New Year's Resolution: Promoting the NPA

[Michael S. Miller]

Last year at this time, many of us anxiously awaited being published in the NoPress Anthology. It was going to be this great, new, groundbreaking thing to shake things up. There had never before been an anthology of complete, short-form RPGs. It was going to rock!

Well, it's a year later and the NPA been published and, as an anthology, it does indeed rock! But what about its presence in the marketplace? There's been a bit of buzz from industry luminaries like Greg Costikyan, Robin Laws & Ken Hite, but I haven't seen actual play reports, or much discussion of the games within.

I myself have held back a bit because Luke was having problems getting the thing printed and stocked at Key20. Those should be taken care of real soon, right, Luke? How have sales been? Am I concerned over nothing?

In anycase, I think that we as contributors should be doing more to promote the NPA. I'll be running Discernment and the Agency at the Indie RPG Explosion in New Brunswick, NJ at the end of January. We should mention NPA games (our own and others) in forum posts we make. We should run these games and post about them, and then ask Matt to add a link to the posts to the NPA page. There was talk of having an NPA forum on the Forge. Will that happen?

In short, we should all do what we can to get the word out and let the gaming world know how much coolness awaits them in the NoPress Anthology. Please post any ideas you may have of how to do that.

[Jeph]

I, personally, just sold a few copies to a local game store (Foundation's Edge in Raleigh; the manager seemed willing as he'd had good experiences with Rafiel's game Dread before, and was thus grooving the indie thang). Two more were on the list for today (Games Galore and Fallen Orc), but the managers were out for New Year's Day; I'll be trying them again next week. And the other 2 or 3 gamestores in the area.

If things go well, I'll need to get a few more from Luke...
--Jeff

[Luke]

sales for the NPA have been steady, and considering we do no promotion, better than expected. Alliance has put in two substantial orders for the book.

At this point, including the extra copies that Jeph and Lxndr have, we've sold out of 200 books. (So sell those copies, guys, make it official!)

I'm in the process of getting another print run completed. Personally, I'd just like to take it to traditional press at this point. This reordering POD runs is headachey for me. Unfortunately, because I'm about to go to press on BW Revised, I can't front the money. So it'll probably be POD for a while.

-L

[Matt Machell]

Michael, you're right we do need a bit more promoting.  

One thing I think we need is some more taster freebies (to use as appropriate attention grabbers), and to that end I'm putting together a sample scenario for The Agency.

-Matt

[xiombarg]

I have people chomping at the bit to buy some copies, as soon as I can scratch up the cash to buy some at author's cost to sell...