Fanfiction
The best way to ensure the longevity of your VN is to have a strong community behind it. It is disappointing how otherwise excellent VNs have petered out in terms of sales and activity even though the market has reached nowhere near saturation.
The best way to have a sustainable community is to have the community itself create new content to bolster your franchise. That's why it's a great idea to make your assets (I mean, what else are you going to do with them?) publically accessible so that fans can create fan visual novels, mashups, amvs, whatever the case may be. They will stay fans longer. And they will attract new fans by self-promoting their work and hence leading people to your original.
By deeply integrating this into the system and making it so easy for fans and publishers, visualnoveldai reinforces your community, and cascades your popularity.
Upload your stuff today.
Project
Feedback is extremely important (or at least it should be) for any publisher or writer, or programmer, or business. In fact, this kind of communication is central in your relationship with your audience.
Recognizing this importance, writers and publishers and others can create a project page from which they can clearly receive feedback, of all of the mundane, and excited, and angry sort, and clearly act on it with or without the help of a community. Sometimes the community can take care of each other's issues, saving you from having to do support.
You can also use the page to keep your audience informed of your status, both for patching your project after release, and for marketing BEFORE release. You want your audience to be engaged, right?
The project page will help you do that.
Viral marketing
What does it mean for something to be viral? When other people recommend your VN to their friends, and then their friends recommend your VN to THEIR friends.
How we implement viral marketing:
Recommend the VN to your friend and get 50% off on the purchase price. Recommend to 2 friends and get it for FREE!
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5956/5-Viral-Marketing-Lessons-From-Dropbox.aspx
Micro-transactions
Microtransactions can be thought of as asking the reader to pay a small amount in order to buy some special weapon, or add on.
More broadly it may mean a different model for selling VNs, such as having the reader pay only minimal amount to play one route, and only pay additional if they feel like continuing into other routes.
Or even totally different models such as pay per view or pay per save.
There's more flexibility with the option of micro-transactions, you choose!
Innovative Pricing
Speaking of pricing, there are a lot of different options available, clearly you can ask for $15 per VN, or $50, or if your VN is super special, $100.
But Amie Street has a different model of pricing, for example, for every new VN, it starts at $0. The first 10 readers gets it for free, the next 20 gets it for $2, the next 100 for $10. There would be tremendous incentive to play new VNs, helping newer writers get more exposure, but still making substantial if the VN becomes popular.
Publishers will be able to take part in these experiments if they are on this platform.
Integrated Demos
Imagine this, you have a whole list of Visual Novels available to you. You click once, and you start playing right away. Only when you're well and truly immersed does the VN ask you to pay. Want to continue? Click to authorize payment. They click, and they continue on their merry way. In this kind of situation, people pay more readily than if you ask them to quit the game, open up a web browser, input their payment information, and download a different client, or worse, input a serial key.
This takes impulse buying to a new level.
Rewarding loyal readers
So you want to develop your own army of rabid fangirls. What better way than to reward them for their loyalty? You have achievements, gamerScores. Why not allow them to use their points from previous VNs to act as coupons for future VNs?
Your readers will love you.