Comments on: Evil Hat Sales: 2009 Observations

By: Fred Hicks

Fred Hicks — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 17:12:19 +0000

A good question and one I’m not 100% on yet. That said, I think OBS is very strong as an initial point of entry. My ability to drive traffic only applies to the folks I grab on initial entry, so, hm.

By: Paul Chapman

Paul Chapman — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:56:20 +0000

Now the question is: considering your ability to drive traffic to IPR and EHP webstores, will you be giving OBS 35% of DFRPG?

By: Paul Chapman

Paul Chapman — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:52:54 +0000

e23′s sales are available on our What’s Hot page (http://e23.sjgames.com/hot.cgi).

By: Ludomaniac

Ludomaniac — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 22:23:20 +0000

Thanks for the offer Chris. I was looking at IPR’s retailer list. It seems that the store I thought most likely to be into indie games (they publish their own line of indie comix) is already signed up. On the other hand, the last time I was in there it looked like they had eliminated their RPG section entirely!

By the way, I was looking at your store’s website. You would appear to have one of the coolest game stores I have ever seen or heard of. I wish we weren’t separated by an entire continent and a national border…

By: Chris Hanrahan

Chris Hanrahan — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:26:14 +0000

Hey Ludo,

If your FLGS needs help or advice about starting up a Retailer IPR account, have him drop me a line. I am always happy to help.

By: Fred Hicks

Fred Hicks — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:06:39 +0000

I get that. If you’re looking to get the game into your local store, you should ride on them to sign up for an account with Indie Press Revolution. They sell to retail just fine, and in a distro-like way.

By: Ludomaniac

Ludomaniac — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:00:26 +0000

I can appreciate your desire to maximize your profits on the game. You all certainly deserve it for your Herculean effort!

Looking at the Evil Hat site, I see that you are engaging retailers directly. I guess I have some minor concerns, speaking as a fan who wants to see this game both succeed on its own, and bring in new readers for Jim Butcher.

For some retailers, if it’s not available through a distributor, it may as well not exist. The local stores in my small town barely carry anything beyond D&D and Rifts anymore. They say they will special order anything they don’t carry, but this just means that they’ll order through their distributor. Asking them to step outside of their comfortable procedures to stock a class of merchandise that doesn’t sell that well anyway…I just can’t see it happening in my area.

I will happily order multiple copies of the DFRPG online, but I would prefer to buy it through a local retailer. I guess I fear the prospect of RPGs turning into a mail-order hobby.

I miss the days when the proprietor of my favorite FLGS bragged that he sold an entire slatwall of White Wolf products every week…

By: Daniel M. Perez

Daniel M. Perez — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:15:22 +0000

Yep, very much so. The freebies also get a lot of downloads. It’d be interesting to correlate freebie downloads to purchases of the same and/or other products.

By: Fred Hicks

Fred Hicks — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 17:12:57 +0000

Wow, nice! Glad to see Cultures and Armies have continued to do well (for you, now) after the hand-off.

By: Daniel M. Perez

Daniel M. Perez — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 16:59:05 +0000

Here you go, OBE Oct-Dec 2009:

Gods of the Shroud – 5
Hard Boiled Armies – 27
Hard Boiled Cultures – 20
Horrors of the Shroud: The Death-Mother – 5
Poisoncraft 4E: The Syrallax – 4
Poisoncraft: The Codex Venenorum – 4
Races of the Shroud: The Half-Dead – 3
Shroudborn Multiclass – 4
Shrouded Agendas: The Purifiers – 3
Shrouded Paths: The Unbroken – 2
The Witch Doctor Player Class – 6

By: Fred Hicks

Fred Hicks — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:25:05 +0000

I’ve been chewing on this one a lot. I think the answer, early on, is “probably not”. It’s not that I don’t see the value of distro, it’s that I don’t think the purchasing cycles and timetables and bureaucracy-like elements of the system will serve us well at all.

Consider: I run Jim Butcher’s official website. We’ve got a large number of eyeballs in addition for Spirit of the Century in the form of the purchasers represented by the above numbers. These are potent sales sources that we already have access to through IPR and now through the Evil Hat web store.

If Evil Hat can achieve this kind of sales volume without engaging distro, then what major incentive do we have to go that route, especially given that it always means less money for us?

By: Fred Hicks

Fred Hicks — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:17:56 +0000

Yeah, that’s my expectation as well. And moreover, it’s a model I think actually makes sense on both sides of the equation, even though it’s not going to be immediately obvious to every retailer. The critical mass helps retailers weed out the stuff that’s less likely to sell at their store, to focus on the “big web phenomena” that will move off their shelves. That manages risk for them, really, but some will flinch at “not getting access to the hot thing right away”.

And on my end, at the time when the financial proposition of the product is at its most vulnerable (at the start — when costs aren’t recouped), the strategy focuses sales on methods which yield the larger amount of revenue for Evil Hat, which builds a more stable, successful product in the long run.

By: Ludomaniac

Ludomaniac — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:39:36 +0000

I’m terrible with numbers, so I don’t see anything in there that you don’t. I do have a question: given the popularity of the Dresden Files as a property, will you be offering the game through the traditional distribution chain? I figure there has to be a huge pent-up demand for this product (or maybe I’m just generalizing my personal pent-up demand).

By: Jim Henley

Jim Henley — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:53:21 +0000

I think the game-store long-tail might stem from: it’s a while before the part of the hobby that isn’t web-centric learns about these games! Eventually either the FLGS hear a critical mass of mentions from their web-savvy customers OR the less-plugged-in customers eventually discover SOTC or Dogs or BW at cons or from their more-plugged-in gaming buddies. Same result: it takes months to years for these games to get on the radar of FLGS staff; when it happens, the games are “new” to the FLGS and their meatspace-oriented customers.

Re Penny and improv groups: my own director LOVES Penny and is scheming up a kind of Penny mini-con for sometime this spring.

By: Reverance Pavane

Reverance Pavane — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:51:46 +0000

I do have to admit that getting PDFs from IPR is quite useful in order to bring the total of an order up to a level where shipping on the physical part of the order gains another $5 discount.

By: Chgowiz

Chgowiz — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 21:24:46 +0000

Your post got me to thinking about the OSR publishing niche, so I posted my sales/downloads and encouraged others to do the same. We have a few links/numbers in the thread - hopefully more to come. (I linked to your article as well, so hopefully we can get some interesting discussion going.)

By: Fred Hicks

Fred Hicks — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:48:42 +0000

Yeah, I totally hear you with the shipping costs at IPR. The problem was that the free shipping threshold simply wasn’t sustainable as shipping costs rose and rose. What’s not immediately obvious is that the overall trend cover price on books was rising at the same time, at least modestly; so it was a double-hit: the amount of free shipping orders increased, but the numbers of products ordered weren’t increasing as much, so the shipping costs that were getting absorbed by the seller — and passed on to the publishers — was in danger of killing the value of IPR as a sales venue. In the end, we had to choose which non-ideal option to go with, and I think we made the right one. People can still get reduced shipping costs when buying in volume, and we don’t have to constantly change what the threshold is to keep up with how shipping costs and product prices rise.

By: Sophie Lagacé

Sophie Lagacé — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:40:01 +0000

I need to write and post the S7S review I promised, and I need to look at A Penny for my Thoughts.

Re: IPR: I don’t know how it affected other customers, but when the shipping costs started being charged differently, it affected my buying habits. I used to target that $35 break point and tended to try small, unknown products to round up the numbers, which was fun. Nowadays, I tend to wait for purchases that are planned as I have less motivation for impulse buy when ordering online from IPR. All bets are off when I’m at F(L)GS, though.

I also like to encourage my F(L)GS with my dollars, and to help make titles more visible throughout the gaming community by ordering them through the stores.

For PDFs I now tend to go to IPR more than OBS. If a title is available in both places, I get it from IPR because I want to support this business. I hardly ever buy anything from Lulu anymore. And of course, my overall purchases have dropped with the crappy economy…

By: Paul Tevis

Paul Tevis — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:16:31 +0000

“Penny made back its money, no problem, so more than anything it being a laid-back product suits us just fine given our mutual tendency to be involved in many often larger projects at the same time.”

That’s about right.

By: Daniel M. Perez

Daniel M. Perez — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:10:34 +0000

Always fantastic to have these breakdowns, Fred. Let me see if I can pull together the OBE numbers for you as well, just for completion sake with the data you put out for the rest of the year.

By: Tim Gray

Tim Gray — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:03:06 +0000

IPR – I’ve definitely found, for print products, that retail sales are maybe half the total in the early stages and a much higher percentage as the product matures.

Penny – can Paul think of ways to promote it to improv groups?