Evil Hat Sales Numbers: Q1 2011

Not really, no. Some printers might offer that deal, but mine doesn’t.

Actually, it’s more complicated than that (but what isn’t?). A return customer for a given title doesn’t have to go through the set-up process again, which may have its own costs associated with it. So that’s a potential savings. On the other hand, usually a reprint is not done at the same scale (quantity) as the original printing. Since that means a smaller print run on the reprint, the economies of scale dictate a higher cost per unit than the original print run.

Lifetime volume is quite respectable, but it’s a slow seller. It’s a nice big book, 7×10 format, but I think some folks are also a little balk-y at the $30 pricetag. But in the small press set, I feel it’s priced appropriately for a 300+ pager.

Yeah, while distro didn’t make as strong of a showing as it could have when we did our initial preorder + launch sales — our direct sales did at least as well as distro did — it has really borne itself out in the long haul after our initial direct-sales spike.

This is very much a multi-variable equation, of course. We had a few years to build buzz (granted, some of it negative due to that length), and in general our preorder tactics work well for getting people talking about the game before it actually starts showing up on shelves. Having a big preorder push, even in direct sales, meant that we had a critical mass of fans talking about the game. This should by its nature feed some of the traffic into game stores, as folks curious about the game drop by to give it a look. Then combo that with what distro+retail is doing on its own: providing first-contact discovery of the game for folks who don’t follow the right blogs or twitter accounts or whatever online. So we get the combinative benefit of all of that stuff, and over the longer haul, that benefit is one that’s expressing most strongly in distribution & retail sales. I’m happy with it.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard that it doesn’t have much of an effect. The awards we do and are likely to contend for are based as much on folks who are post-purchase and happy about it, as they are on everything else. Awards can also happen long enough after a product release that it’s hard to say what other factors are in play: if awards boost sales, say, 10%, but we also experience a natural time-based drop-off in sales of 10%, the boost of the awards and the drop will both mask each other: it’ll simply look like a plateau.