To tell the truth, yeah, at this point I still don't think the site is going to be anywhere where I hoped it would be at launch. It's not going to have more than a few hundred articles, and not all the features I'd hoped to have will be in place. But I hope by the hard launch to get at least some of the subspaces working (I've got to finish those Udemy courses on javascript and PHP so I can figure out how to do that), even if there may only be content there for a few articles. Oh, and I do hope to get the site redesigned to look better than it does now (which is a low bar to clear). It'll only be a shadow of what I aspired for it would be, but at least it will be, I guess, sort of a proof of concept. In any case, I'm not putting it off again; even if the site is still a long ways from being what I wanted it to be at launch, I'm going to go ahead with the launch anyway.
(Then too, there's some dim hope that during the launch, if the site becomes popular, maybe we can actually make some money with it through Patreon and merchandise and so not have to worry so much about money and be able to devote more time to the site. (Well, and the possibility theoretically exists to make some money through licensing too, but, uh, yeah, that's probably hugely optimistic; I'm not going to hold my breath about that one.) If the site were actually a source of income for us, then that could mean we could take some time off our regular jobs, or in the nigh-unsupposable eventuality that we were actually making a living off this, that this would be our regular job. But anyway, yeah, all of this is extremely unlikely, and anyway is putting the... okay, I was about to write "putting the proverbial cart before the proverbial horse", but I've remarked in other recent blog posts that I seem to have been overusing the word "proverbial" and using too many clichés, so, uh, I probably shouldn't write that. (Of course, I did write it, but in the context of... never mind.) Anyway, we've got to worry about getting people to visit the site first.)
But, again, the Wongery site has been publicly accessible since 2012, and almost nobody has visited it. What's going to be different after the hard launch? Do I have actual plans for getting people to visit the site?
I do, in fact, although I haven't shared them here. But I guess I may as well, because why not.
First of all, though, let me cover a few things we're not going to do.
We're not going to run conventional ads, through Google AdSense or social media advertising plans or anything like that. For one thing, I'm not really a fan of that kind of ad (but who is?); I have no plans to ever have such ads on the Wongery site; and so it would seem a little incongruous to run such ads elsewhere. But also, I don't think conventional ads would be effective anyway. Even aside from questions about the true effectiveness of online ads, the Wongery is (I think) a bit of a unique product that might be particularly hard to advertise through conventional means. To whom would we target the ads? Players of RPGs, maybe; fans of imaginary worlds; I guess I can think of some sites it might make sense to run ads on; but we're still not going to do that. We may Blaze a Tumblr post on the day of the hard launch, but that's the only thing we tentatively plan to do that bears much resemblance to conventional online advertising.
We're also not going to try to spread the word by making posts about the Wongery on forums and social media. We recognize that this can be an effective way of publicizing sites and kickstarting the spread of awareness through word of mouth. But I think it's really only effective if you're already a trusted member of the community in question. Making a drive-by post in a forum you've never visited before isn't likely to get much positive attention, and may be considered rude besides.
So aren't there any forums or other online communities where the Grandmaster Wongers do have a presence? Well... no, not under the names we use on the Wongery. Yes, some of us may have social media accounts under our real names, or even under other pseudonyms (although speaking only for myself and not for the other Grandmaster Wongers (if any), even with my other accounts I have very few followers; I am, as I have said before, bad at social media). But if we don't want to reveal our identities, if we don't want to connect our real names or other pseudonyms to our work on the Wongery, then we can't really post about the Wongery from our other accounts. Even if we don't say we're the Grandmaster Wongers, it wouldn't be hard to figure out that these people who are the first ones to post about some site nobody else has heard of might just be connected with the site in some way.
So could we maybe call on our friends and contacts and ask some of them to post about it, relying on the remove to make it harder to trace to us? Well, no. The thing is, the Grandmaster Wongers have not told anybody that they are making this site. Nobody. No friends; no relatives; no, uh, pets; we have kept it a complete secret. (Although I guess we probably could have told pets without much danger of their passing on the information.) Only the Grandmaster Wongers themselves are aware of their (and each others') real identities. At some point we may have to let a few other people know in confidence (it's likely at some point we may have to avail ourselves of the services of a lawyer, and it may be necessary for them to know our legal names), but at the moment nobody knows who we are but us.
Why are we doing this? I don't know. It doesn't make any sense. There is really no rational motivation for us to be so damn cagey about our identities. But at this point I think we're firmly committed to the bit.
Starting on the day of the hard launch, we can—and will—post about the Wongery on social media from the Wongery account; as mentioned in previous posts, the Wongery currently has accounts on Tumblr, Mastodon, and Cohost. But since nobody knows about the Wongery and nobody is following the Wongery accounts, that's not going to do much to get attention.
Fine, so that's what we're not doing to publicize the Wongery. So what are we doing?
Well, here's a not necessarily exhaustive list of things we're considering to get the word out about the Wongery:
- Soliciting art for the Wongery, therefore inducing interested artists (and anyone else who sees the solicitations and is curious) to check out the site. Okay, put that way it may sound a little shady; are we going to be asking for art solely to get people to look at the site? Of course not; we're going to be asking for art because we genuinely want illustrations for the Wongery. (And of course we fully intend to pay the artists a fair rate for their work; we have no intention of trying to get art for free.) But it may end up also getting some eyes on the Wongery as a welcome side effect.
- Free RPG adventures and supplements set on Wongery worlds made available on DriveThruRPG
- Free 3D assets related to Wongery settings for use in making video games. (We had planned to put some free resources on the Unity Store, but, uh, given Unity's slide into cartoon villainy, no. There are other places to distribute game assets1.)
- Hosting a Wongery-themed game jam, with monetary prizes for those we judge to be the winners. (The plan is for the game jam to be announced on the day of the hard launch; the actual jam would take place a couple of weeks or months later.)
- A Wongery-themed fiction anthology, to be published electronically and also maybe through print on demand. Contributors would be paid $0.08 per word (not coincidentally the SFWA's recommended minimum professional rate). Again, the anthology would be announced on the day of the hard launch;
And of course even the things that don't cost money cost time. If we create the RPG adventures and 3D assets ourselves it won't cost us any money... but it will take up a lot of time, which is something of which we also do not have a great surplus.
So... we'll see if this works out. Maybe I'm being too optimistic. Maybe we're never going to be able to do any of this. Maybe the Wongery will always remain an obscure and untrodden backwater of the web. But, eh, I can hope.