Launching Your Kickstarter: Part One

Launching Your Kickstarter: Part One

I am currently in the middle of delivering our successful Kickstarter project: The Painted Wastelands. As a teacher, I always feel compelled to help other people. I’m not just talking about students. When I was a first-year teacher, fresh out of college, I was fortunate to have an amazing mentor. The art teacher (Jeff LaRosa) took me under his wing. No one asked him to do it. I wasn’t assigned to him. He just knew what he was doing, and I knew that I should learn from him. That mentorship made me a much better educator and is probably the primary reason I have the skills and grit needed to still be in education 12 years later.

This will be a series of articles (maybe a future book!) about how to turn your RPG ideas into something bigger.

Part One: On Writing

Everyone has a story to tell. I spent years filling out notebooks with passionate ideas for campaign settings and adventures. I was drawing maps, creating new races, and drawing monsters. I always wanted to do something with them, but I didn’t. I would tell my friends and wife all about them. But I wasn’t putting real words on to paper.

“Nobody in the history of the world ever got better at doing something by not doing it.” -John Leibee

My number one piece of advice to that person is that you should stop dreaming about writing and start writing. Just start. Now.

“What if it isn’t good?” you may ask.

“Who gives a shit? Just do it.” I say.

I might suggest starting small, something like an article. The DM’s Guild is a great space and that’s where I cut my teeth and got my start self-publishing. No one was going to hire me to write for them, so I hired myself. I wrote a series of 15-page PDFs, some of them were new classes, others were adventure ideas. I saw it as my version of the old Dragon Magazine articles I never got to write. I was such a huge fan of Dragon and Dungeon Magazine, I dreamed of submitting an article to them, then they closed. Some of those PDFs did well, others did not do so well. That’s fine. It was really just about the experience and sometimes I made some extra money that I could use to fund my Warhammer purchases, I call them my Dungeon Dollars.

Alternatively, you may decide to produce a zine. A small, homemade, saddle stitched booklet no more than 64 pages long. Zines are popular among the OSR crowd and a good way to publish your own writing. I’ll talk more about Zine production, in the future.

What I learned from the experience is that you need to write a little bit every day.

No More Zero Days

You have set a new goal for yourself; you’re going to write a book! You sit down at your computer and smash out 2,000 words over the course of several hours. Hell yea! Then the second day, you sit down and write 1,000 words. Then the third day, you’re just not feeling inspired or motivated. You write 0 words. Then the fourth day, you’re too busy. You write 0 words. By the fifth day your dream project is dead.

This happens to us all the time. Almost any long-term goal you think of falls down like this. Eating healthier, going to the gym more, or graduating college, you name it. We fail all the time because we lose motivation. Motivation is a fleeting sensation. Discipline is what you do when that motivation fades.

So here’s my challenge for you. When you begin writing your RPG book, set aside time every day to work on it. Just a little time. There will be days when you’re feeling very productive. There will be days when you have enough sleep, enough caffeine, or enough time in your life to dedicate to this project and get real work done. There will also be days when you don’t have enough of any of that to spend on this silly project. When you’re not feeling motivated or inspired, I want you to sit down and write one sentence.

Now, one sentence a day will not write your book. But one sentence is more than no sentences. Odds are, even if you’re just not feeling creative, if you can write one sentence, you can write 2 sentences. If you can write 2 sentences you can write a paragraph. Eventually, you may have written multiple paragraphs. THAT is how a book gets written. A little bit each day.

This “writing time” doesn’t have to be spent just on writing. You could also spend it researching or brainstorming. It just needs to be something that will move the ball forward.