It’s been a funny kind of a ride. Back in 2006-ish, when we were releasing Spirit of the Century, I felt like it was only appropriate to do something I thought I’d seen at least one or two other places on the internet, in gaming — provide a PDF together with the book when people were buying it. And with SOTC, at least, and eventually other products, it only seemed right to offer that PDF for free with the book.

We were one of the first, possibly the first, publishers to offer that kind of a bundled deal on Indie Press Revolution, and it worked out really well for us. It formed a basis of policy for us in general — folks who bought the dead-tree versions of the books should get the PDF as well because it measurably enhanced the experience of the dead-tree version and vice-versa. This policy then extended on to other venues besides IPR, which is how our Brick & Mortar Free PDF Guarantee came about. Support us or support the businesses that support us, and we’ll support you — it just felt like common sense.

More recently something unusual happened with that last part, the part that to us just seemed like a natural extension of our “first principles”, the PDF guarantee. It came in two parts, really.

The first was the idea of working together with a retail store to let the retail store be the agency of delivering the PDFs to the customer — as an incentive to purchase, sometimes an exclusive incentive if some kind of preorder was underway. Our friends in California at Endgame Oakland helped us prototype this using dirt-simple technology: file sharing and burning CDs. Nothing complicated and just a small investment in plastic discs.

The second was the sincerest form of flattery — other publishers also doing the same thing, in some form or another, offering their PDFs to customers of FLGSes when the customer buys their physical products at that store. Rogue Games was probably one of the earliest ones to do this, though they weren’t alone. A kind of critical mass formed, more or less in the same timeframe where Evil Hat was working with a number of retail stores to push the Guarantee out to their storefronts as part of the Dresden Files RPG preorder.

That critical mass turned into a conversation, and that conversation turned into a coalition, and that coalition turned into Bits and Mortar.

We put out our first press release today. It won’t be our last. Give it a read!

http://www.bits-and-mortar.com/2010/08/launch/

It’ll still be a few weeks, in some cases a few months, before we can hook up retailers and publishers — some of us are still getting our feet back underneath us following GenCon — but we’re excited to kick this thing off, to give it a name, and to start putting in the work to make this a game-changer for the industry. But even if it isn’t a game-changer in the long term — hell, we’d want to do it anyway. Because we like retailers. We like local game stores. We like PDFs. And we like you. And if we can make all of those things work together in one place, in one way, with one simple policy … why not make it happen?

Where We Started

Lifetime:

Penny: 471
DLYM: 860
DRYH: 2746
SOTC: 5219
SOTS: 605
S7S: 987

IPR For Q2 2010

Penny PDF: 2
Penny Print: 29 (20 retail)
DLYM PDF: 4
DLYM Print: 38 (35 retail)
DRYH PDF: 9
DRYH Print: 57 (48 retail)
DFRPG:OW PDF: 7
DFRPG:OW Print: 81 (50 retail)
DFRPG:YS PDF: 7
DFRPG:YS Print: 100 (64 retail)
SOTC PDF: 4
SOTC Print: 58 (49 retail)
SOTS PDF: 1
S7S PDF: 2
S7S Print: 19 (12 retail)

OBS For Q2 2010

Penny PDF: 10
DLYM PDF: 24
DRYH PDF: 39
DFRPG:OW PDF: 339
DFRPG:YS PDF: 354
Happy Birthday Robot PDF: 8
SOTC PDF: 104
SOTS PDF: 15
S7S PDF: 14

e23 for Q2 2010

DRYH PDF: 1
SOTC PDF: 1

Lulu for Q2 2010

DRYH Print: 4
SOTC PDF: 2
SOTC HC: 9

Distribution Orders, Retailer Orders, and Convention Sales in Q2 2010

This is a healthy mix, mostly Alliance and Esdevium, but later on ACD, Lion Rampant, Pegasus Spiele, and others. (We recently added PHD and one or two others to our distribution contacts as well.)

Penny Print: 130
DLYM Print: 98
DRYH Print: 136
DFRPG:OW Print: 2626
DFRPG:YS Print: 2741
SOTC Print: 251
S7S Print: 232

Evil Hat Webstore Totals for Q2 2010

Penny PDF: 9
Penny Print: 9
DLYM PDF: 10
DLYM Print: 15
DRYH PDF: 15
DRYH Print: 27
DFRPG:OW PDF: 120
DFRPG:OW Print: 1604
DFRPG:YS PDF: 112
DFRPG:YS Print: 1704
Happy Birthday Robot Print: 1
SOTC PDF: 9
SOTC Print: 31
SOTS PDF: 8
S7S PDF: 4
S7S Print: 9

Totals for Q2 (HOLY CRAP)

Penny PDF: 2 + 10 + 9 = 21
Penny Print: 29 + 9 + 130 = 168
DLYM PDF: 4 + 24 + 10 =  38
DLYM Print: 38 + 15 + 98 = 151
DRYH PDF: 9 + 39 + 1 + 15 = 64
DRYH Print: 57 + 4 + 27 + 136 = 224
DFRPG:OW PDF: 7 + 339 + 120 = 466
DFRPG:OW Print: 81 + 1604 + 2626 = 4311
DFRPG:YS PDF: 7 + 354 + 112 = 473
DFRPG:YS Print: 100 + 1704 + 2741 = 4545
Happy Birthday Robot PDF: 8 + 1 = 9
SOTC PDF: 4 + 104 + 1 + 2 + 9 = 120
SOTC Print: 58 + 31 + 251 = 340
SOTC HC: 9
SOTS PDF: 1 + 15 + 8 = 24
S7S PDF: 2 +  14 + 4 = 20
S7S Print: 19 + 9 +232 = 260

Lifetime:

Penny: 471 + 21 + 168 = 660
DLYM: 860 + 38 + 151 = 1049 (ding! 1k milestone)
DRYH: 2746 + 64 + 224 = 3034 (ding! 3k milestone)
DFRPG:OW: 466 + 4311 = 4777
DFRPG:YS 473 + 4545 = 5018
Happy Birthday Robot PDF: 9 * Note that this does not include the ones sold in Daniel’s kickstarter preorder!
SOTC: 5219 + 120 + 340 + 9 = 5688
SOTS: 605 + 24 = 629
S7S: 987 + 20 + 260 = 1267

Analysis will have to come another time, as I’ve got an evening ahead of me. But feel free to start in with your own observations in the comments!

I’ve talked about this pretty extensively over on The Dresden Files RPG website and on RPG.net, but over here at Deadly Fredly the goal with publishing posts is to pass along things that other folks can learn from. With that in mind I want to talk less about the things that went wrong so much as the anatomy of a preorder ship-out and the lessons available from the mistakes.

Let’s get down to it.

The Problem With Serving Everyone

So this is really the first time that Evil Hat has been in a position to offer strong preorder options via distribution and other means into the retailer/FLGS channel as well as direct to customers. Consider that if we weren’t selling strongly into retail prior to the product’s release, the folks who preordered directly from Evil Hat would not have the point of comparison of “dammit, this showed up in my local store a couple weeks before I got it!” Folks would simply be getting their stuff over the course of the past week and the next couple and it’d all be copacetic.  So one of the problems here is that in opening up multiple alternative ways for our customers to get our games, we’ve also created a ripe risk of problems when any one of those methods fails to execute on the same or similar schedule to all the others. In other words, if you fail to do anything other than a successful simultaneous release, someone — multiple someones, in fact — will come out the other side feeling shortchanged.

The root problem here is that the methods are intrinsically unequal, so achieving a simultaneous release is pretty tricky. Here’s a quick illustration using made-up numbers:

Suppose you have 2000 books that have been preordered. 1000 are via a distributor that sells to FLGSes, and 1000 are individual preorders you got through your web-store. That distributor in turn has, say, 100 FLGSes it’s going to ship to.  You wanna do things as simultaneously as you can, so you make sure your warehouse and the distributor both have the books in hand before you pull the trigger.

The trigger gets pulled and the shipping operation goes into full swing. The distributor ships stuff for a living, and on a massive scale. Day one they’ve got everything boxed up for those 100 destinations and all the labels printed up and scheduled with their shipping service of choice. Stuff gets picked up on day 2 and delivered pretty darn fast. The stores have those books on their shelves within a few days, they’re notifying their customers, and the customers end up with them in hand. Let’s say that all in all a week plus maybe a day or two extra has passed in this timespan, and that’s at the outside.

That’s the amount of time your warehouse — which is probably a smaller operation, or worse, you, personally — has to create ten times as many shipments, if you want to land at least somewhat close to “simultaneous”. In many — perhaps even most — cases, it just won’t play out like that. And every little delay that might come up — packing material not delivered on time, someone needing to run to the hospital a couple times in the first week, the warehouse head might need to be on the ground at Origins when the product is getting its first exposure to the public rather than back at the warehouse keeping things moving at maximum swiftness, etc — compounds the inequalities at play.

And that in short is how you get to our situation. The numbers are a little different, but the shape of the result is the same.

So How Do You “Fix” That?

Good question, and it’s one I’m not sure I can answer, but it is one I can explore.

Let’s first look at simple issues of breaking the timing model. We chose to tell our warehouse/shipping service and our distributors that they could start the shipping operation at the same time. We could have told our warehouse to get cracking a week or more in advance. But even doing that as quietly and as secretly as we could have managed, at some point people start shouting about how they’ve gotten the books.

A risk enters then not with the direct preorder folks but with the retailers/distributors.  Yes, on a per unit basis you just aren’t making as much off of a sale through the FLGS channel as you are with a direct sale. So maybe on a dollar per dollar basis sales into FLGSes are not as “important” as the ones you sell direct.

But to think that is to put blinders on your brain.  FLGSes aren’t just about selling (though that’s what keeps them afloat); they’re also about concentrating customers together in a common space. That’s a fancy way of saying that a FLGS isn’t just a store, it’s also a community. Communities promote your products and play your games. But the folks running them can be persnickety — you want to keep your relationship with them as positive as possible because if they decide they aren’t well supported by you, they’ll order fewer games from you (or will just stop ordering them entirely).

And on top of that, you should also realize that they’re one of the most cost-effective ways to advertise your product. A game on a shelf at a game store is like a mini-billboard; it reaches more eyeballs than the set belonging to the guy that buys the game. But it’s a billboard that pays you for the privilege of displaying your stuff. Yes, you could look at the steep discount you have to give in order to sell the book into retail as you paying for that, but a discounted sale is still a sale and in that regard a heck of a lot better than an unsold game sitting in a box.

All of this is a long-form way to say that if you want to bump your direct preorders ship-out timeframe earlier, you can, but you risk the standing of your other business relationships when you do so, and thus doing so may not be a good long-term play.

In Evil Hat’s specific case, in order to make the scale of the Dresden Files RPG release, we forged several new partnerships in distribution and retail. The earliest part of a partnership is often its most fragile (because there’s only so much trust that can develop in a short period of time), so that left me sensitive to how it would look if we shipped out to our direct customers well in advance of shipping to those business partners.

Okay, So If You Can’t Change The Timing, What Then?

With all of the primary junk discussed above looked at, it’s time to look at the secondary factors. Here’s where all the small lessons come into play, and I’ll try to riff on them quickly here, but I’m bound to miss some of the particulars. If you’ve got a notion that it looks like I haven’t covered, speak up.

Talk about your ideal scenario early and explicitly with all involved parties. I dropped the ball a bit here; I assumed my warehouse folks would be able to handle the load in no more than 2 weeks — a week longer than the ideally-simultaneous scenario I talked about at the top of this post, but with the added benefit of being even remotely realistic. If I’d talked this out earlier and with greater detail it might have emerged that 2 weeks wasn’t likely to be the outer limit, it was going to be more like the average. (As it is it looks like the shipping window on this is 3 weeks, due to wrap up at the end of this week, with the range running June 21st-July 9th. This is at least partly due to the other complicating factors I’ve hinted at above and elsewhere.) So maybe I could have worked out something that would’ve made better sense by talking with the warehouse and the distributors and, for that matter, the customers — all involved parties means all involved parties. More communication makes things better — who can figure!

Know your limitations. I should have run some scenarios past the warehouse in advance, with numbers, to see if I had things right. In my head it seemed to make good sense that with 1600 preorders and 5 business days, 320 preorders processed per day would be possible, especially if a little boost in staffing was in the cards (it was and is in current effect). But data often has to be massaged, so I’d've added a few days on the front of that — two to three — giving things a week and a half to play out. If I’d laid that out maybe it could have been done, maybe it couldn’t, but I would have known it sooner and been able to communicate about it and manage customer expectations better at least.

Make sure to look at the rest of your pipeline, too. My warehouse/fulfillment service is located in Gerlach, Nevada. It’s a very small town (with a population boom whenever Burning Man comes around), and out in the middle of a desert, so that means the pool of available labor is small when it needs to be temporarily boosted for a big shipping operation, and it also means that the “post office” is staffed by just one person and thus probably capped at about 50 outbound shipments per day (depending on complexity — international shipments are chock full of time-eating paperwork complexity, while domestic ones can probably be higher volume).

Try to ask yourself whether or not you’re using the right tools for the job. I might have been able to leverage the shipping power of a larger operation like one of the distributors to my advantage here, entering a short term or one-off contract with them to handle the preorder shipping. This one’s tricky in terms of how much lead time it requires, though. I would have had to know I needed to do this at least a month in advance of when shipping actually started, because I would have had to tell the printer to ship the preorder quantities to the appropriate distributor warehouse instead of to my own warehouse. Plus the contract would have to be all worked out already by/before that point. Arranging for that any later would have meant shipping the product to the distributor from the warehouse instead of the printer, which would mean incurring triple shipping charges (printer to warehouse to distributor to customer) instead of just double (printer to distributor to customer). And even then that would have to be done at least a couple weeks in advance of the ship date so the product would have time to reach distro.  Looking to the future, if Evil Hat’s due to have another large preorder like this one it may make sense to establish a secondary or primary shipping relationship with a distributor able to do fulfillment services (I know Alliance offers this and I’m told PSI does as well).

But “right tools” doesn’t just stop with the warehouse/fulfillment service you choose. You should also look at the methods you’re using.  The vast majority of  preorders got “free shipping” and I decided to splurge on using UPS for all of those. That may have been a good idea; see the comment above about Gerlach’s post office’s capacity — which I didn’t know about at the time — but also consider that the most affordable shipping method for us via the USPS, Media Mail, takes several weeks to reach its target and doesn’t come with a tracking option. But it’s possible that postal mail packages might have less up front processing in terms of the data entry necessary to generate a UPS label and tracking number. Given some foresight on this one we could have run some stopwatch testing here — how long to prep 10 media mail packages vs. how long to prep 10 UPS ones, for example.

Plan for things to go wrong. When you’ve got this many moving parts in one tight timeframe, it’s not that things may go wrong, it’s that things will go wrong. At least from where I’m standing I feel like I went into this thing blind for whatever reason to the possibility that Other Things Might Happen At The Same Time. I don’t know if I could have eliminated the impact of the things that did crop up, but I might have been able to at least alter the plan in a way that would mitigate the hit.

People will get disappointed. Know who you’ll disappoint in advance. Knowing who you’ll disappoint means you can get out in front of the disappiontment and, for example, offer low-cost apology benefits where you can (I’ve already said elsewhere I’ll send a free PDF of any Evil Hat product to someone who feels wronged by how the preorder has played out, though I haven’t trumpeted it as loud as I could), or at least work at managing expectations and hopefully turning some of that disappointment into happiness simply by virtue of not keeping folks in the dark.  The worst thing you can do when disappointment comes knocking is to hide your face and say nothing. It will suck more for you (believe me), but by taking it in the face and keeping people in the loop it will suck less for them.  Your customers and business partners outnumber you, so in the algebra of customer relations you’ll net a positive by owning it and addressing it as best as you can. Anxiety increases exponentially in a vacuum of information.

What Did I Miss?

I’m sure I’m leaving out an angle or topic of discussion in all of this, but over 2,000 words in I think I’m exceeding easy reading length and I know I’m starting to lose coherence. What questions or answers or analysis do you see in recent events surrounding the Dresden Files RPG preorder shipping situation?

Certainly there are some issues with such a book, so this notion is not without merit. Color art can cost you, on average, double what black and white does. And if you’re oriented on print-on-demand technology, especially with one-copy-at-a-time outfits like Lulu, the unit costs can be really prohibitive.

But the thing to realize — the thing I hadn’t entirely realized yet either — is that print on demand is nevertheless putting a squeeze on the traditional printers out there. The printer I used for the Dresden Files RPG, Taylor Specialty Books operating out of Dallas, does very good work, but I had no expectation that they were able to do print runs that numbered in the hundreds rather than thousands.

Turns out I was wrong.

When I started talking to Daniel Solis about taking on the printing and distribution duties for Happy Birthday Robot — a full color interior, hardcover, 40-page, square (8.5×8.5) kid-friendly story-building game formatted like a children’s book — I thought I’d have to do a lot of poking around to see what print on demand places would charge me only an arm rather than an arm and a leg for doing the work on a print run of maybe 500 or so. But I figured I’d ask Taylor anyway to see what they could offer.

Their answer? They can do print runs as small as 300 copies.

This was surprising, and I asked for a quote. Reality is, the cost per unit on a print run that small is not great (though still pretty good if you consider the quality of an offset printing job), and started to get more workable as things moved into the 500-or-so copy range. That’s the range I was looking for (I ultimately settled on 750 copies instead), and I had a good established relationship with Taylor, so I went for it. The resulting book is damn pretty.

I figure some of y’all are eager to see real numbers on this thing, so here’s what I can show you:

Product specs: 40 page, case bind 8.5×8.5; physical proofs for cover and interior; no dust jacket; cover: 4/0=Process Ink ONE side, BLEED-OK, 100# Gloss Book w/ Gloss Laminate over .120 board; 40 page text: 4/4=Process Ink OVER Process Ink, BLEED-OK, 100# Matte Text (328ppi) 5×8 page signatures; binding: smyth sewn, no head & foot bands, round back case bind on the 8.5″ spine

The Quote (not including the shipping component, which ran in the mid-$300 on 750 copies):

These totals are still usually well outside the purchasing power of a guy-in-his-basement indie, but they’re pretty damn interesting at the level of folks willing to spend a few thousand bucks to produce a slim game with high production values (I’m thinking of companies like Bully Pulpit and Galileo Publishing among others).

As it is the unit cost in the mid-$5 range meant we could price the Happy Birthday Robot hardcover at $25 (comparable to many a children’s book) and still manage to make a small profit over expenses when selling into distribution. That’s about the sweet spot that you want to aim for.

Back at the beginning of the Dresden Files RPG preorder in April, I decided to track daily sales data — at least as expressed through our web-store. It’s been an interesting ride, one that’s now over as I don’t intend to keep tracking day to days from here on out. I’ll share the data and some pretty graphs down below after the cut.

What’s perhaps more exciting, though, is that once we add in the distributor and direct-to-retail orders we’ve processed, DFRPG sales on each volume are in the mid-4000′s — around 75% of what we printed in the first print run. That’s major news because of another statistic I’ve been tracking across the years — Spirit of the Century’s sales numbers. With PDF and print sales combined, SOTC was just a bit past 5,000 units sold (before this quarter’s numbers get added in).  It took SOTC since the latter part of 2006 to get to that figure, about 3 and a half years. Dresden Files, meanwhile, has gotten within striking distance of that figure in three months — and with an aggregate price-point between the two volumes that’s three times what SOTC’s cover price is. Huge, huge, huge.

Granted, I have a fat check to write Jim Butcher for his royalties, a $60,000 loan to repay, and probably a $40,000-or-so reprint run (for about 3000 copies of each volume) on the nearish horizon, but I’m at ease because (once the preorder shipments wrap up and I can demonstrate their shipment to PayPal) the money we’ve been drawing in through the Evil Hat webstore pretty much covers all that. The checks that’ll roll in from the distributors in about a month will get to go right into the profit coffer.  Rob’s and my taxes will be real interesting this year, I have a feeling.

Anyway, the pretties:

Day to Day Sales

Cumulative Sales Over Time

% Difference Between Volumes in Sales Over Time

Still sitting nicely between 5 and 6 percent. The vast majority of sales are sets, still, at least in direct orders.

The Raw Data

You should check it out today, though, because he talks about his perspective on the crazy five-year project we’ve been working on called The Dresden Files RPG.

I’m bringing this up (again) because I got the proofs in from the printer today. Here’s a peek and Dan’s gorgeous layout:

I’m planning to go to Origins Con.. Any advice on things to look for from a wannabe game designer perspective, or for the con itself?

That’s a good question. What’s your answer?

I bring this up because the special-edition hardcover is available for pre-ordering right now. It’ll stay available to order until June 6th or until they hit about 100 copies ordered, whichever comes first (which for all I know could come fast). The special-edition is being printed to order, come June. It’s available only direct through the Gameplaywright folks, and costs $27 + shipping. As an added benefit, folks who preorder the hardcover will get the PDF within 24 hours of placing the order. Details and purchase widgetry to be found hyunh: http://gameplaywright.net/?page_id=958

If you’d rather wait (why? why?!) then no worries — hang around a while and wait for the softcover edition to go on sale. I’ll holler atcha when it does.

This is a graph over time of the “gap” — the size of the difference between Evil Hat webstore preorders of the print versions of the Dresden Files RPG volumes, Your Story and Our World.

Your Story has been leading Our World by several copies throughout the span of the preorder — presently, at 1343 copies preordered, it’s ahead by 73 over the 1270 of Our World.

What’s interesting is that as of about two or three weeks ago — essentially one month into the preorder — the gap started to narrow.  I’m not sure what this is indicative of, though I suspect it’s probably not indicative of one thing so much as several. Two main factors I can easily think of are:

• People learning that Our World can be used as a “fan guide” and setting book if you’re not interested in RPGs or are, but not in Fate;
• People who bought Your Story getting the next paycheck that makes it possible to come along and buy Our World as well (or the other kind of follow-up sale: buy Your Story to see if it’s all it’s cracked up to be, and upon positively evaluating that, coming back to buy the next book too)

We’ve had four full weeks of the Dresden Files RPG preorder over on the Evil Hat webstore.  In that time, we’ve broken 1,000 copies sold of each of the two books. For the record, that is officially nuts. We also have an order in from one of our distributors, arguably the largest, tallying up to about 1,100 of each title too, some bound for the book trade, some bound for comic stores, some for game stores. We’re in very good shape right now, and on the cusp of getting the files off to the printer and starting to think about getting the second wave preorder happening over on IPR, stand-alone versions of the PDFs up for sale, etc. Good stuff.

Here’s the breakdown of our webstore sales for the data-junkies. What’s particularly interesting is we’ve only seen about a 6-or-so percent gap between the two titles. Most days Your Story outsells Our World by a couple copies, but there’ve been two days out of the 28 where Our World sold a copy or two more.

The Graphs

The Daily Numbers

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.

Lifetime:

Penny: 398 (so close!)
DLYM: 752
DRYH: 2562
SOTC: 4937
SOTS: 585
S7S: 868

IPR For Q1 2010

Penny PDF: 6
Penny Print: 40 (29 to retail)
DLYM PDF: 4
DLYM Print: 59 (52 to retail)
DRYH PDF: 10
DRYH Print: 79 (69 to retail)
SOTC PDF: 7
SOTC Print: 111 (88 to retail)
SOTS PDF: 2
S7S PDF: 4
S7S Print:  59 (40 to retail)

OBS For Q1 2010

Penny PDF: 11
DLYM PDF: 32
DRYH PDF: 49
SOTC PDF: 69
SOTS PDF: 11
S7S PDF: 36

e23 for Q1 2010

DRYH PDF: 1
SOTC PDF: 4
SOTS PDF: 1

Lulu for Q1 2010

DRYH Print: 3
SOTC HC: 4

Distribution Orders in Q1 2010

These were Esdevium; Alliance has placed PO’s, but I’m considering those to be Q2 numbers since I’m invoicing them in April.

DRYH Print: 12
SOTC Print: 48
S7S Print: 6

Evil Hat Webstore Totals for Q1 2010

Penny PDF: 7
Penny Print: 7
DLYM PDF: 6
DLYM Print: 7
DRYH PDF: 15
DRYH Print: 15
SOTC PDF: 8
SOTC Print: 31
SOTS PDF: 6
S7S PDF: 2
S7S Print:12

Also, Paul hand-sold 2 copies of Penny at OrcCon.

Totals for Q1 (Drumroll Please)

Penny PDF: 6+11+7 = 24
Penny Print: 40+2+7 = 49
DLYM PDF: 4+32+6 = 42
DLYM Print: 59+7 = 66
DRYH PDF: 10+49+1+15 = 75
DRYH Print: 79+3+12+15 = 109
SOTC PDF: 7+69+8 = 84
SOTC Print: 111+4+48+31 = 194
SOTC HC: 4
SOTS PDF: 2+11+1+6 = 20
S7S PDF: 4+36+2 = 42
S7S Print: 59+6+12 = 77

Lifetime:

Penny: 398 + 24 + 49 = 471
DLYM: 752 + 42 + 66 = 860
DRYH: 2562 + 75 + 109 = 2746
SOTC: 4937 + 84 + 194 + 4 = 5219
SOTS: 585 + 20 = 605
S7S: 868 + 42 + 77 = 987

Analysis

Few surprises: Things which were expected to be anemic, were.

Don’t Rest Your Head Doesn’t: DRYH seems to have been getting the love this past quarter. It felt surgey while I was watching various numbers scroll by, but I think the add-ups support that.

IPR is now primarily retail: As I expected, as the Evil Hat webstore matures, the direct sales biz at IPR — while still present — has dwindled. This is also likely partly due to our back catalog accreting a few more motes of dust on it. But IPR’s still doing very solidly in terms of retailer sales for us, and that’s something.

I’m sure there’s more to say, but that’s what I have time for today. Hopefully the math isn’t completely goofed up.

Quarter 2 ahead is gonna be a real interesting one. So this is our snapshot of how things looked in the “before time”, with SOTC just cresting over 5000 copies (physical and digital) sold in its lifetime, and DRYH at better than half that, S7S close to 1000 and Penny close to 500. Interesting times.

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?

So, I was tooling around for commentary and ran across this post at Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  I’m gonna quote a big chunk of it here, then get into some nitty gritties:

Tweets from Evil Hat‘s Fred Hicks indicate decent chances that they will hit 500 pre-orders each (on a book that’s not shipping for another 2-3 months) today.

That’s $45,000 grossed in two days.

He also said, “If those numbers hit 1000 each in direct-sales preorders, the print run (5000 copies each) and nearly all production costs will be covered.”

$90,000 gross to cover print and production costs. That’s one hell of an investment. Evil Hat’s not even considered one of the “large” RPG companies, is it? I mean, before this month.

So, yeah. It’s one hell of an investment.  But how does it break down exactly?

First off, consider the form factor we’re talking about here. Each book is full color, hardcover, full bleeds (the ink goes all the way to the edge of the page). The first is ~400 pages, and the second is ~270 pages.  Hefty little beasties. By getting those printed domestically, I am trading a little higher unit cost for more immediate shipping times (no customs, no slow boat from China) and a greater likelihood my print partner will be regulated in ways I find attractive (environmental regulations, worker protections), as well as the communal advantage of putting money from my company into the domestic US economy, which needs all the help it can get.

The two books at 5,000 copies each (total of 10k units) price out at a total that’s a few thousand dollars over $60,000 to print.  That’s over 2/3rds of the $90,000 gross that was mentioned in the quoted thing above.  Yes, I could have knocked that figure down a bit, but I’d be looking at an extra 2-3 months of delivery time, easy, based on what I saw come about with the send-the-files-to-getting-the-books timeline with other overseas-printed projects I’ve worked on.  I like the choice I made there and I feel good about it.

The price point on each book is $49.99 for the big one (Your Story) and $39.99 for the … uh, less big one (Our World).  This cover price translates into a flat fee per sale based on a percentage of the cover price that goes to Jim each time one of the books sell: it’s the royalty stream.  No, I’m not telling you what the percentage amount is.  With every license you’ll encounter a different structure.

So beyond whatever other fees are involved in a book sale, the royalty percentage comes out of the total (and in this case is not itself reduced by whatever discount I had to sell the book at).  In the case of an Evil Hat webstore sale, consider transactional and handling fees to take 5-10% off the top.  In the case of the preorder deal, shipping is free in the USA and mildly subsidized (about $6-10 per pair sold) for international customers.  Consider this then to amount to us making about 90% of cover on the usual web-store sale (before royalties) and 80% for free or subsidized shipping.  (Once we start selling through IPR, direct sales will get us 70% of cover before royalties come out; selling into retail through IPR or distribution will put it roughly between 40 and 44% with IPR at the high end.)

These cuts amount to the costs that scale on a per item sold basis.  I don’t pay them until the sale is made, but they come out of our theoretical $90,000 gross when we’re talking about 1000 copies of each book sold. What’s left out of that $90,000 (minus 60-odd thousand for the printing and the royalty percentage and transactional fees) are the flat, usually up front costs. Shipping could play into that (though I tend to view it as a scaling cost factor and lump it with the above).

From there, I pay for art, editing, writing. I would pay for layout, except I’m the layout guy and I own half the company so that’s sweat equity territory.  A lot of what’s left of that cost is the art, in fact, and the number would have been higher if I’d had to individually pay for every piece in the final product — but I got a big break when the guys publishing the Dresden Files comic book  gave me permission to use art from that source.  (Word to the wise publisher who wants to get into licensing: think what visual assets might come along for the ride with your license; comic books and TV shows might make the most sense from a budgetary standpoint.)

The rest after an up-front licensing fee paid to Jim went to my text oriented team.  And to be honest, with little exception, they’ve been underpaid.  Now, everyone gets underpaid in the game industry. No job in the hobby industry gets done without a little bit of “I’m paid in loving what I do”, whether that’s expressed explicitly (as it was with much of my team) or implicitly (by the rates and the paychecks simply being what they are when they’re offered).  Sweat equity happens.  All that stuff.  I do plan to pay out more if we smash through some of the bigger financial goalposts beyond simply “break even on costs”, and I’ve done everything I could to do right by the Evil Hat family throughout the process.  But this project was as much about belief and fandom as commerce, and many members of the team came to me and said “How can I help?”  Every game you see on every shelf is to some extent a labor of love for someone, somewhere in the process.  With the Dresden File RPG, it’s carpeted in wall to wall love.  Still, if you’re doing the approximated math, you can see I still paid out a solid chunk’a change in all of this to the writing and editing team, so it’s not for nothin’.

(On all of the above where I’ve been vague, I can’t get into the specific figures — percentages, amount paid to whom and so forth — because that information isn’t just mine to share.)

Math heads will also remember that the biggest chunk of change Evil Hat gets on a sale is one made direct through its web store.  That said I absolutely do not begrudge sales that happen to retailers through middle-men operations, whether it’s IPR or Alliance or Esdevium or DriveThruRPG.  Those services get us more customers and they allow the customers to support more than just the publisher with their purchasing dollars.  Which is why I’ve been enthusiastic about signing up retail stores to partner with us to offer instant PDF access for people who preorder in-store.  A retailer is an advertising program that buys your products from you — at a discount, sure, but they reach people you won’t necessarily reach yourself, and their customers often don’t want to feel like they’re forced to choose between supporting a local business and a favorite publisher.  Letting them choose both with a clear conscience is a good service to them and is why I offer it.

But to stick to the math of it, the figures I’ve given for breaking even are based on number crunches I’ve done built solely around our direct, webstore sales.

There are really three or four tiers at which I can evaluate breaking even on costs.

• At the direct sales tier, 90% of cover, Your Story breaks even around 1,000 copies, and Our World breaks even around 900.
• At the direct sales through IPR tier, 70% of cover, YS is about 1,300 copies, OW is about 1,200
• At the sales to retail high end, 44% of cover, YS is 2,400, OW is 2,100
• At the low retail end, let’s say 37% of cover based on a deep distro cut of 40% and free shipping to that distributor, YS is 3,000, OW is 2,700

But basically in the “worst case” scenarios I could expect to encounter on this product, if I’ve sold through (and been paid for) half of each print run, all costs are covered.  I plan for the worst case, seasoned with a bit of optimism that asserts I’ll sell at least the quantity of this “worst” case.

But in terms of targets for my webstore orders — my best case — I’m looking more at numbers somewhere between the first and second bullet. (Remember, about 10% of a preordered pair goes towards covering that free or subsidized shipping cost.)  So in truth we’ll hit our break even point through our webstore sales alone if we go a little bit beyond 1,000 preorders of each.

But 1,000 was such a nice round number that it’s what I tweeted as our goal.

Any questions?

But as Chris and I covered somewhat on the latest That’s How We Roll, they are also a little disappointing because they didn’t aim high enough with those funding goals. (I pick on these guys here because I like them and I like what they’re doing.)

There’s this funny thing about goals, especially goals that you enlist friends (and followers and family) to help you hit. Funny things, actually.

People love to feel like they’re part of the team, and goals are a good way to motivate that sense of teamwork.  Tell people that you need to hit a goal and, assuming you know enough of them, and that enough of them know enough people that they can motivate in turn, and that goal’s going to get hit, eventually.  We like to belong.

But there’s a flipside to that. Your goal is also the point at which people know they can relax. Once that goal’s hit … well, there might be a team, but how much teamwork is really needed?  The goal was met!

So, that takes me to Happy Birthday Robot.  Daniel was originally building his goal-target around 50 copies.  (Daniel, it should be said, has no idea how good he is; and if you know who he is, you know how right I am in saying this. And definitely check out HBR’s funding site and video — I think you’ll see, as I and others have, that this little story game has the chance to be dynamite in a bottle.)

At any rate, the twitterverse did its level best to convince him to at least shoot for 100 copies, and so he did. Then his project went live and he and his team of friends (and followers and so on) went and hit that target in the first day of his planned-for-70-days fundraising window.

And then the donations slacked off.  Even though continuing to contribute would help out, the goal was met, and so everyone relaxed.  Some people even emailed him saying “aw, man, sorry I couldn’t get in”… despite it still being possible post-goal to get in.

Personally, I would rather he’d shot for a target based on funding 200, even 300 copies.  To someone uncertain their idea has any merit, it sounds like too much — but in having such a higher target, I think more people would have risen to the occasion.  The team would’ve been bigger.

I’ve been counseling Daniel on how to set new goals to continue to motivate contributions to the project. And it’s been working, if more slowly (because, hey, original goal met, right?).  Now that he’s past the goal, every $150 more donated sends free books to kids who are learning how to become gamers.  That’s a good motivation.  I just wish it had been there up front — coulda, woulda, shoulda.

(And to bring it back around to Maschine Zeit, that project too hit its very modest funding goal in the first 24 hours. I’m betting it would’ve hit twice that goal in not much more time, had that goal been there to hit.)

My point, then, is that aiming higher than you think you should pays off.  Don’t undervalue what you create because you don’t think interest will be there.  If you are a participant in today’s social media, it’s pretty likely that the interest is there.  There’s nothing wrong with getting your friends excited about what you do, and nothing wrong with selling what you do to them.

After all, they’re on your team.

I figure that warrants a little extra talk, so here it is.

First off and up front: this was a good thing for everyone involved, and done without any kind of contentiousness. The fact of the matter is, I was getting very tired of the job, and had already dialed back my hours several months ago.  This did not lead to me providing the best customer service. Though maybe that’s a little unfair: I think I did a fine job with the customer service, but I wasn’t very timely about it, which amounted to the same end effect. Folks weren’t hearing back from me quickly, and that made IPR come off as less nimble, less alert. Not good for IPR, that, so when Brennan offered me an out I was straight up relieved.

My replacement (via an expansion of his job description) is Ryan Macklin.  Originally I hadn’t had the impression he was interested in taking on the customer service load in addition to his duties as General Manager. (General Manager sounds like a lame military-themed superhero, doesn’t it? But that’s the title.)  Turns out I was working with outdated information.  So I was double-relieved, because (here’s a little ego for you) I wasn’t sure there were many other folks who could step into the job and maintain/reclaim the level of quality I’ve striven for during my tenure with IPR, and I believed they were all otherwise occupied.  Ryan was on that short list.  So: win.

So it was good for IPR and it was good for Ryan.  It was also good for me, when it comes down to it.  The couple years (was it a couple years? seems longer) I worked this position gave me a lot of time to live up close to the relationship that exists, through IPR, between publishers and customers, and that meant I got to own a lot of anger and frustration.

I’m a negative empath in a way: I really soak up negative emotions if I’m around them, and every frustrated or torqued off customer often found me right there in their corner fuming alongside ‘em.  If a shipment went screwy, I got annoyed. If a publisher was doing a crap job of being clear and timely about shipping us new stock and I had to go write a pleasant disappointment to a customer who desperately wanted to make a purchase but couldn’t, I got really mad.  But that sort of thing just wasn’t something I could pass along, so there was a lot of bottling-up and silent grumbling that happened there.

And that’s just not something I want any more of. When you herd cats long enough, you end up with a fair number of scratches, and some of them are bound to fester. I was experiencing the kind of contempt — often as not unwarranted — that familiarity breeds.  At the end of the day I’m not well-served, nor are my relationships with other publishers well-served, by working in a position where I’m something other than a peer.  If I feel responsible for a large number of publishers, that means I’m going to feel like I own every failure, and the volume on that sort of thing is a killer. (I don’t mean for this to come off as some sort of polemic against IPR’s publishers. By and large they’re a good bunch, but the job left me wanting to hold them to the same standards of customer service and responsiveness as I hold myself to. And those are standards which — I can tell ya — are not always reasonable.)

But it’s not just about the aches and pains. Hell, they might just be a symptom rather than anything causative, and anyone who signs up for a customer service job is due for a heapin’ helpin’ of pains in the ass (gods bless ya, Ryan).  At the real core of it is, the IPR job was too big in my brain for something that should have been so small.  Knowing I had that workload ahead of me each week ground me down a bit, and I think it ground me down because it was never central to what I want to be doing with my career.  The extra money, the insider angle, those were certainly nice, but they were also distractions.  I’m better suited for running my own company — IPR isn’t that.  I’m better suited focusing on game production and publication and promotion, whether as a part of Evil Hat, or in the art direction & layout angle I have going right now with Hero Games, Margaret Weis Productions, and others.  And given that, IPR was always going to get relegated to third wheel status.  And worse, if I didn’t deliberately put it there, it would end up detracting from the stuff I really needed to be doing.

All in all it adds up to a good move.  IPR benefits by getting someone more focused on delivering excellent customer service and quality improvements for the company, and I win by unloading a big basket of frustration and distraction.   And IPR remains a big part of my life even after that separation, too: Evil Hat continues to see IPR as a strong component of its sales strategy, whether it’s in convention floor representation or online consumer and retailer sales.  Everyone wins here, and everyone improves for it.

And I for one can go back to getting excited about new small press products again … instead of regarding them as fresh additions to my workload.

I say this as I think about how often I get conflated with Evil Hat, even though Evil Hat — especially with the Dresden Files RPG — is a team effort, a collaboration.  I flinch a lot whenever I see someone credit me for a thing that I only did the “packaging” on.  I’m loud, and a lot of the work I do has to do with the delivery, the last mile of connection between the publisher and the customer.

Heck, it might be baked right into my psychology to take on those jobs that put me in that position. Customer service, layout, spokesperson, amateur marketeer, what have you — all of those are about putting polish on something and getting it straight into the hands of someone who will express some gratitude for it being done.  That’s intensely gratifying. So it’s almost certainly the case that I’m into that sort of stuff because of the sweet, sweet hit of recognition and respect it gets me.

I can’t, and shouldn’t, deny that it’s part of the equation. But if I let it be all of the equation, I’m a jerk. From where I stand, it’s the artists, the writers, the editors who are doing the heavy lifting.    And these days, those roles are not mine (except in bits & pieces, always a minority portion). They’re the people who deserve celebrating, respect, recognition.  So in the twitter tradition of “follow friday” — which, yes, is about getting people followers but is really about heaping more recognition on folks you feel deserve it — I’m going to talk quickly about the Dresden Files RPG team.

Amanda Valentine: Man, the Valentines. I was very lucky to be introduced to them a couple GenCons back — they are friends of Jim’s, so it felt right to involve them in the game, the ultimate friends-of-Jim project.  Amanda has been acting as our managing editor for the last several phases of the game’s development, and she has a keen eye for seeking out clarity in the text.  When we can explain something to Amanda’s satisfaction, we know we’ve nailed it.  Out of everyone on the project, she has probably read through the text the most times (and given the volume, that’s saying something), each time pushing us to refine and improve.  We’re in great shape because of it.

Clark Valentine: Yeah. The Valentines. Clark is Amanda’s husband and he has almost zero idea how good he is.  Clark has had our bases covered in so many ways throughout this project, stepping in and getting the main work of statblocking done when I just didn’t have the endurance for it, working up extensive examples, and writing up nearly all of the truly magnificent Baltimore chapter based on some notes Rob Donoghue put together. Whenever we’ve faltered in our step or collapsed from exhaustion, Clark has stepped in and gotten us to the finish line.  I’m pleased as hell he’s on the Leverage RPG team we’ve got going over at Margaret Weis Productions because I absolutely need to keep working with him.

Ryan Macklin: Ryan is steadily working on becoming a force of nature. He’s been acting in a complementary role to Amanda on the Dresden Files project, taking care of talent coordination, schedule management, supplemental editing, as well as a few big chunks of writing.  If you end up liking city creation in the Dresden Files RPG, it’ll be because Ryan saw where Rob Donoghue’s early draft COULD go, and took it there.  I’ve seen Ryan do the editor/developer act with a couple other Evil Hat products — Don’t Lose Your Mind and A Penny For My Thoughts — and he’s truly, truly good at it. Seeing him branch out and start to do this for other companies and projects (including Leverage) has been exciting. More folks should get to drink from this well.

Chad Underkoffler: Man, Chad. CHAD. The Chad is crazy good. For some insane reason I had thought I was the equal of reading all of our source material and digesting it clearly enough to write our setting chapters. I was deluded.  The task was way too big for me. Way too big for most people, really. But not for Chad.  He took to it like a pit bull and after many weeks — months — of work put together the definitive guide to the characters and stories of the Dresden Files.  Chad is almost too good at his job, like he throws off too much light to look at him directly.  Screw this “robot from the future powered by beer” crap; he’s a miniature sun.  And research, truly, is where that sun shines the most.  I knew this already from seeing how well he explores the ideas and stories of superheroes, swashbuckling, and faerie tales in his games (Truth & Justice, Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies, and The Zantabulous Zorcerer of Zo), but seeing him do this on a property I already thought I knew so well was really humbling.

Rob Donoghue: Rob and I were the early team for the Dresden Files project, back when we didn’t think it was too big for us (it was). But all throughout, he’s been the Brain In A Jar who takes the time to think in all directions at once.  This can be a bit like trying to ride a tornado, but man, the stuff that spins out of it.  He was the force that, together with Lenny, drove Spirit of the Century through to completion; without Spirit, no Dresden.  Getting Spirit out there gave us a chance to really test drive our new ideas for Fate on the tabletops of the public — in many ways, it’s the biggest, most commercially successful playtest ever. And his fingerprints are all over the Dresden Files RPG, even if it’s difficult to truly suss out a specific passage of text that’s entirely his.  When it comes down to it, Rob’s the guy who goes down into the mind-mines and brings back the ore.  He was the first guy to take a swing at the magic system, at city creation. It taxed him terribly, I’m afraid, but I am incredibly grateful he was on the earliest front lines, smoothing out the road so the rest of the team could march forward with greater confidence. In many ways that was the hardest work of all.

Lenny Balsera: I am certain that this project blew Lenny’s brain clear out the back of his head. That did not stop him.  While Rob could be said to be the man who made all the first moves that got us to where we got, Lenny made so, so many of the final ones. He overcame the magic system after it bested both Rob and I.  He got the vision of the system down when the rest of us were still blinking through the murk.  We thought we’d be able to just take things straight over from Spirit of the Century, but Lenny saw so many ways we could improve and refine.  I might have copy and pasted with some light editing; Lenny rewrote and where necessary reworked from the ground up.  If something in the system needed doing, he went and did it.  In so many ways, he was just fearless. You need that mentality when you need to produce something first rate.  Lenny made sure we did.

There have been others who have helped with the project, for sure — Genevieve Cogman who gave us the core text that formed the basis for our introductory setting chapters, Adam Dray on the editing tip, Kenneth Hite guest-starring as a werewolf tour guide for occult Chicago, Priscilla Spencer as our back-pocket series expert, Matt Gandy as sounding board and earliest of playtesters, Jim’s agent Jennifer Jackson, Jim Himself of course, Chris Hanrahan for his marketing and retail savvy, all of the incredible artists, the truly staggering number of alpha playtesters, our ridiculously supportive family, friends, and fans — but those are my core folks, the crew who saw the final biggest push through from start to finish, the team that salvaged the efforts that, yeah, I started, but frankly never would have finished without every one of them involved.

Shine a little light on ‘em, would ya?