That's a really good question!
In the beginning we wanted to have a publisher for Tavern Talk. But as you see, that didn't happen. So we took the long, hard road of self-publishing and did almost everything on our own. There is no short, easy answer to this and every game and studio is different.
What we did in summary:
- participate in Steam events that have a showcase or sale (but Valve is changing a lot on their platform right now)
- bundle with other studios that have similar games; bundle your own products on Nintendo and Steam;
- discount regularly on Steam and Nintendo; we have to find a rhythm for Itch
- offering single products on Itch that are not available on other platforms and post news/devlogs there
- doing a Kickstarter campaign
- doing a playtest
- giving keys out to influencer and streamers when we had our first demo and later for the launch - mind you, visual novels are not really streamable compared to more mechanic-driven games
- doing other collabs in-game, e.g. where characters from Monster Prom were coming into the tavern as guests
- doing the grind on social media and posting regulary: Bluesky, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube (shorts and longer videos), X (not anymore), reddit, Tumblr...
- you can also do ads, e.g. Meta (Facebook) or Reddit and so on - we only did this for the Kickstarter campaign
Spreading the word/your game everywhere you can!