Tag: Editorial

One question I get asked a lot is “should I market my visual novel? It’s [insert a lot of caveats and complaints]”. When people ask this, they ask me because they know I’m the marketing person. They’re usually not asking for advice, but rather either an easy-out (“she saw how many caveats my game has that’ll make it hard/not worthwhile to market and said I don’t have to!”) or a final push (“she gave me the push I needed to get up and go market my game”).

So let’s answer this once and for all (???)…

should you market your game?

Twitter, X, whatever is slowly becoming more and more unusable by the day, ever since November 2022. Several times I’ve heard people ask “where are visual novel developers moving to?”, which is usually responded with “Tiktok” or “Tumblr”. But as of yet, we don’t really have any data on this.

As we get close to the one year mark since Someone took over Twitter, I decided to do a formal survey on this so we can see more definitively what social media developers are moving to.

Some notes before we begin:

• This survey was anonymous and was shared via my Twitter, Tumblr, and various visual novel developer Discord servers. It was open for about a week.
• Around 1/6th of the submissions were discarded due to high chances of them being bot responses, with very human responses such as “With the development of the Internet, social media also needs fans to support the development, which is abandoned by The Times for the independent development”.
• All long-form questions were optional. All multiple choice / checkbox questions were required.
• 55 developers took the survey, 56 including myself. This is the final count after discarding the bot submissions.
• Sites like Patreon, ko-fi, and newsletters were not considered as social media platforms for the purposes of this survey.

So often I hear questions like “when should I start marketing my visual novel?” or “how do I start marketing my visual novel?”. A lot of these people are actually asking “when should I announce my visual novel?” or “when should I make social media accounts?”. But what’s the difference? Isn’t that what “when should I start marketing my visual novel?” means?

It isn’t, because you’ve already started marketing your visual novel.

Today I want to go over what marketing actually means (and what this means for you as a game dev).

I’ve been on a small writing hiatus the past few months, given our extremely successful physical game Kickstarter over at Élan and continuing to work on Canvas Menagerie. While I’ve been “away”, more indie devs have swarmed the scene, both new and old, making grander projects than before.

Some of these projects have slipped into the undercurrents of the Internet, swept away into obscurity, while some have barely managed to stay afloat. I hate seeing that, I really do.

These ideas have been simmering in my head for a while but I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to dedicate full articles to each topic with the breath of knowledge I’d like to give each of them. So instead, I’ll be going over different topics in bite-sized chunks, namely Kickstarters, branding, and having a critical eye.