[danschuller]

I am but I don't know how long it will continue!

My side project is: "How to Make an RPG" (http://howtomakeanrpg.com/) which I released in June.

It's a collection of code samples, art and digital book that shows the reader how to make an old-school, Japanese-style RPG. So, it's super niche! I wrote a little about my process here:

https://medium.com/@DanSchuller/my-first-side-project-part-1...

There was supposed to be a second part to this article but I haven't written it yet.

It's been over $1000/month very comfortably so far but it is trending down. This isn't uncommon for this type of project - there's often a spike followed by a slow decline.

Still, for the last three months I haven't actively worked on it and it's still sold well. I've moved country and been finding a job (all sorted now), so I haven't had much free time.

I'm not really sure where is good to go after this project. For now I'm building on the base the book introduces, just for fun.

[csallen]

Any interest in doing an interview for https://IndieHackers.com? I'd love to feature your story on the site! I spent many many hours as a kid trying to make my own RPGs, and IH could really use more indie game dev related stuff!

[pavel_lishin]

That's really cool. I wonder if you could make some money by doing actual in-person classes. It obviously wouldn't scale as well as a book you write once and release, but you might be able to charge a lot more for in-person education.

[danschuller]

This is a good idea, and then potentially classes can be recorded and that would be another product (or special tier). I think this applies equally to other similar products.

[AlexeyBrin]

You can try to record a course and sell it through Udemy or Pluralsight.

[et1337]

Very cool. Just curious, what was your marketing plan? How much time did you spend on marketing?

[danschuller]

I didn't have a detailed marketing plan. An early channel was this article I wrote for tutplus:

http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/articles/how-to-build-a-...

I wrote it before starting the book (to test the waters) and had a link to sign-up to the mailing list. I used mailchimp for email collection.

I have ~50 articles related to gamedev on the same domain, so these get organic SEO and backlinks:

http://howtomakeanrpg.com/a/

I quite enjoy writing them. The ones with a more technical bent get a lot more traffic than the others. 50% of my traffic is organic SEO. I haven't tried ads yet, but it's on my list.

More recently I commissioned some new art that I give away as a mailing list sign-up incentive. This hasn't worked very well so far :) I have to work on the messaging.

Tracking time spent is something I want to do but don't - each article at the very least takes a couple of hours. So there's 100+ hours, done in a very incremental way.

[dorfsmay]

Revenue is from people paying for access?

[danschuller]

Yes, it's a simple purchase and then the customer has access to all the content.

[umen]

This great stuff , few questions if I may , What payment getaway are you using?

How did you market your site

I have also gaming how to site that I plan to monotize but not sure how

Www.gamedevcraft.com

Any tips ?

[danschuller]

I'm using Gumtree for payment and distribution, it's worked very well for me.

As for marketing, I've just replied earlier in the thread with a little more detail.

For a site with tutorials on game development, most of your readers will be using adblocking software. Therefore most popular monetization methods are: selling a book, a course or locking off content behind a paywall.

Here's an example of premium content: http://aigamedev.com/premium/interview/dying-light/

Here's an example where the author sells the source code for his articles http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/

This blog is about all sorts of tech stuff but he sells his book "Game Programming Patterns" (which is very good!) in the side bar. http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/

[vram22]

Gumtree seems to be only for UK and AU, is that right? (from a quick Google for the name).

Congrats on your work.

[danschuller]

Sorry Gumroad, I often get those mixed up :)

[MikeTV]

I wonder if there's enough interest to run a webinar on the topic? Or offer a higher tier that gives access to one-on-one with you if they get stuck during the course?

[meir_yanovich]

Can you please comment on those questions ?

Why you didn't go with eBooks publishers ?

Also how long it take you to write the book ?

In the payments can you tell how much percentage are using payapl ?

Thanks!

[dylanhassinger]

sales might pick back up if u wrote the 2nd part to the article