I am an amateur type designer, and have just published a font. I’m not doing this full-time, so it’s more of a side-gig. Now, what are some simple methods of promoting the font online? I don’t have a budget, at least not yet. I’m currently relying on forums and other online communities for promotion, but currently seeing not much of traction, no surprise there.
What are some other methods of driving up the exposure?
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Have you checked out MyFonts, or any other reseller? They (as all do) take a cut of your sales, but the exposure can be worth it many times over.
Additionally, Fonts In Use is very popular with the added benefit that you can self publish features on your font. You need to find examples of the font being used first - they won't let you publish your own promotional images.
Just being with a reseller also gets you into lists which I suspect is most of the benefit rather than actual marketing of your specific font.
Oh, and everyone in the font making world loves a microsite. They can be expensive and I'm not entirely persuaded that they are all that useful but if you have the skill to do it yourself you might as well.
If you're an amateur, and don't need to make money from your fonts, you could add a PayPal link to make it easy to make donations.
Let's say you have a single font novelty display typeface that perhaps feels too "niche" to chart on MyFonts. You can set a price, submit it to MyFonts and get zero to ten deep discounted sales* until it falls into obscurity. Or you could skip MyFonts, include a free for commercial use Desktop EULA and submit it to free font sites. Also submit it to a distributor that allows free fonts with non-free embedding licenses. In the font description, you can tell people where to get an embedding license. If the Dafont version is free for commercial use, it'll get installed by lots of people and get used in projects all around the world. That increases the chances that someone will need to embed the font on the web or in an app.
However, these embedding license sales from single free fonts only account for about 5% of my sales. This could be due to the fact that I expanded the families of my most successful free fonts. More than half of my income comes from typefaces which include free fonts. But years ago, most of these were popular, free, single fonts. When I decided to expand some of them into a full typefaces, I chose the most popular ones.
The kinds of typefaces that do well of Dafont aren't the same as MyFonts. I don't think a Batman related font is going to top the best sellers chart at MyFonts but it probably will at Dafont. Conversely, a beautiful, workhorse text typeface might go unnoticed at Dafont.
Here's a another technique. I took a non-free typeface that was selling approximately zero. It had 1 or 2 MyFonts sales from 2013 to 2015...headed for permanent obscurity. In 2015, I made all caps versions (it included 10 fonts), appended the name with Titling and released it on free font sites. Now it's become a regular seller. The full version of the typeface, with lowercase is now selling reasonably well and people often buy embedding licenses for the all caps version. As Bob Dylan said, "When a font's selling nothing, you got nothing to lose." But this doesn't always work. I tried this with a typeface that was a complete flop on MyFonts and the Titling version was a complete flop on free sites as well.
* I'm assuming from the title of the thread that we're not putting much money into marketing.
Those tips are extremely insightful, thanks.
While these bigger game developers buy fonts from MyFonts/Fontspring/FontShop as any other company would, the sites that sell general game development resources (such as GameDevMarket) are actually aiming at a different customer base; that of the hobby and indie devs. So the smaller developers who do use these specialized sites, I assume, aren't really looking for fully professional fonts and the typical application prices that go along with them.
That's why I'm wondering if it's even conceivable to have any success with targeting the developer market directly; the bigger developers will do it through MyFonts(&similar) and the small ones through DaFont(&similar) - there might not be much middle ground.