“Probably about 75% of my time … is marketing in all different ways” is the frank appraisal of Neil Rennison, the Creative Director of successful developer Tin Man Games. “It could be me speaking to you or just chasing emails to people, planning out how we’re going to do various things, writing blog posts, or sorting out promo codes.”

For someone who effectively forms half of a development company, that has produced and published seven games in the Gamebook Adventures series in just under two years, that is a staggering amount of time spent trying to grow an audience in the iOS market.Yet the approach taken by Neil is one that provides great learning opportunities for other indie developers starting out in the Australian industry.

Forming the company at a time when the large studios were still dominant in this country, and the app store was still building momentum, there was a clear expectation about how successful Tin Man Games would be.

“I’m absolutely realistic about when we develop a Gamebook I know it will take a lot of time to make its money back. Because we are so niche, for us it’s all about the bigger picture. Ben (Britten-Smith) and I have a slogan that we’ve said from day one, so when either of us is in doubt about any of this, we just go “slow burn baby”. Because it is, you know, it’s all about us slowly crawling along and getting slightly bigger each time. Baby steps.”

This slow crawl has incorporated many different approaches to gain fans and keep them. Forum communities were a great place to start for Neil to spread the word and interact with fans, however that has been superceded by something even more effective – Twitter.

“I think it’s important to converse one on one with your fans and I think Twitter does a good enough job. [M]ost of the time now I say to people that if you want some sort of direct link to us then follow us on Twitter. I get a lot of fans direct tweeting me or @ tweeting me and I try to reply to everybody if I can.”

While Twitter is great for low cost promotion Neil has also not been afraid to spend money in an effort to make money. For the last two years Tin Man Games has created a presence at PAX to promote their Gamebooks. However just appearing at PAX does not guarantee instant riches with Neil indicating that “shows like PAX generate a word of mouth within the RPG and gaming community that slowly grows our user base [and] our sales in the USA have consistently increased.”

Additionally Neil has taken the opportunity to visit many gaming conventions to promote Gamebook Adventures, such as the RPG table top convention in the UK – Dragonmeet. Even though PAX and other conventions are a good way to bring their products to new audiences there are consequences to attending them which were not immediately obvious.

“[N]ext year (2012) we’ve agreed that Ben won’t come to them mainly because Ben has so much to do and really one person is knocked out for a week and half. And to have the two key people of the company knocked out for a week and a half, that’s nearly a whole month of developing gone.”

Another plate in the Tin Man marketing armour is the use of temporary price drops to increase purchase numbers. Reducing the price on particular Gamebooks is often a calculated event, “[t]here are obvious markers like Black Friday where everyone crashes their prices, … and we always do a sale when we bring out a new Gamebook just because that attracts new people”. Although Neil believes that flexibility is still required and you must be able to reduce prices on the spur of the moment.

While most consumers would be happy to obtain a game on sale, sometimes the best intentions backfire which occurred recently with the release of Temple of the Spider God. Priced at $2.99 as part of the release sale, there was some forum grumbling from fans who had purchased at the initial price only to see it reduced to $0.99 for Halloween. Neil, however, was able to turn this negative into a positive from a marketing perspective though by being proactive.

“[W]hat I did was contact a few of those people privately on the forums and said “look, I can understand and really I’m sorry, but we’re a small company and we need to take advantage of these situations” and I offered them a free Gamebook in the future.”

“And that’s great because those sort of people tweet about us, they write about us on forums and it’s important to make sure they’re happy because they’re our biggest supporters.”

From a price perspective one rather difficult aspect Neil has had to grapple with was the comparatively higher price point ($4.99) of each Gamebook compared to the standard $0.99 cost for the majority of iOS apps.

“It’s something that I have wrestled for a long time, and there’s been many occasions when I have nearly folded and said “lets just put all our games for a dollar”. But I know that if I put all our games at a $0.99 for ever, yes we’d get an increase in sales for a week or so I’m sure, but then I bet we’d end up selling the same amount we sell now.”

While plenty of net savvy users will be trawling through sites to find the free, or cheap, apps for the day Neil is comfortable in the product they are selling and what it is priced at. “I stand by my guns. We are a premium Gamebook on the app store, I think we deliver tons more than any other Gamebook on there at the moment so we’re well worth our price I think.” An opinion that is backed up by the experiences of people at PAX who seem surprised at how much they get for that little price according to Neil.

As well as managing price, another logical marketing extension for Tin Man Games is managing the various product lines and genres within the Gamebook space. At GCAP in December 2011 Neil and Ben made the huge announcement that they would be releasing a Judge Dredd series of Gamebooks in a deal with rights holders Rebellion.

“It’s kind of a weird one really. So there I was in Australia this year (2011) feeling a bit down in the dumps (about moving back to the UK), because I love living in Melbourne, and I got back to the UK and literally I had only been back in the country a week and half and there I was in a meeting just pitching Gamebook Adventures to Rebellion… and they thought it was a great fit for their IP.”

Surprisingly enough this is not the only new idea that is up the Tin Man’s metal sleeves this year. Already announced for release this year are the Infinite Universe Gamebooks, as well as the collaboration with renowned artist Gary Chalk on Gun Dogs. Releasing three new IP’s within the next year may seem like a huge drain on the finances, however some smart risk management has resulted in less exposure to the Tin Man resources.

“Greywood… put together a proposal for a series of Gamebooks… and then all of a sudden it was good fit for us because then we’re not hiring anybody in particular to do that, they’re coming to us with their ideas and the deals slightly different then. It’s more a royalty. They’re taking as much of a risk with it as we are publishing it. We’re both shouldering the risk on it.”

This sharing of the burden is something that Neil is not afraid to use, and something they are hoping to make good use out of when creating alternate language versions of their Gamebooks.

“Well we’re going to re-release Assassin in Orlandes [this] March, like an anniversary edition. We’ll definitely have French and Italian for March, and we’ll hopefully have a Portugese version for Brazil potentially.”

It’s the Brazil market that offers the most potential for Tin Man Games, and it is a place where again Neil is happy to share the spoils and utilise the expertise of others to widen their audience.

“Gamebooks have always been quite popular in Brazil. I don’t know where I get that information from, I just know because I follow Gamebook lore quite a lot. With our case with Brazil, and it’s early days yet, we’re probably going to get a publisher to publish us in Brazil. They actually will have their own app store, so it won’t be Tin Man Games that sell the Gamebook, it will be the publisher that sells it.”

“And the reason for that is that we don’t know the Brazilian market, we don’t know what is going on with it so it makes sense for somebody who does to sell it. And the people that we’re in discussion with about it they sell books, that’s what they do.”

“We’ve got all this IP, we need to start leveraging them as much as possible. And if that means giving away a bit of our share of profits because we can give them to somebody who knows how to sell them better in that region of the world then so be it. That’s how business works. That’s how all these different big game publishers around the world work really.”

From the way Neil discusses the marketing of their products it’s clear that he has strong views about what is required to make Tin Man Games as successful as possible. He isn’t averse to getting help from marketing specialists, however, recently joining up with the newly formed indie marketing business Surprise Attack.

“While we think we have a good handle on our PR up to this point, it never hurts to have experienced fresh eyes looking at the way we do things and make recommendations on how we can do better, or give us new angles and new “ins” into areas we hadn’t previously considered. We’ve already had a couple of new potential opportunities arise because of Chris at Surprise Attack so it was definitely a great move getting involved with them.”

While 2012 is looking to be a rather busy, and challenging, year for Tin Man Games it seems like they are doing everything possible from a marketing perspective to make the company even more successful. It’s an example that other indie studios could well look to for advice.

All images courtesy of Tin Man Games

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