Inkwell Ideas 2015 Year in Review!

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Well, as we’ve done the past couple of years, here is our year end wrap up.  This gives you the scoop on everything we’re doing and some explanations as well as an idea of things behind the scenes.
I think I’ll go in order for the year (or jump past this for the future plans):

January

We got involved with Mythoard.  We had a good experience and sold some of our dice and I’d be open to doing it again.  Unfortunately I have no idea how well it drove future sales.

We also made “Adventure Hooks” a free mini-game to help brainstorm ways to start a campaign.

February

We made a Coin Creator PDF.  It has a free and paid versions.  It didn’t sell very well, but perhaps as part of a product line (see below) it would be better.

A very popular post was making a world map using a dice drop map.

March

We launched our new RPG Card Decks Kickstarter.  It made its goal in April, and products were sent in May and August, as they were ready.  The cards really turned out well, and we’ve gotten great reviews. We’re working up another one… (see “What we’re working on next” below.) You can get them in our store.

April

We continued promoting The RPG Card Decks Kickstarter.

We began our Geomorph Map Contests.  I wish I could say they lifted the sales of our DungeonMorph Dice and Cards, but I didn’t see sales increase.  But the contests we fun and had a lot of great designs.  The contest went on hiatus during the late summer and came back in early fall.

We published a great article on magic candles for Pathfinder.

We started using DriveThru/RPGNow’s deal of the day.  It really does help.  If you have the publisher points to use, do it.  The secret trick (for all my co-publishers) is to highlight one item of a product line through that and then at the beginning of that product’s description for that day to mention/link to the other products in the line and put them on sale as well.

May

We started making native Windows builds of our three most popular software products.  I’m still behind on native Mac versions.  Hopefully soon.

June

The geomorph map contests continued, but otherwise we were focused on getting out RPG Card Decks and DungeonMorph Dice & Cards Kickstarters complete.  And wow was that a feat!

July

We received two ENnie nominations for our latest Creature Deck and our revised DungeonMorph Dice Explorer set.  I believe that gave us 6 nominations/honorable mentions in 6 years!

August

GenCon:  Financially we came out a little bit ahead.  For anyone who isn’t a publisher, you should know a bit of what it takes to do a big convention like GenCon: GenCon almost has to be looked at as partly a marketing expense because a small publisher is often not going to come out ahead..  Our booth was almost $4000 (it is a double with one side as a corner, because we sort of have two different product lines.)  Then hotels for the duration of the convention are almost $1000 each (and we had two), then add travel and food and one can see that the cost really adds up.  And that’s if you already have your furniture, demo displays, etc.  If you’re starting out you can do it for $1000 for an Entrepreneur’s booth (if the fee hasn’t gone up), $500 for hotel if you don’t mind driving each day from the non-walking distance hotels, plus travel, plus cost of fixtures and cost of product… but even that will add up to $2000 minimum, if no one has to fly and not including the cost of product.

We had our new DungoenMorph Dice and Cards for sale at GenCon.  After the con we began selling them on our store.

September

This was one piece of big news.  My job role at my day job was going to change, and it hadn’t been a good fit already… so in September I started working on Inkwell Ideas full time!  We’ll see how that goes, but for now we’re breaking even, despite paying myself a regular salary.

We began our Patreon efforts!  Each month we’ve released a pack of 15+ icons for each of our four main software programs. (60+ icons each month.)

October

We (Keith Curtis & Joe Wetzel) had a fun podcast interview on Fear the Boot.

We released Modular Battlemats: Inn, a way to create thousands of different Inn maps.

There was a good video tutorial on creating fantasy sandboxes which used Hexographer.

November

We released Icons Assembler, a program to create character for icons and manage the game.

We began releasing our “5e Fiendopedia“s.  Each details 5e stats for five or six creatures which generally don’t have official stats yet for the latest version of the most popular fantasy RPG.

We released Infinite Tomes, a 6 page pdf for creating book titles.

December:

We (thanks to Keith Curtis!) released a set of Western city map icons.

I was really happy with this… and it didn’t get the attention it deserved: a 3.5 to 5e spell chart. It is very helpful to anyone converting creatures or characters to 5e from 3.5 or any older edition of D&D.

What Can We Do Better?

  • Try harder to get our dice and cards in stores.  Indie Press Revolution and Golden Distribution carry our products now, but we definitely could be doing more.  (In the off chance you work/own a store or distributor, email us at joe at inkwellideas dot com.)
  • Support.  I’m better over the last few months at answering support emails, but I still don’t check the Inkwell Ideas forum as often as I should.  I’m going to add a daily alarm to remind me.
  • Cons.  We only exhibit at GenCon currently.  I hope to improve this, especially semi-locally.  Anyone know of any good cons withing say two states of Virginia for RPGs?  (Have a number of RPG companies at them.)  I think I’d prefer cons that are more laid back than GenCon, maybe 1000 people or less.
  • Work with others more! If you’re publishing something and see something we could do together, drop me a note at joe at inkwellideas dot com.

What Are We Working On Next?

  • Hexographer 2 is the big one. Work started last year, mostly in the last quarter, but it kept stopping and restarting as other things caught my attention.  Recognizing that, now I’ll be working on it at least a couple hours every day until I have something demo-able.  It has some big new features that people have wanted for a while that are possible with a fresh approach.
  • 5e Fiendopedias. This is one of the things that took me away from Hexographer 2.  But they are useful and sell pretty well.  We will continue them, but probably not at the same pace.
  • Infinite _____. Our Infinite Tomes product sold well.  (A number of charts for generating 1000s of book titles and descriptions.) And in the past year we did release a few other products that could be revised a bit and fill in a related product line. (Such as the infinite Tomes and Modular Battlemats above.)  Of course, other new product ideas abound as well.
  • Revised free version of the coat of arms design studio.  This won’t require Java–it will just be a web page you go to. An early version is already linked in the navigation bar of the Coat of Arms Design Studio website.
  • Patreon icon sets.  To be honest the Patreon campaign hasn’t done as well as I liked, but we’ve begun selling the sets after the fact on RPGNow and that helps and we have some ideas using them for the future, so we’ll continue to try this effort.
  • Creature, Encounter, NPC Decks. We do have a lot planned here as well. More NPCs and Encounter decks are well underway. Creatures we may get back to but the high cost of art makes them more difficult.
  • As mentioned above, making Inkwell Ideas a full-time effort for me makes all of these possible, but keeping it that way requires us to make good & useful tools/products, help from all the people we work with, and your support of the results.

So that’s a pretty long summation and look ahead, but it gives you a very good idea of things behind the scenes here at Inkwell Ideas.

Thank you for your support and Happy New Year!