Publishing lessons

I love helping people and with the board gaming hobby giving me so much over the last 5 years, it is important to me that I’m giving back. For many years I did this through private mentorships and it was great to help people, but I could only talk to so many in a week.

At the end of 2021 I decided to start this blog with the aim of reducing my one-on-one mentorships and switching to a more one-to-many approach. Whenever I receive emails with questions, I now try to respond by writing a blog post (when appropriate) and the results have been fantastic.

This is my 100^th publishing lesson and before I look back at my own learnings, I want to take a minute to thank you for reading, sharing, and being a part of this journey.

Most popular articles

The most popular articles on the blog this year have been:

• 10. Creating the perfect Kickstarter page: My wireframe (April)
• 9. How to price your game (March)
• 8. 5 years as a publisher – The full report with revenue, sales, and statistics (April)
• 7. How much does it cost to ship a Kickstarter? (April)
• 6. How to translate a game (December 2021)
• 5. A beginner’s guide to VAT (May)
• 4. A list of Facebook groups to join (March)
• 3. How many followers do you need to fund a Kickstarter? (May)
• 2. When to launch and end a Kickstarter (April)
• 1. Board game manufacturers – How to choose one? (January)

It is worth noting most of these articles were written earlier in the year which isn’t surprising as they have had a longer amount of time to be discovered. I’m very pleased by this as it shows articles are being found and read constantly, and not just during the week the article is posted.

Lessons learned

I’ve learned a lot of things from writing this blog and would like to highlight 5 key lessons:

Titles

Looking over the most popular and least popular articles it has become obvious the title of an article is incredibly important. Questions and guides such as “A beginner’s guide to VAT” tend to be much more popular than more generic titles such as “A million dollar idea”. This doesn’t surprise me, but I do need to keep this in mind for future articles.

Posting frequency

I’ve tried to write 2 articles a week and for the most part succeeded, in 2022 I missed 7 out of the 104 dates which I wanted to post on. Typically, I write articles in advance and have content planned out so what went wrong?

In May I went to the UK Games Expo and had content planned to cover the week but ended up getting very ill and it took several weeks to recover. I hadn’t planned enough content to cover this unexpected time off.

In October I went to Essen and upon returning launched a Kickstarter. I had articles pre-written to cover much of this period, only writing a few during the Kickstarter, but I then travelled again for another week immediately after the Kickstarter finished. I couldn’t pre-write 6 weeks of articles and had hoped I would manage to write more while travelling but it ended up not being possible.

The important lesson here is it doesn’t matter.

As the time I was frustrated as I want to write 2 articles a week and I try very hard to make that happen, but sometimes other things have to take priority and I think that’s OK. Let’s see what happens in 2023.

Writing

I’m not a great writer, I never have been and probably never will be. Part of my reasoning for starting a written blog was to encourage me to write more and get better. It’s going to take a lot more than 100 articles but I’m proud of what I’ve achieved so far and hope I will continue improving next year.

Comments

Getting comments is hard!

This probably doesn’t surprise anyone as far more people read/watch content than comment on it, but I hope to continue to see improvements on this side of things in the future. The most popular article (for commenting) has been Board game manufacturers – How to choose one? which currently has over 20 comments.

With that said, I am happy with the amount of comments I have received this year as there have been many more than I first expected.

Rewarding

Writing blogs takes time but it has been incredibly rewarding, I’ve received emails from countless people this year thanking me for the advice I have given. Each and everyone of these emails puts a smile on my face and I am very glad to know I’m playing a small part in helping others achieve their dreams.

Everyone has to start somewhere, I learned everything I know about this industry from the internet and by giving things a try. If I can be the starting point for someone else, then that is a wonderful thing and I wish you all the best with your journeys.

Next year

In 2023 I intend to continue writing articles and I hope I will manage to write 2 a week, if you have any topics you would like covered always feel free to let me know.

Now there are so many articles on here I intend to spend some time in January restructuring the sites navigation and discoverability. I want redesign the crowdfunding, new publisher, and growing as a publisher pages and add more categories.

I also hope to see a continued growth in both viewership and comments and will be doing what I can to write interesting and helpful lessons to facilitate this.

Happy New Year and I’ll see you in 2023 with another 100 articles!