That initial post was a great overview. I'd be curious to see what the content of the final ebook looks like. 

Bonus tips from what I've learned elsewhere:

-Make the game overall, and the first minutes of your game [especially] amazing. Once you've got people actually playing it, you want great word of mouth. The better your game, especially the start and end, the stronger your publicity. No ad campaign will be as effective as a horde of excited fans who think the game's outstanding. Critics giving positive reviews also likewise very helpful, and again that'll only happen if your game is good.

-Build a community around your work and be responsive to questions and feedback from that community. Forums and the like are great. I've taken a lot of feedback, good, bad, and ugly, assessed the useful criticism, and made improvements and additions based on any criticism that seemed valid. One Redditor griped that my websites looked like they were 'from 1998' and suggested using Wordpress or Wix. I didn't do that exactly, I know what I'm doing design wise is not going to have any Wordpress or Wix template that matches, but I did nonetheless spend the past week heavily overhauling and redesigning one of my main sites so navigation is faster, pages more responsive, and things look a bit cleaner. Those updates based on user feedback may pay off!

-Value pricing will improve peoples' opinion of your work even if it reduces profitability out of the gate. I've priced stuff really reasonably across the board myself and the result is generally glowing reviews. My eBay account is 100% positive with 387 ratings. My Etsy account is a 5-star account. My Itch.IO account has no ratings yet but once it does I'm sure the presence of unbiased 'social proof' will cause it to take off like crazy just like what's happened elsewhere.

-Legibility and clarity actually matters. You'd be surprised how much a simple and clean font like Helvetica, Lucida Grande, Verdana, Tahoma, etc, with maximum contrast against the page background, increases people's willingness to stay on a page. I changed some things like that in a few places, and saw traffic on those pages spike by 12% with no other changes made. Black clean text on a white backdrop sounds boring but it works.

-Don't be afraid to put yourself out there and open up to criticism. I've posted a lot of my work on Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, DeviantArt, Pinterest, and so on. It's kind of self-promotion but always in places where it's relevant. Find the sub-spaces in these social networks where your stuff is not a distraction but is legitimately relevant and of genuine interest to people and maybe even can help solve their problems.

-A/B testing. Try having two somewhat different - in just one aspect - versions of a game page for a week each with no other changes. See which one produces better results. Stick with that one. Then narrow in a little at a time, optimizing things to get as strong a response as possible.

-Playtesting. Have people play your game before release, and watch to see where they run into issues that you did not anticipate. It's easy to get stuck in a sort of 'tunnel vision' as a designer and not realize that what seems intuitive to you may not make sense to players.

-Speed up loading time. As much as you can, do this on both websites and games themselves. Optimization of every aspect will reduce the number of people who get frustrated and respond badly to the loading time. If you get to a barrier on low-end devices where load times cannot improve without seriously compromising content, consider ways to make the loading screen 'more than a loading screen' with brief gameplay tips, a small image preview of the level that's loading, maybe behind the scenes [making-of] secrets, whatever works to make the wait less onerous.

These are just a few examples of principles that seem to be effective.

- Matthew L. Hornbostel, 

https://matthornb.itch.io --- http://www.miniaturemultiverse.com --- http://www.triumphantartists.com

Incidentally, I have a massive sale beginning soon, from April 10-12 if anybody's interested. 90% off a large bundle of recently updated asset packs!