#cpcgames

[cleverplayingcards]

My Game Plan for Licensing

In my last post, To Kickstart or Not to Kickstart, I shared my reasoning for not going the Kickstarter route for publishing our new children’s card game. Now, I’d like to share with you what I will be doing in our quest to getting published. 

Being a “cut to the chase” kind of gal and not a writer experienced in the art of building suspense, I’ll tell you straight away. I’m taking our card games (yes, there are actually two more of them) to the International Toy & Game Innovation Conference in November. It takes place the two days leading up to ChiTag. I attended this conference in 2013 and the amazing access to industry insiders is the reason I’ll be returning this year. From the T&G Con website: This is the one time in the year that many of these inventor relations executives will look at outside submissions from inventors who are not represented by agents.

In 2013, inventors were given a list of industry experts who would be attending and available for one-on-one meetings. We put in a request for those we most wanted to talk to and ranked them. I don’t recall if I got my top three, but I definitely got three out of my top four, which is pretty darn good. (I’m going to name drop now.) I met with Scott Brown, co-founder of Marbles The Brain Store, Carle Wunderlich II, owner of Best Toys (distributor), and Lisa Wuennemann, inventor relations at Patch Products. I also managed to show our games to Mike Hirtle (Paladin LLC), Jenni Jalava (Martinex), Richard Gill (McGill and Associates) and Dougal Grimes (Hasbro). But I think the most important contact I made was Mary Couzin, CEO and founder of the Chicago Toy & Game Group which organizes T&G Con. Definitely worth the price of admission. No deals were made as a result of these meetings, but the feedback I got was incredibly valuable and I’ve kept it in mind while designing our new games.

For 2015, it looks as though the one-on-one meetings are being replaced by the “speed meeting” period. Again, from the T&G Con website: During the "Speed Meeting" period on Thursday afternoon, all conference speaker / experts have agreed to take time to walk through the Walkabout room to see product,and listen to the "elevator pitch" at each table. This guarantees you will receive one minute of time with each company, and then take advantage of the networking opportunities to have deeper discussions with the people who are interested in your products. 

Sign me up! I don’t have to choose just three people to talk to and I won’t have to hustle as much to search out others that I’d like to meet. They’re all coming to me!

November seems like a long time off. How am I going to fill all those long hours leading up to T&G Con? Prototypes, Pitch Sheets and getting Elevator Speeches under 60 seconds!

[cleverplayingcards]

To Kickstart or Not to Kickstart

I have been dying to run a Kickstarter campaign. I have a great children’s card game with an adorable character. And as we all know, characters sell. The mechanics of the game are all worked out, and as of last weekend, Protospiel tested. The artwork needs to be finalized, but I have enough to use for the campaign itself. So what’s holding me up? My lack of an established social network. In researching how to run a successful campaign, I discovered that the trick is having a social network in place and advertising your campaign before it ever hits Kickstarter. Of course, I can just go for it and try my luck with my uber adorable character, hoping he’ll catch on and spread like an exploding kitten. But I know in my heart that’s a long shot. 

I should have mentioned that the ultimate goal of running a Kickstarter campaign is to catch the eye of a game publisher. I would like to license my game. I’ve self published before and discovered that my strengths are not sales and marketing. I’d like to let someone else do that for me. (Check out CleverPlayingCards.com for “Think Ahead” and “High And Low Poker”. See, not great at marketing.)

Then I happened upon a blog by James Mathe. http://www.jamesmathe.com/courting-a-game-publisher-dos-and-donts/  The last “don’t” is Don’t run a Kickstarter campaign and THEN look for a publisher. Most publishers won’t touch your game after you have run a crowd funding campaign for it already. Contact them before and leverage their marketing to make the best of crowd funding. This puzzled me. I thought what better way to prove to a publisher that there is real interest in your game than to approach them after having run a successful Kickstarter campaign? It seems that my thinking was flawed. I had the pleasure of talking to James at Protospiel as he play tested my new games. I specifically asked him why a publisher wouldn’t touch a Kickstarted game. The answer is simply that a publisher wants to have control over the final product. They want to touch up the artwork. They want to tweak it and make it part of their product line. Once you’ve shipped product to your Kickstarter supporters, it’s published and they’re not interested. So for that reason alone, I am putting my Kickstarter dreams on hold.  

Not having a social presence online was an advantage only that it slowed me down on my road to Kickstarter. I have a new game plan. (Pun intended.) Kickstarter may still be in my future. I kind of hope so. I’d love the experience, but only after I’ve exhausted other avenues. While I explore my options, I’ll work on being more social. Please tell all your friends about me. (See, still not good at marketing. Tell your friends about me anyway.)

Thanks to James Mathe for his incredible website and sharing his insight with me at Protospiel/Milwaukee.