Well, 2020 was a disaster, and I followed that up by declaring I’d do game publishing exclusively in 2021, which I did in lieu of any sort of looking for a replacement Day Job. I also had a very long list of bullet-points that I wanted to try and do. So let’s start with the big one, and then get to the nitty gritty.

The short version? Gaming Ballistic…

• …was profitable
• …met but did not exceed income goals for the year
• …delivered great product on time
• …was disciplined and effective in managing resources
• …needs to grow more, both in terms of within-segment customer count as well as number of segments served
• …will continue to be the primary occupation for me in 2022

Details to follow. Many details.

Financial Performance in 2021

I had two pillars of financial success in 2021, and they are no surprise: profitability and growth. Hey, that sounds like stars and dogs!

Growth: Not really, no. I ended on a high note with the Bestiary, but while it did represent a 10% increase in my audience over the prior record campaign, it was not a break-out in terms of market reach. Overall, my projects ranged from the best-ever 685 customers for the Bestiary to a fourth-worst 322 for Tower of the Moon. More on that later; it was not the failure it sounds. In order to really replace Day  Job, I need to grow my audience to something like 1,200 to 1,800 backers on the regular in three to four market segments (so I don’t repeatedly dip into the same wallets) in order to do that. It’s not impossible, but it’s a huge milestone, and one that is going to require serious effort.

Revenue: Record year. I had thought I’d doubled my revenue in 2021, but there was a classification error (listing an in-and-out transfer as expense/revenue instead of just a pass-through). No matter how one slices it, though, my prior best-ever revenue year was 2019 at something like $115,000 and my revenue for 2021 was at least $165,000. I say “at least” because a whole bunch of GB’s revenue comes in through PayPal…and then goes right OUT through PayPal. So both revenue and expenses will increase on the final tally, but at a minimum Gaming Ballistic increased revenue over 2019’s prior record by 45% or so, and more than tripled relative to 2020.

Profitability: In a word, yes. I had to finish up More Perilous Journeys, which started out the year on a negative because that was all fulfillment cost and not much revenue. But I ran four successful projects in 2021, and several of them were among my best-ever in terms of total revenue from both Kickstarter and Backerkit. The key takeaway here is that I had some great projects that were also very profitable. I was good about expenses, disciplined about production, and had a 33% profit margin. I achieved between 91 and 99% of a non-trivial income goal this year. It still didn’t make a comfortable replacement for Day Job in Tech, but seriously: the RPG industry isn’t going to do that without achieving the growth milestones above.

Net/Net: This was the big thing. Not only did I come pretty close to hitting the income goal outright, my life situation changed to make the “required” amount less, so I can chalk up 2021 as a success, though I do think that growth is required for sustained success. The key bit for my customer base is that it was good enough, though it was a close-run thing, for the end of the conversation between my wife and I to be “yes, GB will continue to be my primary job in 2022 … but I will also drop a resume in the pile here and there, because while 2021 was good, not hitting the growth goal is a real issue.

2021 Goals and Attainment

I laid out my 2021 goals in this post, delayed to the end of January that month. Let’s bring them together and summarize, since there were a lot of bullet points in that post.

What went well?

• Run GB as my sole income in 2021. Yes, did that. As per financial performance, it worked out OK, but not awesome.
• Establish a Patreon and target 200-250 patrons. Yes to establish, no to 200+ patrons. I am flirting with 60, though, which maybe isn’t so bad. In fairness to myself and my Patreon subscribers, I don’t know that I really had a sufficient flow of interesting and Patreon-specific content to drive the sort of “I really need to jump on this” pull that 200 subscribers might require.
• Complete More Perilous Journeys: Yes. This was a painful project in some ways, and I learned valuable lessons here. It did make money handily and was the revenue bright spot in 2020 … but it took a lot of my own time to get right and that hit hard. Even so, it paved the way for a few things in 2021 that shall benefit.
• Launch a new TFT Project, maybe two, in 2021: Met target and launched two projects.
  • Character Collections launched, and did well. It was a very complicated Kickstarter, and it raised almost as much money in Backerkit as it did in Kickstarter: Over $22K in Backerkit (includes shipping) vs just shy of $29K in Kickstarter. So that was a $50K project. Prior to that, Four Perilous Journeys hit that mark, and the Bestiary crushed it.
  • Side note: Character Collections hit big mostly because of cards and counters. When I announced them, the project went bonkers. Almost did as much that day as on launch day, and we DID do as well as launch day on the last day of the campaign.
  • Tower of the Moon was a great little adventure by David Pulver, with cartography by Thomas Denmark and illustrated in black and white by Billy Blue. It was only 16 pages long, so it was never going to be a blow-out, but it did what it needed to do and was profitable. It also completely bypassed Kickstarter, which may have been responsible for its somewhat lacking backer count (322).
  • Lesson learned here: I cannot bypass Kickstarter as yet, because Backerkit plus Mailchimp/Constant Contact is no substitute for the networking effects of the Kickstarter platform.
• Card and Counter Supply Chain: I nailed the cards, though the perceived need to CE Mark both cards and counters by my 2021 shipping partner for EU delivery cost me much angst and profitability there. The CE Marking process in both the USA and China was excruciating. Counters are, and continue to be, problematic. One of the reasons I need bigger backer counts is to make counter-printing in Poland or a few other places affordable. I’m just not at the minimum order quantity for those.
• Publish the Bestiary by the end of the year: Almost. I ran the Kickstarter, which will probably account for fully 1/3 of 2021’s revenue, and pulled a lot of the expenses into 2021. I still have printing and fulfillment expenses to send out in 2022, but am looking good on timing there. I promised June, and I suspect I’ll deliver well before that (PDFs are likely in Feb in final form, and sooner in preview).
• Figure out better International Logistics: This was nearly a “no,” but one of my last acts in 2021 was to partner with ShipQuest/UK for international delivery. They invested a lot of effort and cash in being a VAT agent for the EU and UK, which makes a LOT of things smoother for international shipping. Not smooth. Smoother.

What didn’t work out so well?

• Increase Typical Backer Count to 1,000-1,500: This just didn’t happen, and the prospects for it proved elusive enough that I’m not sure I can count on it unless something radical changes. The two projects I thought really might do it – Delvers to Grow and especially the Bestiary – didn’t even threaten the 1,000-backer goal. It’s hard to overstate what that would do for me, but it starts to look like “no regrets at all for leaving tech/engineering behind.”
• Advance the ball significantly on Mission X: This was somewhat an after-effect of the growth goal (backer count) not being delivered. Mission X is a big project that will require a lot of up-front work (and therefore cost), so it got shoved aside to make room for the Bestiary.
• Convert DFRPG to Dragon Heresy and Bring more pre-written Dragon Heresy to market: Pushed to 2022.
• Increase blogging: Total fail. Probably went backwards. Some of this was lack of gaming; I dropped out of some ongoing games and didn’t start any of my own. A lot of it was a general attitude malaise in the end of the year due to 2021 being a rough year in general, but also a few other personal things. A lot of 2021 just wasn’t fun, and writing about not-fun things is also not-fun.
• Lose 30 lbs and get back to more regular exercise: Started OK and lost a bunch, then gained it all back in the last three to six months. See above with respect to “malaise.” Stopped going to Viking Martial Arts training for a few months as part of that.
• Increase my Stable of Working Authors: Sort of. I got a book from Peter Dell’Orto and Marshall LaPira (Crypt of Krysuvik) that is a great little adventure, and Marshall continues to write for me. But otherwise, this didn’t really happen. Some of that was receiving some submissions that didn’t work out, some of it was more strategic, some financial.
• Be more bold about marketing/getting the word out: A mixed bag, in that I felt my efforts to drum up “followers” for the Bestiary were successful. Follow-on efforts to double-down on the success did not initially work, but then a combo of a few things (a post on the Girl Genius RPG Kickstarter, and a change of tone/presentation in my own marketing efforts) blew up in a good way on the Bestiary. I engaged a marketing company, who did not help me increase the “take” on Tower of the Moon or Delvers to Grow, but did grow my Facebook and Twitter audience to 1,780 page follows on my GB facebook group and over 1,000 Twitter followers. Followers are not sales. Nor are they customers. But it’s a start, and re-shared and likes have better reach than they did.
  • My Ballistic’s Report, published usually either weekly or every other week, has gotten me some attention. It’s also a good discipline to keep up, and SJGames likes it as well; it keeps them informed of where my head, my money, and my development efforts are at. They appreciate it.
  • Reddit. I started to engage harder on the r/rpg and r/gurps reddit boards. With 1.3 million and nearly 9,000 subscribers, respectively, it’s an important outreach method that is under-used.
• Better Finance Tracking on an Ongoing Basis: Meh. I was doing better but then I wasn’t.
• Distribution. Really a waste of time at my sales volume.

Things in 2021 that were not goals when the year started.

• I increased my stable of artists. A few new ones who worked out quite well, and a few others who didn’t. But I’m chalking this up as a win.
• More Sales on DriveThruRPG. This actually went pretty OK. Not a ton: 266 items for a bit under $1,400 in income
• Starting to make some retailer inroads. Not a ton, and not enough, but it doesn’t take many of these to make a huge difference. I need to prioritize this in 2022 a lot more.
• My ECommerce Platform Sucks. This was always the case, but it became blindingly obvious this year. I moved over to BlueHost, which was good, but it didn’t really increase my website speed. And in the last few months, plugin conflicts in WooCommerce and other issues make shopping on my site hit or miss. This is a catastrophe, and must be rectified soonest. I cannot make money if I cannot take money from my customers, and “sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t” is pure amateur ball, and I can’t afford that.

So overall, 2021 was a pretty good year, but not a great one. I made money, nearly hit my “enough to keep going” target, but didn’t exceed it, and not hitting that growth button was rough on me and my prospects.

Lessons Learned?

So, what did I learn or confirm?

I know how to make stuff. I was disciplined, rigorous in my evaluation of risks, and my execution of projects led to every one of those that was new in 2021 making money. I won’t know the true numbers until a month or so from now, but overall it looks really solid for a publishing outfit. My logistics this past year were better than most, I have picked mostly good partners, and my product quality has been outstanding, both in content and production value.

My Marketing Needs Help. Making great product doesn’t do a darn thing unless folks buy it, and this is doubly or triply true if one is hoping to live on the proceeds of publishing as a job rather than a hobby. Some folks, like Phil Reed, straddle this seemingly easily, launching something like 10+ projects per year and hitting 1,000 to 2,000 backers on a regular basis. That sort of pull and name recognition is huge, and hitting that 1,000-backer or more threshold is key for my ability to make each project really count.

I need to Diversify. I love working with SJGames. They’re great licensing partners for me, and we have a fantastic relationship. I get along quite well with their folks, and their folks seem to like me and I have never lacked for support when I’ve asked. But I need to do more than just GURPS and The Fantasy Trip, which means getting my feet back into the D&D/OSR space, as well as some systemless stuff so that anyone can use it. If I did one or two projects per year in four or five different product spaces (systemless, Dragon Heresy, OSR, TFT, Powered by GURPS) that would not pull too many dollars from the same people, and some of those markets are rather larger than others.

Time to Ditch WooCommerce. It’s a great place to start, but by the time I get all the things I want out of it, the plugins slow to a crawl. I don’t have the time or energy to be my own IT department when it comes to web optimization, plugin maintenance, and the rest. So it’s time to start paying for that. Maintaining and growing the Patreon support model will help fund this needed improvement. I suspect I’ll wind up moving over to Shopify, but I’m looking around.

Stay Focused on Productivity. I did three big and one small projects this year. I had a fast, solid start with Character Collections. Delvers took a bit longer than I hoped, but went out on time in the first half of the year. Tower and Bestiary ran in September and November, but really, I got Tower and only Tower in the second half of 2021, and I need more output than that.

Goals for 2022

So what’s now, and what’s next?

Products

• Finish the Bestiary. So important. I need to do this, and do it promptly. It is going to be an absolutely gorgeous book, though. Right now, I’m pushing to have the files to the printer by mid-Feb. Ideally a bit sooner, as review and edits and such take time. From there, it’s about distribution, and that is largely out of my hands this time, a good thing.
• That Diversification Thing. I’ve got two projects in mind here, both of which have already been started. These are going to be close to first-up in the new year in terms of stuff that requires significant development.
• More Small Projects. This may tie into systemless, or it may not. Character Collections was a great project, and nothing would prevent me from running six single-book Character Collections efforts in the coming year. It’s not all I want to do, but those smaller projects don’t have to be giant hits to really help support the big projects as well as make it easier to run the day-to-day. Even beyond that, I have a few ideas on Delvers to Grow follow-ons that I think would be really really good, and tie into several other 2022 goals.
• Convert Existing Material. I’ve got a lot of words and a lot of art for various games, and some of these may do quite well (or at least, well enough) in other systems. One of the stretch goals for the Bestiary project was a TFT conversion of the material…and I don’t see any reason not to try that out at some point.
• Dragon Heresy. This is not exactly “convert existing,” but again, I have a lot of art and a lot of words here that would do very nicely turned into products. This would include Backgrounds, Feats, additional character classes, and level 6-11 or more of the existing classes. Plus a dedicated spellbook that fixes some issues with the existing grimoire as well as expanding the contents to be its own thing.

The big thing is to get all of the above rocking and out and on the way in the first five to seven months of 2022. That will make way for

• Mission X. This has been out there, with permission to go, for a while now. I ran out of time and didn’t see a good way to make this happen in 2021 for various reasons, but I want to try and make it happen in 2022. What I REALLY want to do is work backwards from a book in hand date that times out towards the end of 2022. This is doable, but shall require no small amount of hardcore discipline and time management. This is a heavy investment in something that Powered by GURPS does really well, but if I do it how I want to do it, I’ll really have something in hand that is hard to replicate, and makes the best use of my Powered by GURPS license opportunity.

Processes, Presence, and Infrastructure

• Shopify/Alternate eCommerce Platform. I have to get off my current platform for everything but blogging. I might also consider Square, but I want something that will grow with me, and I do plan to grow.
• Blog Output. I need to write more, and write more for Patreon. My blog archive is extensive and important, and that’s a good thing. But I need to have something new to say a few times a week. It doesn’t have to be a 50,000 word tome, but it has to be there.
• Video Output. I’m not sure what this would look like, but a video presence seems to be important and useful. I need to think on this.
• Conventions. I have avoided conventions in the past due to simple lack of time, and a usually upside-down profitability metric. But getting out there, putting down a table, sitting on panels, and other networking and show appearance is useful. Really look into the GAMA show to meet retailers face to face.
• Retail Presence. I have sold orders to Noble Knight and Source Comics and Games. These orders are large and important. There are well over 1,200 retail stores in the USA alone, and having even a few dozen who want to stock my wares would be a big coup. Especially since retailers tend to buy several of a thing.

Personal

• More gaming. I’m a better designer and writer when I’m gaming more frequently. I need to play more, and not just GURPS and TFT. Run some, especially when I’m developing adventures.
• More exercise, More sleep. I need to get back into a regular exercise and fitness habit, and get my butt back to Viking Martial Arts class. Focuses the mind, provides energy, etc. I was doing well with a 16-8 intermittent fasting regimen, and getting back to that along with managing my face-stuffing will be good. Regrettably, this probably means less wine. Alas.
• More scheduled and free time. I need to do a better job of having a work (and workout) schedule that floats less. I need to get up early, exercise, get my kids to school, and start cranking on real work early, and steadily. I’m sure I will be doing a lot of “work every day” time, but I need to make sure I get my work done so that I can get out of my basement office and play, take some real vacations, and get out there with my girls. Have a schedule, including when I’m on Discord and other platforms, and STAY OFF THEM when that time has passed.