boomer (which you should be) then you should check out his novel The Hole Behind Midnight sooner rather than later. If you've enjoyed Lauren Masterson's (alias Alice Liddell) contributions to High Level Games' blog, pick something off her Amazon author page or out of KHR Arts if you prefer her artwork.

This one is my latest release!

And because I'm still excited, I'll take this last chance to plug Marked Territory which dropped on the 1st of the month. A back alley noir mystery featuring the debut of Leo, a heavy from the Bronx, he ends up getting his whiskers involved in other people's business, and nearly getting in over his head. Curiosity might try to kill the cat, but he doesn't give up all that easy. A solid read for those looking to kill time in quarantine.

 

How To Support if You Don't Have Money

 

If you're just as broke as the rest of us, don't worry, that doesn't mean you don't have the power to help the creators and designers you like! In fact, even if you are making contributions and buying books, you can still do these things to double the results of your actions!

 

Never underestimate the value of a hand up!

The first thing you should do is find your favorite creator's social media channels, and follow them. The more followers someone has, the more attention they get, and the wider their signal gets boosted! I'm on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, for those who are interested.

Also, consider signing up for your favorite creator's mailing list. I started one recently (you can sign up here) and it provides a weekly update of all my new releases, fresh content, and other projects every week!

In addition to signing up for our updates, though, you can also use the power of your audience to help boost our signals so we can reach more people. For example, if you see a blog entry of mine that really speaks to you, share it with your groups! Whether you're in Facebook groups, you spend time on Reddit, or you've got a community on Discord that you think would enjoy it, don't be afraid to boost that signal. The more people who find out about what we do, and the more people who share it, the better off we'll be.

This goes double for my articles on Vocal, by the by, as they pay me based on how many reads they get. So if you want to help me out specifically, make sure you read through that archive and share anything that catches your eye!

Lastly, if you have bought something from a creator you love in the past, then take a moment to leave a review! Whether it's on Amazon, Drive Thru RPG, Goodreads, or perhaps all three, ratings and reviews make a big difference as to which products get seen, and which ones get forgotten. So even if you don't have the cash to buy something new, a few nice words and a recommendation can help that module, supplement, novel, etc. reach new readers who just might make a future purchase.

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 YouTube channel Dungeon Keeper Radio. Or if you'd prefer to read some of my books, like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife or my latest short story collection The Rejects, then head over to My Amazon Author 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!