Is it wrong to want to try and make money from your IF? If you believe in your work and want to provide more for people etc is it wrong to do something like a Kickstarter to build up funds to provide additional extras people might be interested in?
I’ve seen a few people say that they don’t charge for their IF because it’s a passion or because they don’t think it’s the kind of writing that should be charged for but, why not? Why can’t we be proud of what we create and hope to earn something from it (I’m not saying a yearly salary that means we don’t need to work, but just something that helps us along create more?).
I’ve got a Kickstarter going for my sci-fi book but I’ve terrified of promoting it here because I’m scared people will say I shouldn’t be trying to do that? I’m really proud of what I’m creating and I’m very closer to releasing a second demo that has so much more than my first one - is it wrong to hope it leads to support from people?
It’s not wrong to make money off IF, it’s just incredibly hard. The consistent moneymakers in the space, like Choice of Games, can do it by offering complex games with staggeringly high word counts. It’s hard to get people to pay for anything else (that doesn’t have graphics, anyway – IF-adjacent things like VNs are another story), and the hobbyist community has been thriving since the 90s so you’re also competing with a bunch of high quality free games. Some very well established authors have successful Patreons but they got there on the strength of their free work. Basically, most authors around here don’t find the juice worth the squeeze. I don’t think anyone’s tried to do a Kickstarter for feelies or tie-in material for an otherwise free game yet (someone correct me if I’m wrong) so it remains to be seen how well that would work, but this place frankly isn’t very big so I suspect you’d need a broader reach to make that successful.
We have also had an influx of people convinced that their new AI-powered platform has unlocked the One Weird Trick to making easy money off IF so I think people are tired of the discussion and jumpy when it’s something new members bring up. That said, it’s not completely off the table – some community members have also written books (like Aaron Reed’s 50 Years of Text Gaming) that have done pretty well and are well liked around here! Others have other unrelated but paid creative work that gets advertised here occasionally. The common thread I’ve noticed is that the people who get engagement with their other paid projects are active community members who are generally well liked around the forums and regularly engage with other people’s work as well as talking about their own, so if you put the time in around here to get that status then I’m sure people wouldn’t mind you advertising your other projects.
I definitely understand what you’re saying and it helps put it in perspective for me. So far, the Kickstarter is not successful haha, I don’t think it’s going to be ultimately. But I’m still going to keep writing.
In addition, there’s a common attitude towards creative hobbies where people think that if you’re not making money off of your work then it’s a waste of your time, so hobbyist spaces can sometimes get understandably defensive about wanting to do things for fun.
svlin: in the weberian countries, maybe, but surely in other countries work and hobbies are two separate matters (if not together, as in not few Italian groceries, where the shopowner is more interested in social interchange than commercial interchange)
Back IT, on the actual money gained, my conservative estimate is that the colossal prize fund of the IFComp is by far the biggest income for an IF author…
It is absolutely not wrong to want to make money off your creative work. It’s just incredibly hard and takes as much (or more) luck as it does hard work and business sense. Financial success with creative efforts is almost like a lottery because there are so many people trying to make and sell things. I think this has always been true but is arguably more true now than at any time in history, with the democratization of digital tools and delivery, fractured attention spans, and a barrage of requests for micro-payments. In the case of interactive fiction, which has shrunk to a tiny niche art form, the audience for it is equally tiny. I suspect that many (most?) of us on this forum are more or less aware of that reality and pursue our crafts regardless.
However, having said all that, I’m sure the road to every success story is littered with naysayers. If you have a creative dream, you should pursue it. Maybe you’ll prove us wrong! The only way anyone ever succeeded was by believing in themselves. Just don’t give up the day job, as they say.
I don’t think it’s wrong at all but, like others have said, it’s hard!
I make a chunk of my income from IF-related stuff - mostly running workshops - and I’ve had a contract with Heart’s Choice games in the past. But I’ve also released most of my independently developed games for free, because mainly I just wanted to share those with people and I knew that if I charged for them that would be a very small pool.
An unintended consequence of that free sharing, though, is that the vast majority of my commissioned work came about because people had heard of me because of my free stuff. So if you do want to make money from IF, I think that building up a player base through free distribution can be helpful.
You can certainly post about any project in Playing > Project Announcements - we just don’t appreciate people who do a drive by of the forum to drop their links in a first post with no intention of becoming part of the community. Even if it’s not specifically IF adjacent, if you hang out here, we’re interested in what you’re doing.
> I should start a company. Yeah see, I’ll call it Textfyre. Yeah see, it’ll be great.
A group of trolls wander by and having heard this proclamation take out large wooden clubs and beat the man to death. His body vaporizes into a black cloud.
The trolls cackle and start singing something about lions as they wander off into the forest.