Impostor Syndrome is a Real B—

After a pretty crappy year of unemployment, some positives have been coming out of the TTRPG industry.

Last time, I told y’all about the great news I’ve been dying to talk about for nearly a year:

But even landing that amazing opportunity and having a second, different upcoming Kickstarter collaboration, after having lost my job and the way the company had been treating me prior to being let go, I have felt like an abject failure for the past 12 months.

On paper, though, everything was going pretty well. I had freelance contracts for web design work, did some SEO writing for a former supervisor, and my TTRPG sales did well enough that it wasn’t a waste of time by any means.

But I still felt like an impostor who was flailing—and failing—at pretty much everything I was trying to do.

I wasn’t, but I felt like I was. And when talking to people, I felt like an impostor because I’m brand new to working in TTRPGs and gaming.

So I need to get over that. And myself.

Over the past year, I’ve put out a lot of TTRPG content. You can find all of that in my portfolio, which links out to the DMs Guild and DTRPG product pages.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, I was given the go-ahead to say publicly that I was working with Free League, writing the mini-adventures for the Kickstarter. That’s when I decided it was time to use all that TTRPG content I’ve been putting out to good use.

I decided to send cold emails to various publishing companies in the TTRPG space to see if they’re currently looking for pitches or submissions.

What’s a cold email? An unsolicited email out of nowhere, apropos of nothing, trying to make contact with a person you don’t know for a specific reason. And they suck.

Cold emails suck, but they work

There’s no two ways around it—cold emails are terrible. To send and to get.

But it’s like mingling at a party. Sometimes, you just have to walk up, say hi, and introduce yourself.

So I went a-searchin’ and found the email contacts of companies I’d like to work with and sent them a basic email admitting cold email are awful, why I want to work with them, and that I’m not just some random shmuck who wants their attention.

I didn’t expect much of a response. After all, cold emails are often lumped in with spam, even when they’re bespoke messages like mine.

Surprisingly, I got an amazing response from doing this. I don’t know if it’s the industry or just that I have good taste in people and companies I’d like to work with, but the response rate was far higher than I expected.

Even more surprisingly, I’ve already landed a couple of contracts from reaching out. It’s very much not what I expected, and very much a strong sign that my feeling like a failure was completely untrue.

I say this not necessarily to humble-brag—though of course there’s a little of that, lol—but to tell you that impostor syndrome is a big, stinky, good-for-nothing liar.

To tell you that if I can do this, so can you.

If you want something, go for it

I am writing this specifically to urge you to send a cold email. If you have a project you want, a person or company you admire and want to work with, you should put together an email and say hello. Introduce yourself.

Even if you’ve had no prior contact with them, my experience has been that the folks I emailed have been exceptionally gracious.

In the worst scenario, you get ignored, and you’re in the same spot you were before. Best case, and I speak from experience, you have a new connection and potentially a dream gig.

Y’all, I’m a nobody. I have no name recognition, no nepotistic connections that go way back in this (or any other) industry, and I don’t have decades of experience behind me.

What I do have is a solid portfolio of work I can show off, and at least a reasonable amount of talent and creativity. That’s it.

That, and an almost non-existent fear of talking to strangers. That helps, but isn’t entirely necessary.

I started out in this industry writing a Christmas adventure because my father-in-law was dying in the hospital, and I needed something happy in my life. I had literally zero experience with commercial TTRPG content before that, having only written for my own groups. Almost 30,000 people have downloaded that adventure at this point.

So yeah, if you have impostor syndrome and think you can’t do whatever it is that you want to do or work with whomever you want to work with, try to think about it little differently.

And to prove that it’s a big, stinky, good-for-nothing liar, I will wrap up with this you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up anecdote:

A crazy thing happened on the way to your inbox

As I was drafting this particular post—I kid you not—an email came in with news that 3 of my pitches were accepted by a publisher! So now, a couple of adventures and some new monsters by yours truly have been purchased and will see the light of day soon.

Take that, impostor syndrome!