Hey, folks, another member of the team here. I've recently joined them to help them out with crowdfunding and spreading the word about COLUMNAE. About three weeks ago, we released our trailer and started reaching out to press for the first time. Here's a little post-mortem on how it went for us. If you're in a hurry and don't have much time to read, just gloss over the bolded parts for a few tips.
Releasing the teaser and reaching out to press for the first time
The prepThere are a few decent guides for contacting the press out there. The two most useful ones I've found are
A Guide To Launching Indie Games and
Pixel Prospector's How To Contact Press. If you've never contacted the press before, these guides are a great starting point, as they cover most of the important stuff you need to know.
One of those important takeaways is that you should contact all outlets in the same day and preferably at the same time. I figured it'd be best to send emails to everyone in the morning at their local time, so we sent those emails in two batches: one batch for European editors and the other for American ones. To make things easier for me, I wrote the emails in advance and then set up
Boomerang with GMail, so I could schedule the emails and not worry about waking up and writing them on time.
I wrote a few different emails and subject lines to see if any of them will have better traction. Since there aren't many press email examples online, I'm willing to share ours. Just send me a PM and I'll send it to you.
ShowtimeWe released the trailer on Wednesday, September 9th, and reached out to the press on the same day. We were very lucky and only a few hours later
Rock, Paper, Shotgun wrote about COLUMNAE. We also got covered by
3D Juegos, which is, I belive, the largest gaming portal in Spanish language. In the following week, the news trickled down to several other regional outlets and we also managed to reach most of the adventure gaming sites.
Our trailer received over 3,000 views so far and about 50% of viewers watched the whole video. Our trailer starts slow and we have an above average drop in viewership in the first five seconds, but I do not think this is problem - point and click adventures are games for the patient.
On the social network side of the campaign, we managed to reach over 4,000 people on Facebook in the first week and a little shy of that on Twitter on the first day. Considering we only had around 400 likes and around 100 followers, I’d say this was a pretty decent outreach.
What went wrong?Despite being featured on RPS and the relatively high reach on social networks,
our engagement was low - we got only 37 page likes in the first week and 16 followers on Twitter. This might mean we need a real gameplay video, not just a teaser to attract more attention.
We released a trailer without any links to our website or social media profiles in the video. Sure, we had clickable links in our description on Youtube, but the video was mostly watched embedded on other pages. Some of the outlets also rehosted the video without our description. This is probably one of the causes for low engagement.
It also looks like
people aren't visiting our social profiles from our website. Now, our website isn't the best and our social links aren't very obvious - there's only text, no social icons. Some people probably don’t even bother looking for these if they can't spot them easily.
Closing thoughtsMost of the writers wrote about our game in their own words, quoting only tidbits from our presskit or the email I sent them. Since you already have a game description in your presskit, I'm thinking,
maybe you don't need to write much about the game in the announcement email. Just write what's news and maybe just the bare basics to get the editors interested. This way the email becomes shorter and probably more attractive to read. And if you get the attention of an editor then, they'll check out the full presskit, too. If there's a journalist reading this, maybe they can tell us what they think about this.
One of the guides above will tell you to wait 24-48 hours before sending a follow up, but I think that's too little time. Some of the outlets we got in touch with took a week or more to post an article. I'd say wait at least 10 days, before trying to get in touch with the outlets who still didn't write about you.
Hopefully, this writeup will be of use to some of you.
We are now working on a gameplay demo and are planning to fix these mistakes we've made now: we're going to improve our website and make sure the next trailer has all the proper links.
Cheers!
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