For the past four years, I’ve released a serialised “advent calendar adventure” throughout December. This year’s was called The Witch of Drithwyn Weald. These adventures are released in daily instalments throughout December, with the price rising each day. The price on the first day starts somewhere around £3 and ends somewhere around £15 on Christmas Eve (or Christmas Day, this year). (My first experiment with this, Reivdene-Upon-The-Moss, started at £1, but I lost the majority of the money I made on the first day to payment processing fees. And, as we’ll see in a little while, most of the sales with this model come early in the process, which is by design. But I’m getting ahead of myself.) They’re purely focused on words, released as minimal layout PDF and epubs produced using Pandoc.

I didn’t intend for this to become a Thing that I do every year, but now that we’re four years into it I think it’s safe to say that it’s very much become a tradition. In a lot of ways it’s the highlight of my year. I look forward to it throughout the year, and I spend a lot of time thinking about what I could write and do differently this time. Every year I also tell myself that I’m going to keep good notes about sales and marketing efforts so that I can write a post-mortem when I’m done, but every year I forget to do that. That is, until this year.

So, what’s this post-mortem thing about? I want to look at the numbers, both to see how this year’s serial adventure compared to last year’s and also to try and quantify whether this project - which takes up a lot of mental energy throughout December - is “worth” doing financially. It’s definitely worth doing from the point of view of artistic fulfilment; it’s fun, it’s self-indulgent, it’s a nice way to end the year. But since this is my full time job I also have bills to pay, and working on this comes at the expense of working on other things. So, is it worth it? I’ll start off by looking at the numbers. Then I want to talk a little bit about running these projects in general - what I’ve learned from four years of doing this, what I’m going to take into future projects, how I approach the projects, etc.

2024 was a particularly hard one for me financially. People seem to be spending less on luxuries anyway (unsurprisingly), but that coincided with a year in which I wasn’t able to work very much due to ill health. Prior to The Witch of Drithwyn Weald I’ve only released one adventure this year, The Thing From The Swamp, whereas since 2020 I’ve pretty regularly put out 5 or 6 major releases each year. It’s an unfortunate reality of self-publishing role-playing games that most books have a short tail, and if you stop putting out work you stop making money. The compounding effect of Twitter dying as a reliable marketing platform hasn’t helped matters, either. So I went into The Witch of Drithwyn Weald feeling burned out and stressed, worrying about money, my position in the industry, and my ability to keep doing my job full time.

The Sales Numbers

Unlike in previous years I decided to do a “soft launch” of The Witch of Drithwyn Weald, making the itchio page live a couple of days before I released the teaser trailer but not directly linking to it anywhere. I knew that it would show up in the feeds of people who follow me on itch, and in general I was just curious to see whether people would buy it without me actively trying to sell it to them.

I soft launched on November 26th, making the Itch page live and posting a teaser image in a few places but not linking to the page. The adventure was priced at £3, with no downloads available. 33 people bought the adventure on that day and spent a total of £173, with an average transaction value of £5.24. Sales continued to come in over the few days that the soft launch period was live, generating another 30 sales worth £164. The average price people paid in this period stayed very consistent at £5.20 across the five days. Aside from the initial day when the game appeared in people’s feeds, the best sales day in this period came on Friday 29th November, which was Itch Creator Day - a promotional day in which Itch doesn’t take a percentage of sales from sellers. 15 people bought the adventure on that Friday, generating £91 of sales.

Unsurprisingly, the best day of sales for the whole adventure came on the first real day, December 1st. On that day I did a social media blitz. I reactivated my Twitter account to post there; I posted on Bluesky; I sent out a Substack newsletter; I posted on Facebook. On December 1st I sold 80 copies for £349.50 (ATV £4.37). On December 2nd, with the price rising to £3.50, I sold 38 copies for £157 (ATV £4.13). Another 23 sales came in over the next two days worth £117. Then sales dropped dramatically. They trickled in fairly steadily, with a couple of sales most days over the rest of the month, but nothing like that initial flood. Here’s a bar chart so you can visualise it.

You can see the very sharp drop-off in sales here. There are a couple of small bumps that were the direct result of marketing activity: the 7th of December was the day I released the accompanying soundtrack EP, which gave me an excuse to vary my marketing; December 12th was the day I sent a discount code to Kickstarter backers in an update. I had hoped to see more activity from that, but that Kickstarter is very overdue and hasn’t been a smooth process (more on that later) and open rates on updates at this stage are very low.

Over the course of the month that this adventure was updating I sold 239 copies for total earnings of £1,272.50. After I keep 20% back for National Insurance and tax, I’ve earned £1018 (minus platform fees and payment processing fees). Writing this project took up the bulk of my working activities in November and the first couple of weeks of December, and I was actively engaged in trying to market it all month. Had I worked a full time job at minimum wage instead, I would have earned around £1693 before tax.

Comparison to Previous Years

I didn’t keep detailed notes in previous years, though I’m able to download sales reports from Itch to see how things sold. The first advent calendar I released, Reivdene-Upon-The-Moss, is the best-selling of all of them, and has made £1,419.57 to date. I was using that as a sales target for this year’s advent calendar, hoping to match it, but I hadn’t actually looked into the figures from 2021 when that adventure was being released. It turns out that The Witch of Drithwyn Weald actually outperformed Reivdene in what I think of as its “live” period. Here are all the sales figures for the three previous adventures I’ve released under this model:

Reivdene-Upon-The-Moss (2021)

• First Day Sales: £560 (181 sales)

• “Live period” Sales: £969.20 (260 sales)

• Lifetime Sales: £1,419.57 (308 sales) |
  BLACKOUT (2022)

• First Day Sales: £500.47 (113 sales)

• “Live period” Sales: £807.47 (171 sales)

• Lifetime Sales: £822.47 (174 sales)

A Month of Misery (2023)

• First Day Sales: £322.34 (97 sales)
• “Live period” Sales: £670.34 (155 sales)
• Lifetime Sales: £763.34 (163 sales)

There could be a whole host of reasons why sales have steadily declined on these projects over the years. Reivdene was novel, and it landed with a splash at a time when Twitter was still very useful to me as a marketing tool. Engagement was still high there, and I think in 2021 people were spending a little recklessly anyway as we came out of COVID lockdowns. Reivdene was also a straight-up folk horror adventure, and that’s always fairly popular.

BLACKOUT was a hard sell. It was science fantasy written for A Dungeon Game at a time when that game was still very much in its infancy. Reivdene was statted for B/X, Mörk Borg, and Troika. BLACKOUT was statted for a game nobody was playing that wasn’t fully complete, in a genre that I’m not particularly known for. I enjoyed it and I think it has a lot of cool stuff in it, but there’s a real gulf between the response it got and the response Reivdene got that’s visible in the sales figures. I remember being very deflated while writing it, feeling like it had failed, and that probably accounts at least a little bit for why I missed a couple of days of updates on it and had to scramble to catch up during December.

The fact that A Month of Misery did even worse than BLACKOUT continues to surprise me, given that I’m somewhat known for producing Mörk Borg adventures and this one was specifically Mörk Borg. Unlike the previous two years (and this year) I did “real” layout for this one and produced a lot of illustrations. I put much more work into A Month of Misery than any of the other releases, and its failure to find an audience still stings. It’s possible that the pitch just wasn’t good. This is a weird, experimental thing - a large portion of it is presented as fiction rather than classic “adventure content”, the recovered manuscript of a monk on the run from the Church. I was playing around with footnotes and strange typography, and I asked a lot of the reader if they wanted to use this thing in their games. I had fun making it, but perhaps it was just a little too strange.

Given the trend of declining sales on these things, combined with my generally bad year, I was expecting The Witch of Drithwyn Weald to flop. The fact that it didn’t is very reassuring.

Marketing Efforts

In past years I haven’t really made any effort to market these advent calendars. I’ve thrown them up on itch, tweeted about them a bit, and otherwise just enjoyed working on them. This year I tried to be a little more proactive about seeking an audience, though I’m not sure I can say that those efforts were worthwhile. I sent press releases out to a number of outlets but didn’t receive any coverage (likely because I left it too late). I uploaded the press release to Rascal‘s announcements portal and it went live the same day, but I received no traffic from it. I was told that a link would be included in Rowan Rook & Decard’s Christmas gift guides email, and while I’m very grateful for this (it wasn’t something I asked for or expected, I just have very generous friends) I don’t actually know if the email went out of if The Witch of Drithwyn Weald ended up being included. If it was, it unfortunately generated no traffic or sales.

The biggest disappointment in marketing was very much an issue of my own making, a product of the difficult couple of years I’ve had coming back to bite me. Partway through the month I posted an update to the Kickstarter for Down In Yongardy about progress on that book, and ended with a 50% discount code for this adventure. That Kickstarter has 700+ backers, and I hope that I’d get traffic from maybe 5% of them. Instead that code only generated 3 sales. That campaign is very overdue (though, thankfully, very close to being fulfilled now) and unfortunately my mismanaging of it means I’ve burned through any goodwill that section of my audience once had, to the extent that the majority of them likely aren’t part of my audience at all anymore. It’s a shame, because reputational damage like that is very hard to recover from, but I have nobody to blame for it but myself.

Given what a wet squib the marketing has been, I’m actually very pleased with how well this project has performed. I wonder if it’s in part because it’s a return to familiar, safe territory. I’ve done plenty of horror - and specifically folk horror - through my career, and I’m somewhat known for it, so it’s a much easier pitch than “weird science fantasy” or “experimental Mörk Borg metafiction”. A Dungeon Game is also much more established now than it was in 2022, too, and the system is much more robust.

Lessons etc.

A big project I’m hoping to start tackling later this year is The Fractured Nations, a massive hex crawl campaign for A Dungeon Game very much inspired by Luke Gearing’s Wolves Upon The Coast. In a lot of ways, The Witch of Drithwyn Weald was a trial run for that project. Unlike Reivdene or BLACKOUT, Drithwyn Weald is very much a sandbox with no real “plot” or “story”. I didn’t provide adventure hooks or rumours, and I resisted the urge to explain many of the things that are in the setting. They’re just there, waiting to be encountered, and whatever meaning they have will (hopefully) emerge through play. This is particularly true of the nature of the titular Witch, whose presence is felt in small ways, and the explanations for her existence in the forest are vague and often contradictory.

In particular I wanted to test out the tools I’m going to use to write The Fractured Nations and the tools for dungeon stocking and design that already exist in A Dungeon Game. The procedure I used to populate the hexes in this project is based on Luke’s procedure from Wolves, and is the same as the one I’ll use for The Fractured Nations. Initially I was a little disappointed that it only gave me two dungeons for this setting, because I really like dungeons (though when I fell behind on writing Drithwyn Weald and had to scramble to get it finished before my self-imposed deadline early in December, I wasn’t particularly upset that I didn’t need to write more of them). Thinking about it, though, 2 dungeons out of 25 hexes means that 8% of hexes contain a dungeon. The Fractured Nations will have 1230+ keyed hexes. At 8%, that means nearly 100 dungeons in the entire thing. Suddenly that doesn’t feel like “not enough”.

In terms of lessons for future advent calendars, one thing I’m curious about is how customers feel about the length of each daily update. I’m very prone to scope creep, and I often look at something I’m about to put out and think “this isn’t enough”. I love a concise hex fill, and there were some days where I told myself that putting out a file that only contains 50 words of text wasn’t enough and that I needed to write something else to go with it. (This is why Reivdene‘s hex fills look the way they do, with lists of Sights and Sounds, because I wasn’t confident about releasing small entries). There’s a part of my brain, though - the rational part, I think - that tells me that because the price goes up each day, I’ve essentially valued each daily entry at £0.50. And when I look at it through that lens, I think that maybe I’ve actually been overthinking it and that it’s perfectly fine to release a 50 word hex fill for a day and call it good. A proper chocolate advent calendar only gives you a thumbnail-size piece of chocolate each day, after all.

So this is something I’d like to hear from you about. Take this entry from Day 4, for example:

In a small clearing, a ring of five upright stones weathered by time. Each is marked by carvings, the lines deep but smooth, skeletal trees with roots that extend down into spiralling, abstract shapes.

They are warm all year round, always untouched by frost or snow. Standing within the circle brings the sensation of being watched.

Because this was short, I also bundled it with an encounter table for the forest to make the daily release file look more substantial. If you’d just received this and nothing else, how would you have felt about that? Please do let me know.

The biggest lesson I’ve taken from this, especially in the light of the failed attempt to convert Kickstarter backers into repeat customers, is that I’m very grateful to the audience that I have. Putting out a book and asking you to buy it is one thing. Asking you to trust me not to miss and update for the best part of a month, and to provide daily updates that are both fun to read on their own and add up to something greater than the sum of its parts, is quite another. The fact that 240 of you said, “yes, actually, we trust you to do that” is very gratifying on a personal level. And it gives me hope that my ongoing aim to convince people that you don’t actually need visually impressive art and layout in an RPG book - as nice as they are to have - isn’t completely in vain. When it comes down to it, all I want to do is write. I enjoy Making Books and all the additional skills that calls for, and I’m proud of myself for having learned to do them to an okay standard, but words are where my heart is. The fact so many of you keep coming back for Just Words means a lot to me.

Thank you for supporting The Witch of Drithwyn Weald, and thank you for reading this post-mortem, which is much longer than I intended it to be. I’ll be releasing a collated version of all the hex fills and appendices in one file later this week, and that will be the last update for this project. If you’re interested in The Fractured Nations then please do come along and sign up for my Patreon where I’ll be sharing updates as I begin work on that. And if you’re not interested in that, then hopefully I’ll see you again next December for the 2025 advent calendar!

All the best,

Chris