Anatomy of a Preorder

Day to Day Sales Volume (first 5 days)

Cumulative Sales Volume (first 5 days, each title)

Totals For The First Five Days

600 copies of Your Story, 573 copies of Our World preordered. A total of 1,173 books.

The Numbers

These are based solely on preorders placed through the Evil Hat Webstore. I take ‘em to be a pretty damn good sign, even with the (expected) tapering off over time.

This is a very short time period to be sampling; it’s not clear what the basic level of day to day sales is going to look like without the early “alpha strike” effect in play.  We also have some economic milestones ahead: taxes get filed on the 15th, so people may be waiting on refunds, and mid-month, two-week, and end-of-month paychecks haven’t landed yet.

As I noted earlier this week, if we hit about 1000-1100 direct-sale orders of each book, we’ll be looking at a break-even point.  So where we’re at, we’re over halfway. And that’s before factoring in eventual sales into distribution and retail, through IPR, at conventions, and so forth.

Factors Going Into This

So what factors went into this preorder?

Killer IP: The Dresden Files is an incredible license, and its fans are legion.

Our Own Brand Strength: Evil Hat’s been putting out well-received games, if intermittently, for a few years now.  People are now buying our games because they’re our games, not just because of the license in this case.

Positive Anticipation: We’ve been carefully managing the anticipation of this game for a long time. We’ve had to, because the game has taken a dog’s age to assemble.  But measures were taken to make sure that — as much as possible — that anticipation stayed as positive as it could.

Transparency: Part of that was done by doing what I’m doing right now: running the company very openly, rarely if ever spinning the facts hard enough that people felt like we were hiding something.

Community: We invest time and attention and respect and response in our community whenever we can.  I’ve talked about this in other posts on this blog if you want to get into the nitty-gritties of it, but the end result of it is: we don’t have customers, we have fans, and those fans are eager to support us.

Generous Previews: We’ve been previewing content for… well, years, now.  Not long before the preorder started, we put out our biggest preview yet, an entire chapter that showed in 40 pages what a campaign using the game would look like (and showcased the visual qualities of the game as well).  This built confidence that an early purchase would not be a wasted purchase.

Instant Content: People get access to the PDFs right away (even if they’re a little incomplete). This lets them hit the ground running, and enables them to build enthusiasm for the product’s impending release.  By the time the books ship, reviews will already be posted, tweets will be tweeted, drums will be beaten, and games will be underway.  That’s momentum.

Partnership and Choice (A Sidebar): And it’s momentum we’re sharing with retailers as we sign up more FLGSes to deliver the PDFs in-store when people preorder there (even though those numbers are not a part of the totals I’m sharing today).  That builds a community in the store, with the store, and allows our fans to feel like they can make a choice that supports both the publisher and their local businesses without having to sacrifice anything to do it.  People like to win for free.

Timing: Changes, the 12th book in the series, landed at about the same time as the launch. Tax day and tax rebates are just around the corner. We said we’d be launching the preorder the day after Easter, but did it on Easter so folks feel like they got a killer easter egg to open.  The preorder was launched without a lengthy period of time since the big Baltimore preview (so we caught that wave as it was still rising). We kicked the whole thing off with an instant content preorder at the Endgame Oakland minicon on the Saturday before, where at least a couple of the slots were Dresden Files sessions.

Control of Channels: I maintain Jim Butcher’s official website and forums, so it’s easy for me to create awareness of the product in a highly targeted audience. I can operate in a mode of high availability and responsiveness on discussion forums and mailing lists (I have a few years of practice at it by this point). Encouraging people to download the Baltimore preview of the game from DriveThruRPG meant I could use DriveThru’s potent suite of sales tools for outreach: was able to announce the preorder to nearly 500 downloaders.

Partnership Part II: And by working with and not against retailers (see above) I’m able to engender enthusiasm and cooperation on their part.  The fact that the preorder is shared with them means that I’m not “stealing” orders away from those stores, and that in turn means those stores will be motivated to step into a role as a remote, distributed sales force and affordable method of advertising.  Assuming that this strategy pays off, it should result in larger orders happening through my distribution partners, saving me time and money by giving me bigger quantities to ship direct to them from the printers when the books are done. This minimizes double-shipping costs.

Any questions? Any factors I missed?