Deckible and Tarot By the Neon Light Launch

Deckible and Tarot By the Neon Light Launch

Posted by Nicholas Ribera on

Hello and welcome to blog entry number 4! It's been fun writing down my thoughts, many of which keep me up at night for no reason other than too much excitement for what is coming next.

Deckible

Early in June, I was contacted by Nick Kellet, founder and creator of Deckible. His goal for this app is to make what is basically Audible, but for decks of all kinds- flash cards, games, trivia, and especially Tarot. I was selected, among many other creators in the tarot-sphere to try it out and use it as an avenue for sales once it launches (September 16th). The platform was a little odd at first, as it was still in active development, but quickly simplified. I have two decks in there now- Date Night and Eros Tarot. I'll add The Goracle once inversions are added to the platform.

The financials of the transactions were more creator friendly than I had expected. The app store takes it's cut (usually around 30%) from each sale, and the remaining amount is split evenly with the creator and the app developers. Compare this to traditional print publishing where you'd only get a few dollars for each physical deck sold. Plus, since it's a digital product, no need to print anything or play with logistics.

The creators still retain full control over their IP and can remove their deck from the store at any time (although anyone who purchased it and downloaded the cards will still have access to your deck on their device). You are also able to give cards more than two sides- this allowed me to put the Eros Tarot meanings as a third graphic on each card. So you draw a card and see it's back- flip it to see the illustration- flip it again to read the description.

One more element about this that I'm excited about is that I have full control over couponing my products- so I can have Kickstarter projects that have a code for a free digital implementation of the deck via Deckible, or I can put a coupon code in the digital deck that will lead to a discount on purchasing the print version from my store.

How successful of an avenue will this be to me? Time will only tell, but the negligible amount of work that went into digitizing my already digital illustrations to this format made it worth the time commitment.

Deckible launches officially on September 16th.

The Impending Launch of Tarot By the Neon Light

I recently completed a 10 week course, hosted by my county business development center, called Co.Starters. Throughout the course we focused on making steady income, developing profit and loss statements, finding when and where to hire help, and much more. During the final class, we each did a small presentation on our next steps. I used the opportunity to talk about Tarot By the Neon Light. Below are two slides from that presentation:

This slide shows the static marketing avenues for this project. I've got my Kickstarter Pre-launch page, so that gives me something to link people towards. This page has a counter that tells me how many people clicked on "Notify me on launch" - which is a good indication of the general audience's interest in the project. Even though this is my 15th kickstarter project, I've never tracked what this number was before launch, so I really should start taking note and comparing it to the final result.

I also created a subdomain for my website based on this deck. I didn't find it necessary to buy a simpler, more direct domain, but if the project does well- then I'll go back and see what's on the market. A subdomain is free, as I already have the main domain of ChainAssembly.com, and I can freely change where it redirects. Currently, neonlight.chainassembly.com takes people to my BackerKit landing page, but once the project is launched I'll change it to the actual Kickstarter page. And once that is over, I'll have it redirect to my online store.

The BackerKit launch page is something I am trying for the first time on this project. Essentially it is the same as the Kickstarter launch page, except it's more customizable- you can have more text, links, images, etc, and you can also collect email addresses. It also has some lovely tools to track who has or has not opened the emails you've sent.

My more active marketing avenues are as follows:

I've been posting semi-daily on Discord, Facebook Groups, and Instagram. I have a photoshop template that allows me to easily swap out the card for each day's post.

I once again returned to Moo.com for custom business cards, each one featuring a different card from the deck and info about the project, plus a QR Code, on the back. I'll be giving these out at my upcoming events before and during the Kickstarter project.

I just finished my Intro video (all done in After Effects) which I also just posted on YouTube earlier today. This will give me more content to share online.

I enlisted The Gamecrafter to print three copies of the deck and shipped them out to three different Tarot reviewers/content creators to also drive more people to my site in anticipation of the launch. Keep yours eyes peeled for posts from:

These reviews will also give me more content to add to the Kickstarter page, which adds to the trustworthiness of Chain Assembly as a brand and the verisimilitude of the product itself.

Lastly, I planned on making some Facebook ads. I also put a really nice 20 second video together. But today I want to post it and saw that my ability to place ads has been revoked- probably because I had so many ads rejected for Eros Tarot. So I submitted a review and will hopefully be able to boost that video post soon. Meanwhile, you can watch it here.

I hope the information above shows you how I plan on launching this thing. It's a bunch of work, and I'm going at it from a lot of avenues. I have zero advertising related education, or real world experience, so here's hoping it all works.

Tarot By the Neon Light launches on Kickstarter on October 2nd.

 

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