Seeds of Trust

So, for a while now Evil Hat has been offering the Brick & Mortar PDF Guarantee (read about it here).  This is a program we’ve test-driven with the help of Endgame, then expanded as a casual, as-asked-for thing with our customers.  Its implementation has always been dirt simple — the customer contacts Evil Hat or asks their retailer to, we ask for some sort of proof of the purchase, and then we use DriveThruRPG‘s complimentary copy sending tool to get the customer the PDF for the physical product they bought.

Dirt simple is the key to this. There’s nothing fancy here. There’s a little bit of trust, all within reason: we trust the customer not to try to pull a fast one on us (if sending us a scanned receipt or the like), we trust the retailer to be forthright with the verification of the purchase, and so on. We’re getting something for that extension of trust, too — a customer that’s just a little bit more of a fan of ours, a retailer that’s aware that we’re working to keep them in business while still giving their customers the advantages of the electronic form of the product.  These seeds of trust grow into relationships, and relationships are how we earn repeat business, both from the customer and the retailer.

And past that, we’re doing it with pretty minimal risk; considering we’re already willing to sell people Print+PDF bundles at no extra charge over the print copy alone, the PDF at risk of being given away without a backing purchase is already getting treated like an advertising expense, an incentive to drive sales of the print product, rather than a salable stand-alone item. While we do sell the “solo” PDF as well, that’s not the transaction that’s occurring here. So in the rare and unlikely case that someone’s pulling a fast one on us, so what? They’ve pulled a fast one on us to get access to a piece of advertising.

When it came time to look at doing this sort of thing with a preorder, however, some elements had to be re-jiggered and adjusted for that particular scenario.

The trick in part was that we couldn’t use DriveThru to comp PDFs; when we run a preorder, we don’t put the PDF up for sale yet (that waits until the book is close to shipping or has shipped), so there’s no product there to “comp”. And looking ahead to the Dresden Files preorder in particular, we knew we could be dealing with a scale where handling all of the retailer-sale comps by hand would be real tricky.

Again, we worked with Endgame to pilot our ideas. And again, we aimed for dirt simple. Our “instant PDF preorder” program with a retailer would be another extension of trust: we give the PDF to the retailer, and when the retailer takes a paid preorder for the product, the retailer has permission from us to make a copy of the PDF of that product for the customer — burned on a CD, copied onto a memory stick, whatever works.

By delegating this to the retailer, we both get the workload off our plate and ensure that the retailer is the one maintaining the quality of the relationship with their customer — which in turn builds the strength of the relationship between the retailer and us. We don’t get seen as taking the customer away from the retailer, and we support a perspective that PDFs can be used to the advantage of the FLGS (a perspective that is very much in need of some solid working examples). The retailer feels motivated to promote our products because they come with an easy value-add, which helps to maximize the advantage of using FLGSes as loci of word-of-mouth advertising for our products.

And the customer ends up seeing both the retailer (21st century thinking! Looking out for their customers!) and the publisher in a positive light. Best of all, it empowers those customers to choose how best to use their money to support the businesses they want to see succeed. There’s no devil’s choice of “Do I order from the publisher and get the free PDF, or do I eschew the PDF to make a local purchase that supports my favorite game store?” They get to select the option that supports both of us, with all of the possible benefits.

This worked out pretty well with Endgame, and we could see clear from there to extending the delegated-trust aspect to cover our entire catalog with any retailers we bring on board. Why not give the PDFs of all our products to the retailers? In doing so, we give them easy, free to us and very low cost to them value adds when selling our products in their store; this motivates them to order and sell more of our games; and if they aren’t already familiar with our games, giving them access to the PDFs of all of them means they can build that familiarity.

Especially as we looked ahead to the preorder for the Dresden Files RPG and the exposure that would get us, it was clear this was an angle we should pursue. The main difficulty left was figuring out an easy way to get the files to the retailers, and for that we turned to Dropbox.com.  By establishing a “share folder” with the retailer through Dropbox, we both get them the files and gain a conduit for sending additional electronic materials their way down the line. And the drag-and-drop, sync-in-the-background nature of the service means we’re minimizing the effort as much as possible.

All in all this program looks to be working very well.  When a retailer contacts me asking for the details, I send them this:

Hi there,

We are running an online preorder for the Dresden Files RPG (in two volumes available through Indie Press Revolution, Alliance Games Distributors, and Esdevium, shipping in late June/early July).

As part of that we’re looking to partner with game stores to offer an in-store “instant content preorder” option. Basically the deal is this: folks preorder the game books through you, and you provide them copies of the PDFs of the games when they place the (paid) preorder with you — maybe burning them to CDs, or asking them to bring by a memory stick for you to transfer the PDFs to them, whatever works for you.  This way folks get something right away to satisfy that instant gratification itch, while you get to capture that sale in-store.

If you are interested in doing this, the next steps are super easy:

- You sign up for an account with dropbox.com

- You tell me what email address you’ve signed up with

- I set you up with a shared folder that I put copies of the preorder PDFs in

- You take preorders. You burn those PDFs to the CD to give to customers who preorder.

- We both get happy customers.

I trust you not to sell copies of the PDFs without it being tied to purchase of the books. Trust! It’s a new concept in business, I know.

I’m also willing to give you copies of the PDFs of our other games so you can directly provide the benefits of the PDF guarantee to your customers if that’s something you’d be into.  Please let me know if you are; otherwise we can just give you the Dresden Files PDFs to back the preorder and call it a day.  Details found here:

http://www.evilhat.com/home/pdf-guarantee/

Best,

Fred Hicks
Evil Hat Productions, LLC
www.evilhat.com

And so far we’ve gotten a number of retailers signed on board:

USA

• Game Daze (8 locations, AZ)
• Endgame (Oakland, CA)
• Black Diamond Games (Concord, CA)
• Dicehouse Games (Fullerton, CA)
• Gamescape North (San Rafael, CA)
• North Coast Role Playing (Eureka, CA)
• The Realm (Brea, CA)
• Between Books (Claymont, DE)
• 2d10 Games (Fort Myers, FL)
• Gameopolis (Idaho Falls, ID)
• Safari Pearl (Moscow, ID)
• Castle Perilous (Carbondale, IL)
• Games Plus (Mount Prospect, IL)
• G-Mart (Chicago & Champaign, IL)
• Hometown Games (Lawrence, KS)
• Comic Book World (Florence, KY)
• The Louisville Game Shop (Louisville, KY)
• Evolution Games (Lansing, MI)
• Village Games (Anoka, MN)
• Games HQ (Charlotte, NC)
• Myriad Games (Salem, NH)
• All Things Fun! (West Berlin, NJ)
• Active Imagination (Albuquerque, NM)
• Zombie Planet (Albany, NY)
• Little Shoppe of Games (Oklahoma City, OK)
• Rainy Day Games (Aloha, OR)
• Red Castle Games (Portland, OR)
• 7th Dimension Games (Abington, PA)
• The Games Keep (West Chester, PA)
• Veteran Games (Warwick, RI)
• Dragon’s Lair Comics & Fantasy (Austin & San Antonio, TX)
• Generation X Comics (Bedford, TX)
• Rogues Gallery Comics & Games (Round Rock, TX)
• Game Parlor (Chantilly & Woodbridge, VA)
• The Dreaming (Seattle, WA)
• Gnome Games (Green Bay, WI)
• Pegasus Games (Madison, WI)
• Lost Legion Comics & Games (Beckley, Charleston, and Princeton, WV)

Internationally

• Leisure Games (UK)
• Area 51 Games (UK)
• Kingdom of Adventure (UK)
• Patriot Games (UK)
• Fantask A/S (Denmark)
• Sphaerenmeisters Spiele (Germany)
• Mark One Comics & Games (New Zealand)
• Infinitas (Australia)
• Milsims Games (Australia)

Recruiting is the first hurdle, here. While we did reach out directly to a handful of the above stores, we generally waited for them to come to us. (And they did; that list above numbers in the upper 40s, and it took us about three weeks to build to that point.)

Waiting for the retailer to come to you might not sound like a good strategy, but the way we did it was to use our social media ties to our fans to encourage those stores’ potential customers to go into those stores and directly advocate the idea of signing up with the program.  A retailer is going to respond more positively to a customer coming in and saying “I would like to give you some money; here’s how to make me do that” than a publisher coming to the retailer and saying “I’d like you to do this thing in the hopes of making money which you’ll spend on my stuff”. When you’re selling something, you’re going to make more time for the guy who is trying to buy something from you than for the guy who is trying to sell you something too.

We also worked with one of our distributors, Alliance, to help get the word out, and early-adopting retailers also did a bit of talking among themselves.

There’s a hidden advantage in this, too. If a retailer is motivated enough to make that initial contact after the customer expresses their interest, then we’ve solidly established that this retailer has a bit of a proactive drive (and a willingness to do business by email) — something that is really needed for this program to work. There’s little value in offering the program through retailers who aren’t motivated to make the most of it, after all.

Then, when the instructions go out on how to sign up, if they do sign up it’s an indication they’re on board with the basic technical aspects of the program: sign up for dropbox, install the software, burn the PDFs to CD. All pretty simple stuff, but there is still the occasional retailer out there with an anti-technology bent. It’s in our best interests to focus our energies and efforts on those retailers looking at how to leverage technology to their store’s benefit — those are the retailers who are more likely to see that PDFs can be used in cooperation rather than in competition with their commercial interests.

Because really when it comes down to it, this is the sort of program that needs a little bit of advocacy, of belief that it’s a right thing to do. The retailers that have signed up with us are in that camp, and we’re happy — excited, even — to send them as much business as we can. (In addition to adding their names to the list on the DFRPG Preorder Page, I also tweet encouragements to their customers to seek them out and thank them with purchases.)

But above all, we’re showing the retailer trust and support, and they’re showing us trust and support in return. That’s a relationship. That’s a healthy relationship, and the sort of one that the hobby business could use more of. And it’s just the beginning, really. We have yet to see how fertile this “dirt simple” soil will prove in the years to come, as Evil Hat continues to grow, and continues to put more products on the shelves of these retailers.