A guide to promotion tools available to partners through the Promotion section of the Partner Hub.
Publisher Promotion Points
Publisher Promotion Points (PPP) are a virtual currency we use to fairly share promotional tools among all publishing partners. Learn more in our Help Center article on Publisher Promotion Points (PPP).
Deal of the Day is the most expensive use of your PPP but is also one of the most effective.
When you put your title into Deal of the Day, it goes into a queue. You may make your title 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, or 80% off for the day it is chosen.
- Exclusive partners get to the front of the line quicker.
- All partners move quicker the longer a title is in the queue.
- Partner Relations does not have access to adjust or predict your date of release.
You will receive an email 24 hours before the Deal of the Day (which launches at 10:00 AM Central on the day until 10:00 AM Central the next day).
Your title will appear on the front page of the site you submitted to and will be sent out to all customers subscribed to our Deal of the Day newsletter.
We recommend that you:
- Use your Send Email to Customers Tool to notify your customers of the Deal of the Day
- Post on social media (DriveThruRPG will post it on Facebook and Twitter alongside the other Deal of the Day on other sites)
When the Deal of the Day finishes, you will also receive a round-up of how much you sold.
Please note:
- This will not discount your POD products.
- Adult titles and titles that include AI-Generated Artwork are not eligible for submission.
Note: If your title goes into a site-wide sale, it will keep its spot in the queue but will not be put into the Deal of the Day. This is to ensure that you don’t have double discounts. Once the site-wide sale ends, you will move through the queue per usual. That said, there are usually no Deals of the Day during site-wide sales, or titles not in the site-wide sale will move extremely quickly to the front of the queue.
Featured Product Messages are less expensive than Deal of the Day but more expensive than Banners. They are also less effective than Deal of the Day, but more effective than Banners.
They are placed near the top or the middle of the page, depending on whether it is a homepage or category page featured product message.
Featured Product Messages pull the cover image, title link, title name, and partner account, allowing you to write a short call to action. This can be simply a sentence about the title or whether it’s on sale. You are limited to 400 characters for the text. You should be able to find some inspiration on the front page or in the filtered pages to get you started.
After creating it, you will add ‘Impressions’ for either Homepage (more expensive) or Category Pages (less expensive). When those impressions run out, you will be emailed that they have reached zero. You can also turn these on and off. Once they are toggled off, they will no longer run or take from your impressions. You can run several Featured Product Messages at the same time.
We recommend you use Featured Product Messages on titles that may have decreased in sales recently or to promote older titles in the back of your catalog. It's also an excellent option to use if you’re running a sale on a particular product and can put in the message something like, “XXX Title is 40% Off For a Limited Time!”
Banners are the least expensive and least effective.
Banners appear at the bottom of the front page and category pages. Because of this, they are not seen as quickly as Featured Product Messages. However, even though they are less effective, this is still an excellent and lower-cost option to promote your titles.
Like Featured Product Messages, Banners run on ‘Impressions’. When those impressions run out, you’ll be notified.
Banners should be a maximum of 1250 px width, and 200 px height.
You can also email your customers—anyone who has purchased one of your titles from us—using our Send e-mail to customers tool. We recommend at most 2-3 a month. The tool is highly granular, too, if you want to target or exclude specific customers of your products. You can use this tool to notify customers of your newest releases or a sale you might be running.
Customers have the option to disable your contact with them and to determine whether you're allowed to see their name and/or email address or not. Sending email too frequently may cause customers to opt-out of future notifications.
Notes:
- Affiliate Links will NOT work when emailing customers (they’re already on-site through this tool!)
- Off-site links will not work unless it is an allowed URL, see Allowed URLs for Product Descriptions and Emails. Please do not send emails to customers that direct them to other websites (even your own)
- Once you hit ‘send,’ you CANNOT stop the sending, so make sure you double-check everything
- You can put emojis in the subject line but not the description
- If you are trying to email your customers about a crowdfunding campaign, Partner Relations has to send that for you. More details can be found in our Help Center article, Email Customers to Notify Them of Your Crowdfunding Project
You will receive an email when your mailing is complete. If you do not receive the completion email within a few hours of starting your mailing, you may need to check your junk/spam folders. Otherwise, please contact Partner Relations by submitting a request through our webform.
If your title(s) are not included in a sale (for example, if they don’t meet the requirements for inclusion, etc.), you can always run your own sale using Manage Sales, found under Promotions on your Publisher Hub. These sales will appear on the Daily Deals page, and you’re welcome to run them however you’d like.
A sale can only be set up to go live starting the next day, and titles currently in a site-wide sale or already in the queue for another sale (i.e., in the week right before a site-wide sale) cannot be included. This is by design so that discounts do not accidentally stack.
Note: There is a slight delay between setting up a sale and seeing it in the Manage Sales tool.
If you don’t want to put a title on sale to all customers but to just a select group, you can use the Special Discount Link tool. Publishers use this tool to provide discounted titles to fans or reviewers or might use it to reward customers for purchasing another product (e.g. injecting a 20% off discount link into the PDF of one product into another product to encourage customers to purchase it).
Special Discount Links can also be combined with the following Emailing Customers tool to provide past customers with a discounted title.
Whether you’re fulfilling a successful crowdfunding campaign or just want to provide a contributor copy to those who helped make your title a success, you can use the Complimentary Copy tool to provide free titles to customers.
To learn more about this tool, visit our Help Center article How to Use the Complimentary Copy Tool.
The Analyze Marketing Sources tool helps you track where your sales have originated. To understand the most common source codes or learn how to create custom source codes, check out our Help Center article, DTRPG SRC Codes FAQ.
If you’re interested in doing a Bundle of Holding, we work closely with their team! You can check out the current bundles with our Partners here: https://bundleofholding.com/
Contact us by submitting a request through our webform.