Threadbare is LIVE! (And some behind-the-scenes marketing talk)

As of last Wednesday, Threadbare is LIVE on Kickstarter!

If you don’t know, Threadbare is my role-playing game about broken toys in a broken world. It has a stitchpunk/maker aesthetic, but focuses on creating and building, rather than tearing things apart.

I’ve written about it quite a bit here in the blog, and I’m very excited that the game is finally live and funding.

But let me chat a little bit about one of the things I’ve done to promote my Kickstarter. Aside from telling everyone I know, and being a little shameless about podcasts and interviews, of course.

As you might or might not know, many years ago, I wrote a fantasy world-building guide, and then later I wrote a 30-day guide for world-building. For several years, I’ve had an “ad box” on those pages, quietly drawing revenue from Project Wonderful, which is an ad-share service largely focused on the webcomic and geek markets. It doesn’t do popups, and  I used it to promote Handknit Heroes a bit, but found that it was just a nice trickle of revenue that I left in my Project Wonderful account. Over the years, that has accumulated to a small sum in my account, money which I didn’t have to actually put into the account.

On Sunday, I posted an ad for Threadbare on the site and started spending what’s in my account. I’ve already had one sale due to the ads, which have been shown over 130,000 times (click through rate isn’t great, though). I was able to target them somewhat towards games/gaming, crafting, and writing sites. Most importantly, though, this didn’t cost me anything right now, when I’m trying to promote this Kickstarter without breaking the bank.