Publishing is curiously intimidating. I feel that the step of making a product to sell means I must hold its quality to a very high standard. More rationally that isn’t true. If I want to make a product to sell on (say) DriveThruRPG, I don’t need it to be near perfect. It should be useful and interesting, and merely not brought down by flaws from my necessarily novice publishing abilities. I can only get so much better at publishing without actually publishing something.
For the past few years I’ve been working on publishing Coming of Age. Mostly I haven’t been making real progress because of this perfectionist streak combined with the fact that I have tested and played Coming of Age long enough to be solidly sure of its reliability but too long to keep my full enthusiasm for it. Coming of Age has become a hard point, blocking progress to publishing rather than facilitating it.
Rather than hitting that wall, I need to flow around it. I’ve started finding alternatives, pieces where I can take work I’ve done and build it into a useful, marketable product. It also doesn’t hurt that Coming of Age seems best served as a Pay What You Want core system, augmented by more focused products, and that DriveThruRPG wants you to have a non-free product before you can post free or Pay What You Want products.