First Steps to a New Age

Lamentations of the Flame Princess has a couple of important problems that I am now finally, very late, making an effort to solve.

1. I am very dissatisfied with how the LotFP website and our social media accounts operate.
   
   Social media is a problem in that we have thousands of subscribers on various accounts, but when a post is made only a fraction of those subscribers ever see the post. What is the point? I’m told that I don’t use those platforms properly. I don’t engage. So the algorithm punishes me. I’m given advice on how to behave on the platforms so as to please the algorithm.

   No. I have no interest in altering my behavior or my language to please a machine. They are tools to be used, not environments I care to be changed by. And as-is they are useless as the kind of tool I need as a business.
   
   Others want the views and clicks, and the benefits that come with views and clicks, so they do behave and talk in ways that have the algorithms in mind. So that means even as a user these platforms are useless, because effectively everything I see, everything that is recommended to me on these sites, is content made with the algorithm in mind.

   There’s no humanity left on social media. People posting for engagement and/or to please the algorithm are no different, no better, than bots.

2. The LotFP webstores are completely separate entities, with no shared databases or anything else between them. That means they have separate mailing lists. And the mailing list program in each of them are the standard versions included in the Opencart web commerce programs. Whatever.
   
   Problem is, for some reason when I send anything out via the webstore mailing lists, the formatting is awful on the receiver’s end, and worse yet the mailings get caught by spam filters, so a significant portion of customers signed up to one or both webstores aren’t receiving updates about new releases, sales, etc.

Issues #1 and #2 are the same issue: I have a problem reaching people. I have a problem reaching the people who have proactively decided to sign up or subscribe to LotFP on whatever platform. That’s ridiculous and that has to change.

I thought about going back to the old LotFP blog and making that the main outlet again. But Blogger technology is all screwed up and insufficient and that’s why I moved from that to using Google+ somewhere between 10-15 years ago. And then that place got hostile with people being really nasty to each other (and that was just me seeing other peoples’ interactions) and so I quit G+ in 2018… just before my actual controversies that hit in late 2018 and early 2019. I didn’t see any of what was going on on Google+ when the shit hit the fan for me, so that was good timing.

So going back to Blogger isn’t it. And making the LotFP website a “destination” seemed like a whole lot of effort, as a complete redesign and adding in all the desired functionality from scratch just seemed like a complete pain in the ass. Especially when I could just find another platform and at some point change the LotFP domain name to point there.

So here we are at Substack. I’m not 100% committed to making this the official LotFP website, but I’ve seen on other pages here that the user home page can be highly customized, and it has the one valuable thing:

The mailing list. Posts can be sent straight to a subscriber’s email. There will be no “why is this post only being seen by 10% of the people following this account?” stress and hopefully no “why is 30% of my mailing list rejecting as spam the newsletter they signed up to?” panic.

So it’s just a matter of fiddling with the interface here to see if I can make this a suitable place to be THE LotFP website. I’m fairly confident that I can, or I wouldn’t be making this post.

Then it’s a matter of figuring out how to get people to come here and subscribe. I have a few ideas concerning that, but that is a future concern.

I hope everyone is well. New releases will be delivered from the printer over the next couple weeks, then we have Ropecon and then Gen Con immediately after, then the new releases go up on the EU webstore. And the results of those will reveal how well I’m doing.