Deadly Fredly

I’m a fan of Seth Godin‘s brand of nuMarketing, even though I don’t always agree with it. Recently, he posted “Make Big Plans“, an as-typical very short post that alludes to how, in essence, if you plan big and pursue that plan, you’re going to have a hell of a bigger chance of actually making good on that plan than if you don’t ever plan big and always shoot for the small target. In short, trying something is more likely to accomplish that thing than not trying it.

Common sense, right? But it’s the whole world, when it comes to publishing, and many other creative things besides. It’s better to plan big, to try and even then to fail, and to build on what you learn in the process, than to dither and worry and not put yourself out there (read Ryan’s thoughts along a similar vein, there).

You are harming your dreams far more by not trying.

Maybe you’ll find out that you don’t actually like the publishing gig. Maybe you’ll put something out there and it just isn’t the sort of thing to catch mass appeal. Maybe you’ll discover that without someone doing some serious grass-roots marketing push behind your awesome idea, nobody’s going to hear about it.

But any one of those are a net positive gain, experientially. You know these things now instead of forever wondering. And because you’ve built a body of what you know for sure, you can start deciding what the next thing you need to do, is. Maybe it’s correcting a root cause. Maybe it’s going off and doing something else entirely. Either of which is way better than not having tried.

That’s not to say you should blindly leap out there, sell the farm, print 10,000 copies. Trying instead of not-trying is not the equal of recklessness or stupidity. More than ever, the barrier to trying is lower. You can print 100 copies. You can print 50. You can release in PDF only. You can release for free, on a website that costs you nothing or maybe $5 a month.

The options are there. They’re cheap. And they’ll give you the chance to make some first steps.

So why not try?

(Unrelatedly, the Evil Hat sale ends come midnight. Don’t miss out!)

The Evil Hat February sale is still going on, and entering its final week.

Our best (biggest) discounts have been in the PDF category, so it’s no surprise the most activity has been there. Looking in at DriveThruRPG stats has been the easiest way to monitor things; far and away the big hit has been $5 Spirit of the Century, enough so that I’m considering making that particular sale price permanent. On DTRPG, we’ve sold 61 copies at the time of this writing, in February, compared to January’s 18; and this is of a game that’s over 4 years old. Clearly we’re picking up folks who’ve been holding off for years, or who are intrigued by the deal after learning about Fate through some other Fate product. Most (possibly all) of our other products at DTRPG are showing an uptick as well.

On the Evil Hat webstore, the story is mixed. PDF sales are doing slightly stronger overall, and our older-catalog items are selling slightly better. Comparing to January, the volume of sales for the Dresden Files RPG is down a bit, as are Wizard Fudge Dice, even accounting for the partial-month data vs. full month data thing, though the PDFs are certainly getting picked up. Overall, not a shock: the stuff which is discounted continues to sell and even sells a bit better, while the stuff that wasn’t or couldn’t be discounted (DFRPG in print, the dice) has fallen off a bit. It does mean that despite the back catalog doing slightly better than usual, probably well enough to absorb the “cost” of the sale for that segment (and thus yielding a higher dollar total), the newer items in the catalog aren’t carrying their weight on a month-to-month comparative basis, so we’ll likely exit the month with a smaller dollar total than January. It’s just funny (funny-hmmm) that the drop isn’t coming from the sale items (which are bringing in less cash per item sold), but instead from the not-sale items.

It’d be easy to draw some sort of causal relationship here, supposing that the PDF sales are “cannibalizing” the print sales due to the sale pricing on the PDFs, but for the moment at least I’m more inclined to think of this as a purely correlative thing. Sure, sending eyeballs at the sale items may be taking those eyeballs away from the regular-price items, but the DFRPG is just generally likely to show cooling off over time, as any RPG product is, so it’s hard to sort out the one from the other (and those from other unidentified factors; January may simply have seen a burst in post-Christmas gift-cash-driven spending, for example).

Overall, I’m given to thinking that DTRPG is the better venue for doing sales-type stuff, at the end of the day. They’ve “trained” their purchaser base to look for deals, and they’ve got some optimizations on the site to drive people towards those sales when they occur, and the nonphysical products they sell feel pretty easy-to-grab-a-handful in an age of electronic content  on demand. Their customer base is much larger than an individual publisher’s direct-sale webstore, so the volume benefit

At any rate, there’s only one week left for this sale, so if you’ve been holding off, get cracking! The Evil Hat webstore is the best way to go in terms of getting us the biggest share of the money, but if you judge Indie Press Revolution or Drive Thru RPG is deserving of your financial love, the sale is running there as well.