So you’ve joined a BackStory world as a manager, congratulations! What comes next? It’s time to build out your roster of creatives, aka a recruitment drive! Let’s look at how you might go about that.
Having the right creative mix is important if your world is going to succeed. It’s like making your favourite meal; get the right mix and amount of ingredients to make it the best it can be. Add salt to taste. Choosing your creatives works in the same way, you need to find the right blend of people.
What about builders?
A good world team has a sub-team of fantastic builders. These people are unique in what they do. If you’re not sure what a builder is have a look at this blog post, which talks all about them.
We believe that a strong world team will have roughly 5 or 6 builders working under the Architect. You might opt for more or even less, but you need to make sure you have enough builders to get work out on time.
We believe that a builder can work on several different pieces of content at the same time without becoming overwhelmed, so your team of builders won’t need to match your team of authors in size.
How about editors?
Just like builders, your world team will need a sub-team of editors. Your Editor-in-Chief will head up them up. How many editors you bring on board is up to you.
We think that you can achieve a good team balance with around 5 editors. One of the things to consider is how involved your editors need/want to be in the franchise development process. Some people will want to get stuck in with the planning and development of franchises, while others are happier just making sure that the quality of the content is up to code.
The best scenario is to have some combination of the two types. Some authors work better with soundingboards for plotline development, and thrive in a collaborative environment. Other authors work better without this.
So what about authors?
Your author sub-team will most likely be the biggest of the three. We estimate that a strong author team would be somewhere between 30–40 authors. It sounds like a lot, and it might be the case that you never reach this size, but it’s a good amount to aim for.
Why so many authors in comparison to builders and editors? We don’t recommend giving authors more than one piece of content to work on at a time, because you need to make sure that your world is regularly publishing content.
Don’t forget that, because your world is putting out different kinds of content (stories and IWDs) while at the same time putting out different genres of content (from romance to crime), you need to have a variety of different specialists on your roster.
If your world’s content is lacking in romance, and you don’t have any romance specialists you’re losing out on potential revenue. So having a team of 30 or so authors means that you will most likely cover all of your bases, both in terms of genres and content types.
Ultimately, how you fill out your roster of creatives will be up to you and your fellow world managers. There are no hard and fast rules on the best combinations, you will have to go through a process of trial and error until you get a mix that works best for you.
The one thing to remember is that, at all times you need to keep a steady stream of content coming out to keep your fan base interested and engaged.
