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?

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

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.

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.

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 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?

Evil Hat’s PDFs are 25% Off At DriveThru

The GM’s Day sale starts today and runs for 4 days past it.  Stuff which is on sale is 25% off, and that includes all of Evil Hat’s stuff. Well worth checking out the sale — tons of publishers have weighed in.  The site’s running a little bit slow, though; I’m wondering if they’re getting hit with huge traffic.  Just remember, this “GM’s Day” event is 5 days long, so you’ve got some breathing room.

Origins Game Submissions from Evil Hat Volunteer GMs

We got a ton of volunteer sessions onto the books for Origins 2010.  Most of them are Dresden Files RPG events.  You should head on over to the Dresden Files RPG website and give it a look.

Oh Yeah, That Alliance Thing

Evil Hat got in bed with a distributor last week and that included getting specific about the Dresden Files RPG’s pricing and cover art (don’t forget you can already find out what makes up the mammoth page count already).  Normally this is something I’d be posting about at length, but, well, see the above. I definitely have great plans and intentions to get into the details of it (as I always do), I’m just pressed for time this week/month.  It’s coming, though!

Today, I’ve taken some painkillers, so I have very little to say that doesn’t dissolve into a suffusion of yellow.

I’ve got some interesting things to say about how a distributor totally backed me up earlier this week — without me being a client (at least not yet).  That, maybe Monday.

But it’s Friday, so I’ll just leave you with this:

Steve Kenson.

Fate-inspired supers.

On preorder.

Holy crap!

ICONS.

Kenson talking about ICONS.

The preorder.

The forum thread.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0ywiYboCLk

Okay, so that’s a game theory concept right there, but it’s also a big underlying current in the stuff I’ve been talking about.  This is Friday, so I’m going to be quick about it with this one.

Commenting on Wednesday’s post, Scott Acker said:

You know, at the beginning of this it was a bit like seeing the ‘trick’ behind the magician. Like where you learn how they saw the lady in half and what not. A little weird and deflating. Not because I didn’t know how this stuff works but I guess its strange having it pointed out and its you, me, etc that [you're] talking about.

And I replied:

You know, it’s easy to read this and employ the advice and do it for completely mercenary reasons only. But that’s not the magic trick, really, that’s just capable sleight of hand. For the actual magic, you have to employ all this with absolutely genuine intent to *be* that peer, to *be* respectful — not just to act like it. If you’re not authentic in that regard, that will become apparent at some point. You’ve got to mean it and live it. I’m not sure I can teach that part; some days I feel like I’m still trying to manage it myself.

At the core of all of this is that game theory idea that “Nash” was on about: doing what’s good for the group (the community) and what’s good for the individual (the community organizer).  Consistency in picking the best options in front of you — where “best” is defined as the greatest aggregate good for both you and your community — pays out.

If you constantly prioritize your community without giving any heed to your own needs in the formula, running the community is going to wear you thin and leave you resentful. It’s going to kill the reason you got that community going in the first place. In the long term, that’s not only bad for your personal joy but also for the community.

If you constantly prioritize your needs over the community’s, at best you’re going to drop the ball a lot and end up feeding into a trend towards stagnancy.  At worst, you’ll come off as a tyrant, and it won’t be stagnancy you’ll be dealing with — it’ll be mutiny.

So what you do is prioritize both.  And in doing so, you’re in easy grasp of that authenticity, that genuine intent I’m talking about.  If the things you do are good for you and good for your community, then there’s no conflict between a selfless motive and a self-interested motive.  And that makes it much easier to be positive about the whole enterprise — for everyone.

You could see someone saying this about the whole Dresden Files Disclosure Pledge thing I talked about on Wednesday: “Sure, Fred’s going to make a few extra sales because he’s doing this — but he’s also giving the fans out there a chance to get at all sorts of information about the game that they wouldn’t normally with another company.” The move both serves the self (Evil Hat) and the community (fans of the Dresden Files and fans of Fate). So it works, and works well from what I can see.

I’m shading over to talking about the Evil Hat side of things, here, and that’s for a reason.  “The individual” and “the company” are pretty similar when you talk about community building strategies, as is “the community” and “the customers and fans”.  One and the same, really, for these purposes.  So all the stuff I’ve been saying about community building applies equally to customer building, to fan building.

Which means you can apply these things as sales techniques.  And that sounds pretty mercenary … until you zero in on the game theory lesson again.  Applying that, it becomes clear that the trick isn’t just to prioritize the company — i.e., the maximized profit motive — when making decisions as a game publisher. And it’s not to prioritize the customers either. The trick is to prioritize both.

And so, at Evil Hat, we have the Disclosure Pledge for the DFRPG, we have PDFs bundled for free with print products, we have the Brick & Mortar PDF Guarantee, we have our general effort to participate with our customers as equals rather than as voices-of-authority, and we have an orientation towards maximum possible transparency as a business.

And, sure: if I factored out the customer angle in the business decisions I’m talking about, and just looked at the company’s, it might well be that I’m making a number of decisions that are less than optimized for the company’s best interests.  I’m certainly investing more work in making those things happen than I “have to”.  But add the customer angle back in, and I think Evil Hat is managing to strike pretty close to the greatest good, there. And long-term, I think that the community-focused benefits form a big feedback loop that makes it actually even better for the company’s “self interest”.

As a publisher, you’re not selling to faceless customers — or at least, you shouldn’t be.  Make those personal connections.  Pull them up on stage and make them awesome with you.  Organize them together in a way that best suits growing as a community.  Because they’re not your customers, they’re your community.  Don’t hold your community at a remove.

Participate.  Deputize. Celebrate. And they’ll celebrate you back.

The good news here is that I’m not suggesting that you, the community “organizer”, are obligated to make a personal and direct connection with each and every member of your community.  In fact, if your community is active and thriving, you can’t.  (Not strictly true — in some circumstances, you could, but it would be a full-time activity and that’s all you’d be doing. So for our discussion’s purposes, we’ll call that close enough to “can’t” for the assertion to stand.)

The trick, inasmuch as there’s a trick, is to engage in behaviors that makes it seem like you’re making that personal connection anyway.

Before we get into that particular toolbox, I want to talk about the role of the blog, the twitter, the facebook presence in all of this (substitute your favorite social media site of choice).  In a very real way, these are at least micro-communities in their own right, each organized around the central “followed” person or organization and the followers.

A social media presence has an element of personal connection baked right into it, and it is very, very easy for followers to feel like they’re just one degree separate from the person they’re following even if they’ve never actually met or had direct conversation with them.  This feeling is cemented and amplified every time the followed replies to a comment by a follower. The personal connection made to one person feels like a personal connection made to all the followers, via transitive, representative interaction.

If the followers are deep, fervent fans, that sort of interaction is akin to something I saw at a rock festival a few years ago. Green Day was playing (they’re a fantastic live band) in front of tens of thousands of people.  For their next song they call out to the stadium: anybody out there know how to play a guitar?  Several friends of one dude near the front start pointing emphatically at him.  So Billie-Joe Armstrong points right at the dude. “You can play the guitar? Are you fucking serious? Because if you can’t and we bring you up here, everyone in this stadium is going to laugh at you.” I’m rows and rows and rows away but it’s clear the dude is nodding and the crowd around him is lifting him up, getting him to the stage.  The energy in the whole joint goes up several notches.  And the guy gets lobbed onto the stage.  And Green Day hands him a guitar. And he plays through the song with them.  We all played through the song with Green Day, because that’s that representational interaction, that personal connection made to one person that translates out to everyone else in the community.

Social media makes it possible for the inequality boundary to vanish.  It takes us from being creators and fans to just being peers of one another, at least partially.  This peer-to-peer relationship is what can induce and strengthen an emotional connection that a fan feels for an artist.  It’s very potent. The effect exists, and when we take on the role of being a Followed Person instead of a follower, we need to be mindful of it and make the most out of it.  This is that improv principle that’s shown up in indie gaming in action: “here’s how I make you awesome”.  Because when a FP reaches out to a follower, the follower gets that warm fuzzy leveling-up feeling.  And when an FP is a dick to a follower, well, the things you might expect happen, too.  Nobody wants to be a fan of an ass unless that ass is in their corner.

But to come at this sort of presence — like the one I maintain here at Deadly Fredly — from another angle, these venues also offer an element of heightened inequality as well.  Not a paradox: because I interact with you in the comments of my blog, we’re having a peer-to-peer connection; but because it’s my blog, there’s also an implicit authority model in place that I wouldn’t necessarily experience as your peer on a forum or mailing list we both happen to frequent (but not run).

And in a nutshell, that right there is part of why I’m not much for participating in forums any more.  As much as I try to destroy the perception of “the authority that speaks from on high” in venues such as these (as well as on mailing lists and forums that I do run), I rely just a touch on that authority too to enforce an element of respectfulness in the discourse that goes on in those places.

But I have to do that lead-by-example thing as much as possible: to get respect by giving respect, to speak to people as peers, but to take clear, polite action as that authority when conversations are going outside the bounds of what I think is acceptable.  Managing to do all three of these in a community you’re running — whether it’s a micro-community like the commenters on a blog, or a “macro” community like JimButcherOnline.com — is not easy.  The voice of authority can sound like the voice of condescension, and that is absolutely poisonous to the idea of peer-to-peer respect.  I have left forums in the past over such leadership failures, and I’d expect the same from people on my own when I louse it up.

So the core trick in this particular ramble is simply stay aware and stay on top of acting like a peer rather than an authority.  Golden rule, here’s how I make you awesome, yadda yadda.  If this one approach is your hammer and you try to treat every problem like a nail, you actually won’t go that wrong with it (save for in those moments where the Mr. Nice Guy element of it can end up undermining your ability to put a stop to something objectionable).

So if that’s the tool in your box, what are the ways you can finesse its use?  A couple things, to wrap this up:

Celebrate: Your followers have cool ideas too. Do not fail to point at them and call them cool. Better yet, make it clear you see those ideas as cool as or cooler than your own (because they are, in the same way that your kid is cooler than you are; maybe you spawned that idea, but seeing it take a life of its own trumps the original).  This is essentially what Green Day did.  The guy they got up on stage wasn’t as good of a guitarist as their guitarist was, but he didn’t need to be to be, in that moment, the coolest damn guy in the stadium.  Celebrating a follower’s idea destroys that whole inequality aspect of the paradigm in ways that kick off a party.  A community that parties together stays together, grows together.  There’s a reason the Evil Hat guys will offer their perspectives on the FateRPG mailing list, but never declare someone else’s different idea as any less valid (except in terms of whether we’d use it in our own play).  We’re in the business of celebrating the ideas that get kicked off by our products — not the ideas of our products.  That’s what being a game publisher is about.

Deputize: This is, really, the big one. It’s celebration on steroids.  It’s what you do when you take someone from that community of yours and give them some of the power in the authority you have as a nominal “head” of the community.  You’re not pulling someone onto the stage to play a song; you’re picking someone out of the audience and making them a member of your band, for keepsies.

It’s often pretty easy to figure out who should be deputized.  They’re your best fans, the ones who are really regularly adding good positive energy and support to the community.  They’re the people who are making your life easier by running off and compiling that list of information about the books y’all are so geeked about, or finding links all over the ‘net about your particular fandom and bringing them back to the community table so everyone can get pumped about ‘em.  They’re the people who speak up when you say “Hey, I could use a little help with…”

Rather than get into a generalized perspective on deputizing your best fans, I’ll get into some quick examples from my own experience. I’ve done this several times, in several ways, so this will be a cross-section at best.

Lenny: That guy who’s the lead system developer for The Dresden Files RPG, and Fate in general at this point? Yeah. He’s a community member from the FateRPG mailing list who regularly posted showing keen insights as to the nature of the system, the finesse of play, all that.  He and I started chatting about Fate after several of his posts caught my eye.  After a while it became clear he had an incredible amount of energy for what we wanted to do, so I asked him to help us get Spirit of the Century to completion.  It was ten kinds of rocky as Rob and I tried to figure out how to go from a duo to a trio on this, but we pushed through the work (eventually — I had my own flameouts here and there, everyone did) and ended up with a really satisfying new iteration of Fate in SOTC.  There’s a reason Lenny’s name is on the cover of that game: his relentness energy for Fate kept things going when fatigue was taking the rest of us.  Deputizing him has paid off in spades.

Priscilla: Priscilla Spencer’s one of the original superfans on Jim Butcher Online.  She’s a constant, positive presence there. She collated and maintained the timeline of the Dresden Files books. She posted a lot.  Hard not to notice her, and notice how much of a contribution she was making.  So I invited her to help moderate the forum.  That went well.  Then I started to notice how much I was failing to update the news items on the main jim-butcher.com website, so I asked her if she’d be willing to take that on too (she usually scooped the rest of us on newsworthy Jim items anyway).  Jim noticed her too. She also happens to be a capable artist.  Got a copy of First Lord’s Fury by Jim Butcher?  Like the Map of Alera found inside?  Art credit on that: Priscilla Spencer.  In my particular corner of fandom, she’s the guy up on stage strumming the guitar along with Green Day.

Rick, Stacey, Scott: There are plenty of other names I could list here, too. Each of these people — Rick Neal, Stacey Chancellor, Scott Acker — are part of the alpha testing crew that we assembled for the Dresden Files RPG.  When I assembled the Alpha groups, I didn’t have them sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement). I had them sign a Disclosure Pledge — they had to promise that they’d get out there on the net and actively talk about the playtesting experience, offering perspective, answering questions, and (frankly) achieving a grass-roots free advertising effect.  Each of these are accomplishing this in different ways.  Scott has helped make sure talk about the Dresden Files RPG occurs on RPG.net and in other venues, and he’s run several demo sessions of the game at conventions (rather than just running the game for a private group of playtesters).  Stacey makes sure the Dresden Files RPG community on LiveJournal gets updated about the progress of things, helping us cover that vector for getting the word out.  And Rick Neal — man, Rick Neal.  You want to see what he’s doing for us, go read his Dresden Files posts over on his blog — which he started, originally, to satisfy the Disclosure Pledge’s requirements.  It’s turned into a real destination for me, and not just because he talks occasionally about the game we’ve been working on.  These are all the result of a (stealth) act of mass deputizing — the Disclosure Pledge is all about doling out portions of the authority to speak publicly about the game Evil Hat is working on.

One thing you might notice in these examples is that in each case, the deputized folks are able to get more accomplished on the part of the community than I was able to do by myself.  That’s the true benefit of deputizing.  Communities that exceed the leadership’s ability to push for growth and activity will fall apart in some way (not necessarily die; just fall into chaos).  Deputizing is how leadership can grow in response to the growth of a community, and it uses the peer-to-peer value of those occasional personal connections to do it.  And every time it happens, it brings along the rest of the community for the ride.

Rock on.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t dig into it at least a little.  Today, I’m going to talk about managing your critical mass and using it to power your community.

Communities result from common interest, collected into one place, focused on an exploration of its enthusiasms.  In that respect, you need to locate those common interests that have a critical mass and build on that, or you need to create common interests and focus them into a critical mass.  I’m not sure that there’s much I can say about the “how” of that, because you either have something that many people are interested in or you don’t.

That said if you’ve generated lots of smaller interests, you might be able to aggregate them usefully to create a larger common interest.  On the opposite end of the spectrum it’s possible you can have too much mass for your, uh, “containment mechanism”, to the point where the enthusiasm getting generated is in excess of the members’ ability to parse through it.  So there’s definitely some right-sizing going on here.

For small press games, there’s a very real chance that there’s not enough quantity of interest in an individual product to sustain a mailing list or a forum.  By “sustain”, I mean generate regular self-producing traffic to the extent that the community doesn’t fall into stagnancy.

If the publisher only produces that one game, they’re going to be out of luck in terms of having a viable community on their own.  If the publisher produces multiple games, it might be possible to create community around the aggregated interest in the publisher’s entire body of works, though that can be tenuous as wildly different styles of games are going to have a hard time finding enough common areas of overlap for the community to hang together sustainably.

If you’re such a publisher without that quantity of interest available (the critical mass), your only real path of action is to direct fans (and yourself) to larger communities that align with the interest you do have.  That means putting on your swamp gear and wading into the mucky territory of online gaming forums: RPGNet, Story-Games, the Forge, etc.  That’s no guarantee your area of interest will thrive there, but if it dies there it’ll be from something other than the lack of feeding it gets as a solo endeavor.

Once you do have that critical mass, it’s a case of right-sizing how you contain and focus it.

For most focused interest communities, at their inception, a web forum is not the right idea.  Web forums require people to remember they exist, and need to be interesting and important enough that the members have an incentive to make time in their days to venture out onto the Internet and check in at this specific destination.  Web forums also fragment conversation: people can participate in a single thread or a small selection of threads, and ignore all the rest.  For those small focused interests, that can be deadly, and will often lead to stagnancy rather than sustainability.  For this reason I only look to web forums as the solution for high levels of traffic and conversation, where the conversation is so active that it would drive more people away from a mailing list than it would bring in.

A mailing list is like a forum with a single thread. In order to participate, you have to parse at least on a basic level every message that comes through (even if that act of parsing is “nope, no interest, delete” or “do the subject lines in this digest interest me?”).  That’s a pain in the ass for large and highly varied conversations, but it’s perfect for focusing a lower-traffic interest into one continuous “stream” with enough mass and energy to become sustainable.  (If a mailing list version of your community is falling stagnant, moving to a forum won’t fix it; you simply do not have enough mass there to do the job. See above for what to do then.)

A lot of what I’m talking about here is art rather than science. I’m not putting numbers or quantified frequencies on what I’m talking about, because I can’t.  I do it by “feel”, and your “feel” very likely does not match mine.

There’s a point at which a mailing list feels dead or stagnant: that means the community doesn’t have a critical mass.  There’s a point at which a mailing list feels too damn busy for people to keep up with and still do everything else that’s important in their lives.  That’s where you have too much mass for your container, and it’s time to consider a move to a web forum, where your community’s nascent subcommunities can all coexist and occasionally cross over to one another conveniently without it feeling to the members like these interests are constantly intruding.

So as a community-runner, you need to keep an eye on these trends and be willing to take action when it’s clear that the community’s location is not a good fit for the community’s level of activity.

A few real-world examples from my experience:

The FateRPG Yahoo Group (a mailing list) is where we took conversation about the Fate variant of Fudge when it threatened to get large enough to drown out rest of the traffic on the original Fudge community mailing list.  It has stayed in this form for its entire lifespan to date.  Occasionally bits of off-topic conversation can pop up, but at this point it allows for discussions of Fate in general, Spirit of the Century, Starblazer Adventures, and Diaspora — as well as some other fan-produced variations.  Traffic is reasonably constant but rarely overwhelming.  There’s no reason to split it off to a forum, even though I’ve had it suggested to me before.  Frankly I think a forum version would just result in a lack of sufficient traffic; I’m betting the move would take an active community that’s thriving in its current “container” and put it into an environment where things would fizzle. Folks would leave due to the transition, and those that remained wouldn’t keep the conversation going enough for the value of community to really work.

Here, I’ll pick on my good friend Chad Underkoffler a bit to talk about another mailing list community I’m in occasional contact with. Chad insists on giving each of his individual PDQ-derived products their own mailing list.  Most of them have little to zero traffic.  While he has recently (at a fan’s request) started a general PDQ interest mailing list, that’s been done without shutting down the other specific-product lists and funneling traffic to the one place.  I suspect — though this is just my gut feeling — that this move is keeping the PDQ fans at large from achieving a critical mass.  The versions of PDQ in each individual product are not so different that there wouldn’t be plenty of value in some cross-over talk amongst the various small groups of people interested in each.  The Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies group has perhaps the best chance right now of sustainability, though part of the energy burst happening there is due to its relatively recent publication.  But who knows? I could be wrong. I just think that the various sub-groups of the PDQ community have much more to offer each other as a collective entity than they do as satellites nominally orbiting one another.

The Jim Butcher online community started as a mailing list a decade or so ago that I called McAnallys, named after the pub in the Dresden Files.  It worked great for the first few years of Jim’s post-publication career.  We encouraged a pub-like atmosphere, where folks could talk about whatever so long as we always circled back around to the reason we were gathered together in one place: Jim’s writing.  But Jim kept getting more and more popular, and the mailing list got to the point where it could kick out multiple long digests in a single day.  Plenty of folks on the list liked the fact that it was a mailing list, that they didn’t have to go out and check a forum, but the conversations were just too active. That started to create an “insider effect”, where the list was active and hoppin’ and great for the people who were already there and thriving in it, but which ended up being unpleasant to get into as a new member.  The thirsty man could either go thirsty or try to drink from a firehose pointed right in his face.  So I bit the bullet and moved the community to a web forum.

Today’s web forum on JimButcherOnline.com is still crazy-active, but by being a forum we’ve managed to support the continued idea of a pub atmosphere for some members, while allowing others to focus their interests only on the parts of the conversation that are actually about Jim’s works.  The “pub” area dates back to July 2007, with 93980 Posts over 2651 Topics. It outnumbers the board that discusses, say, the books of the Dresden Files by a 3-to-1 factor, and that’s after some pruning.

We absolutely lost some people in the transition — which is part of why I advocate making a move after a mailing list feels too busy, not in anticipation of it getting there. Change by its nature cuts off some of the old guard. In this regard, I was something of a casualty in the move to a web forum.  I just don’t directly participate that much these days, unless you’re talking about the Dresden Files RPG board on the forum. The way I work, I need something to intrude a little for me to participate in it.  At least a forum lets me pick & choose in that regard — I can subscribe to a thread that interests me, and it’ll “intrude” on my mailbox when something happens there.

…

So that’s my take on communities and the management of their critical mass. The term is particularly apt here. A community is a volatile substance. You have to handle it carefully.  Bring too little of it together and you might get a little radioactive but you won’t produce sustainable energy.  Bring too much of it together and it’ll blow up on you — unless you can contain it in something that can turn the explosive possibilities back into a sustainable energy source.  When it comes down to it, that’s what you want: the presence of enough common interest in one place that people fuse together and vibrate excitedly about the discovery of enthusiastic peers. That’s a community.

This is on my mind because at Evil Hat we’re getting ever closer to the release of the Dresden Files RPG.  (Yes, we’re splitting it into two books. No, I don’t want to talk about that here. I’m talking about it enough other places already.)  Our press release doesn’t talk about distribution; it says we’ll have it on sale through Indie Press Revolution (and therefore through retailers who get books from IPR), and we’ll have it on sale through our own web store.

Now, that’s not the whole picture, but it’s most of it. (We have a good relationship with UK-based distributor Esdevium, and we’ll likely continue to work that relationship for getting products over to the other side of the Atlantic.) The question, then, is why is that most of the picture? (i.e., why aren’t we diving at distributors aplenty and trying to get signed up?)

That’s a complicated question, and one that I’m not sure I can get completely surrounded in today’s post, but it breaks down to two main things for me: the cold hard math of publishing and price points, and the curious state of The Book On The Shelf in today’s marketplace.  In the specific case of the Dresden Files RPG, it also has something to do with the degree to which we can make direct contact with Jim’s fan-base — I certainly have a unique advantage in that I also run Jim Butcher’s official website and forums for him — but I’m trying to think about the more general case, here.

The Cold Math

Selling something direct through our webstore gets us around 90% of the cover price. Selling something direct to an end-consumer through IPR gets us 70% of the cover price.  Selling something to a retailer through IPR gets us about 44% of the cover price (the retailer gets the book at 55% of the cover price, and IPR gets a 20% cut of that; 0.55 * 0.80 = 0.44).  Selling to a distributor gets us 40% of the cover price, minus any additional costs due to covering the shipping ourselves (distributors often ask for a minimum order amount at which they can get free shipping, and then hit that minimum amount; the threshold is usually no more than a few hundred bucks total on the order’s bottom line).

Mathematically, in order to make sure you stay solvent as a publisher, you have to plan for the smallest amount of revenue per sale. If a distributor is a major factor, I have to plan on something in the mid-30% range (let’s say 37.5%, though reality may slide that a few points in either direction depending on what your shipping costs are; a recent order from Esdevium came out to about 37-38% after adjusting for shipping cost).  The difference between planning on 37.5% and 44% might seem small, but that’s still a difference of 6.5% — an over 14% drop in the revenue source.  So all the same I’d prefer to plan for that 44% mark

And that’s just talking gross revenues.  Depending on how you’re able to work the math, the cost of producing that book could be 20% of the cover price (maybe as little as 10%, maybe as much as 25%, and hopefully never more than that).  I’m gonna use 20% in this discussion because “five times your cost” is not a bad rule of thumb in general. So look at those numbers again, through the lens of net profit per sale.

(This is shaky ground, that said: it supposes that you’ll sell every single one of your books! Otherwise you have to absorb the cost of those books that you didn’t sell through and spread it out across the units that you DID sell. But it’s a useful abstraction for the kind of algebra I want to do here. And in essence, the “net” I’m talking about here IS that buffer through which you accommodate unsold product — as well as your other non product specific costs of staying afloat.  It may also be where you’re making back production costs that you aren’t working into the formula; I often run my formula strictly off printing and shipping, and hope for the profits to cover things like our art budget, etc.)

Knocking the 20% off gets us: 70% in the web store, 50% in direct sale through IPR, 24% sold to retail through IPR, and 17.5% to distribution.  Now the math of profit gets pretty harsh when comparing IPR-to-retail to distribution-to-retail: 24 vs 17.5 is a nearly 30% drop.  Flip that over and you’re saying that distribution needs to increase your sales volume by at least a third in order to maybe be worth it.  And consider: distribution comes hand in hand with new risks such as delayed payments (yes, IPR “delays” its payouts to quarterly milestones, but I know they’ve collected money for every copy sold already; not so with distro) and other assorted issues and constraints.  And while distro’s “alpha strike” order might be respectably large, follow-on orders are usually going to be pretty small.

So say you have a $40 book, and you’re looking at making $28 off a sale, $20 off a sale, a little less than $10 off a sale, or $7 off a sale. Where’s your cut-off? Especially given that you have other costs and future growth that you’ll need to pay for out of that revenue?

A number of small publishers might cut that at $20. Understandably. In doing so, they’re cutting out ALL game store access, since that eliminates IPR’s sales-to-retail option, but they’re making the most money off of high quality sales that often have an element of personal connection and fandom. They’re serving the alpha consumers and alpha gamers, there, and looking out for themselves.  That’s not Evil Hat’s approach, but I get it.

Evil Hat cuts it mostly at $10 per sale.  That final $3 difference can really add up over time, and as yet I haven’t seen strong evidence that the theoretical additional volume that a distribution service would get me would make up for that gap.  On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of evidence that IPR is getting our product out to plenty of retailers.  Half our sales volume through IPR is in sales to retailers, after all.

Then there’s the social motive, which I have to use to “warm up” this cold math, at least a little. Getting into some retail stores is good for connecting with gamers.  So there’s the compromise, and the mostly comfortable “rest state” at which Evil Hat finds itself when it comes to getting our products out into the world.  Seeing as this has gotten us 2500 sales (digital copies included) of Don’t Rest Your Head, and nearly 5000 sales (digital copies included) of Spirit of the Century … I think we’re doing all right with that compromise.

Sidebar: The Specific Case of the Licensed Product

So the real bitch with a licensed product is the cost of the license itself.  Here’s the double edged sword: you can either work that cost into your base product cost that you quintuple to get a reasonable cover price, or you can take it out of the profit margin.

The former approach will drive up your cover price but will make sure you’re doing well (making money) in almost all of your sales scenarios (save for the catastrophic Nobody’s Buying one). The latter approach will keep your cover price down (which is socially good, as it looks out for your buddy gamers that are the reason you got into publishing for the hobby in the first place), but leave you with a very thin profit at the end.

Licensors are often looking for a percentage of cover price, so you’re often (as far as I can tell) looking at a case where you pay less when you sell a book at 55% of the cover price vs. 100% of the cover price.  From a licensor perspective that makes total sense: it’s good protection against the licensee losing his damn mind and selling the game at 90% off, reducing your take to a pittance. (There may also be other guarantees worked into the contract, like “licensor will make at least $X,000 from this, and if licensor doesn’t, licensee will pay up for the difference”.)  This percentage could be 10%, 15%, or something else. My experience on those specifics is of course massively limited, but let’s use 15% for the example.

If we’re going with the latter case (taking it out of the profit margin), our theoretical $40 book is now, in the licensed scenario, paying out $6 per sale to the licensor.  So the webstore makes a $22 profit, IPR direct makes $14, IPR to retail makes $4, and distribution makes $1.  Nasty, huh?  But making $4 per sale (10% of the cover price) at least sounds better than $1 (2.5% of the cover price), right? Plus, it suggests that a direct sale is worth at least 3.5 sales to retail (sticking strictly with IPR).

Or, considering the $40 book is based on the notion of a $8 cost base, what happens if your cost base gets $6 added to it. That’s $14, and quintupling it gives you a fresh new cover price of $70. Yuck. Even adjusting your formula a bit and just quadrupling it gets you a cover price of $56.

The reality is that I think most licensed product publishers go for something in the middle — part of the cost of the license goes against the base cost of the book, and part of it goes to the profit margin, or the “5x multiplier” is reduced as I suggest above. Regardless, a whole lot of praying goes into the idea that the license will boost the sales volume considerably to make that work out.   Or maybe other more manageable deals are being made, where the cut for the licensor isn’t based on the cover price or on sales volume at all.  Every license is its own special snowflake, and data is especially thin on the ground.

However you slice it, though, a licensed product brings in a whole host of other factors that can make the math extra messy.

The Book on the Shelf

All of this points, then, to the Book on the Shelf, as has been told of in songs and legend.

There are two kinds of shelves we’re talking about here: the ones in game stores, and the ones in book stores. I’m going to talk about the second one first.

There’s some overlap there, but the book store shelf brings some extra risks to the party. Your volume can be a lot higher, but you’re usually getting a faceful of fun risk factors like “returnability”.  The policy of returnability has killed off (or at least gravely wounded) plenty of small publishers. The idea is that when you sell a few hundred books into that particular market, it comes with a guarantee offered by you that if the stores/distributors can’t sell the products, they can return them to you and get a refund.  Which makes some sense in terms of wanting render the bookstores and bookstore distributors willing to place larger orders … but only if those stores and distros can figure out how to sell your product.  Many don’t: there are a ton of products and not a lot of time to devote specific attention to each one, and that means your product has to sell itself, reliably, everywhere it shows up.

In essence, the bookstores and bookstore distributors asking for returnability are saying: we’d like to take a gamble, but we want you to cover all our losses if the gamble doesn’t pay off.  And that, simply, is not something a small publisher — as most in the game industry are — can really afford.  Yes, in theory, you could cover all this and remain solvent by carefully watching how much money came in from those sales sources and making sure you don’t spend any of it until the window for returns has expired.  But a lot of businesses need to spend the money they make, and since we’re talking distribution here you’re looking at shipping costs tied to the order that you the publisher probably had to cover both coming and going.  Fail to be perfectly vigilant and your awesome, profitable company could go bankrupt the moment the UPS guy knocks on your door with a truck full of unsold product.

This has happened, and will probably continue to happen so long as this business model exists.  And all of it is balancing against the idea that what you’ll sell through that “channel” will more than make up for the risks.  But do you really want to take that gamble, as a publisher (especially if you happen to agree with me that the other guy isn’t)? To me, this particular gamble feels a lot like Russian Roulette. Life is on the line, and that’s a stake too high to venture.

Run all that through the feedback equation of the free market a few thousand times, with small publishers reacting reasonably to the risks and the big bookstores having their own set of reasonable reactions, and you get our current circumstance with bookstores.  Big physical stores that don’t carry as wide a variety of product as many of us wish they would (because stocking a few books in many many physical stores is a big expense), and online stores that provide a crazy amount of variety because they can better handle the idea of only having one or two copies of a book in stock (or drop-shippable through a back-end deal with the publisher). And those online stores are getting fed through the same deep-cut distro system, but since their overhead is so much lower, they can turn those deep cuts into deep discounts for the end consumer, and the physical store has to match it or at least try to get close … hence the shaky ground on which the big bookstore currently stands.

So that physical book on the physical shelf in a physical bookstore is a huge gamble. Will anyone notice it and pick it up? If they do, will they just use it for its window-shopping value, and then seek out a cut-rate lower price through an online sales venue instead? Will the book need to be returned to the publisher? More and more it will, all for perfectly reasonable reasons.   The only exceptions are those which will always reliably sell all of its copies through that venue, usually through little effort of the bookstore itself.  And when we’re talking RPGs… Well.  How many of you go to a chain bookstore instead of a game store to get yours?

So, the first case, the game store.  That book on that shelf is a gamble, too, but more often it’s one that the store is shouldering.  They can’t return the products for refunds in many cases (and if they can, the returns might just go to the distributor, not to the publisher).  Hopefully, because they’re a smaller store, a focused-purpose store, they can get to know the product and make a more directed effort to sell it to their customers.  In return for this risk, those stores ask that they get a significant discount on the products (45-50% off the cover price).  Unlike the big chain bookstore scenarios above, here the tit-for-tat seems more evident, more plausible, and thus as a publisher it’s something I’m willing to tap into.  It might not be my most revenue maximized situation (though with the IPR vs. distro math, clearly there’s a range of options for choosing a better vs. worse revenue strategy). But tapping into it is probably my healthiest scenario, from the perspective of sustaining the hobby industry, because it hits that balance point where the publisher can exercise both self interest and community interest.

But it also touches on the third case, the one I didn’t mention, the inverse scenario: the book that ISN’T on the shelf.  That’s a gamble too, one shouldered wholly by the publisher, one that plays counterpoint to the whole set-up.  When you choose not to put a book on a shelf in a retail store, how many possible customers and fans are you failing to reach?

The answer, in a quantifiable sense, is pretty damned close to unknowable.  So you roll the dice.  You listen to your gut, and you try to weigh the unknowable cost of the “lost customer” vs. the cost of sending a book at a big discount down one of the channels to a store’s shelf.  Every publisher’s gut is going to rumble a little differently, there.  Some will say the gains of selling into a full on distribution channel outweigh the risks, that you find so many “lost” customers that it’s a no brainer.  My gut isn’t convinced, and that’s not much of a surprise — honestly it’s a pretty conservative gut given how Evil Hat has incrementally, gradually accepted one risk at a time over the last few years.

We’ve taken a different approach at the Hat, one that tries to find those lost customers not through the riskiest of shelves but through making direct contacts, whether we’re talking about forums, blogs, the FateRPG mailing list over on Yahoo Groups, Jim Butcher’s website, and so on.  At the end of the day, we can’t ignore the shelf — we feel we need to take that gamble, at least in a smaller stakes sense, because we DO gain some customers we wouldn’t otherwise.  But it just feels like folly to make everything about the shelf when the age of the network has opened up so many other ways of reaching people.

Here’s the skinny.

Previous Totals

2009Q4 to date:
Penny PDF: 19
Penny Print: 12
DLYM PDF: 21
DLYM Print: 7
DRYH PDF: 41
DRYH Print: 25
SOTC PDF: 47
SOTC Print: 33
SOTC HC: 12
SOTS PDF: 30
S7S PDF: 23
S7S Print: 12

Lifetime:
Penny: 342
DLYM: 709
DRYH: 2473
SOTC: 4812
SOTS: 576
S7S: 814

Let’s see what IPR adds to that, shall we?

2009Q4 for IPR

Penny PDF: 11
Penny Print: 45 (27 to retail)
DLYM PDF: 2
DLYM Print: 41 (28 to retail)
DRYH PDF: 11
DRYH Print: 78 (56 to retail)
SOTC PDF: 9
SOTC Print: 116 (96 to retail)
SOTS PDF: 9
S7S PDF: 3
S7S 51 (33 to retail)

Final Totals for 2009

2009Q4 final:
Penny PDF: 19+11 = 30
Penny Print: 12 + 45 = 57
DLYM PDF: 21 + 2 = 23
DLYM Print: 7 + 41 = 48
DRYH PDF: 41 + 11 = 52
DRYH Print: 25 + 78 = 103
SOTC PDF: 47 + 9 = 56
SOTC Print: 33 + 116 = 148
SOTC HC: 12 + 0 = 12
SOTS PDF: 30 + 9 = 39
S7S PDF: 23 + 3 = 26
S7S Print: 12 + 51 = 63

Lifetime:
Penny: 342 + 11 + 45 = 398 (so close!)
DLYM: 709 + 2 + 41 = 752
DRYH: 2473 + 11 + 78 = 2562
SOTC: 4812 + 9 + 116 = 4937
SOTS: 576 + 9 = 585
S7S: 814 + 3 + 51 = 868

Observations

A few quick observations about this final chunk of data. (If you want to see commentary on the other parts of 2009, check out the sales numbers tag.)

IPR Slows Down In The Winter

This was the weakest quarter we’ve had with IPR in a while. I think it was a weaker quarter for IPR overall, however — there just aren’t that many new items coming into the catalog over there, and new products have been clearly indicated as a prime driver of sales at that site.   People get reluctant to buy games for themselves during the holidays, I think, so that plays in too.

IPR vs. Our Own Store

Q4 was also our first full quarter with the Evil Hat Web Store in effect, and I think it stripped off the richest topsoil of direct sales both in PDF and print.  PDF sales of our products in the fourth quarter were almost vanishingly small at IPR, as can be seen with the above numbers.  In order to maximize revenue, the Evilhat.Com website switched over to linking to the webstore as the “first link of preference”. IPR formerly occupied that position. So I suspect that has grabbed the folks who come to Evilhat.Com as the first point of entry when looking for our products. IPR is clearly still capturing a lot of sales — more than our webstore — as its own first point of entry, so I’m of course still happy we’re working with them.

IPR to Retail = Good Times

The general trend of IPR sales skewing more strongly toward retail continues. In terms of print sales, 60-80% of the print items sold in Q4 were to retail, depending on the title (SOTC’s percentage was largest, Penny’s was smallest.)

I suspect this is in part due to the “topsoil” stripping I mention above. But I also believe that the long tail effect is playing out in retail stores, as far as our “back catalog” goes.  IPR and direct sales have allowed us to “alpha strike” the marketplace to our financial benefit — we’re making the most money per unit on those earliest sales — but once that presence-via-product is out there, it starts feeding back into retail, and retailers then comes knocking to order a few copies for their stores.  It’s clear the products continue to sell in these storefronts, and that makes me happy: I certainly don’t want stores ordering copies only to see them sit on the shelves. But it also suggests that stores which don’t get right in on the ground floor with a new product are still going to have the opportunity to make something of it after the market has a chance to demonstrate that the product is worth placing some confidence in.  While that might net the retail store less cash overall, it does mean that they can make the purchases with less inherent risk. In this economy, that doesn’t suck.

IPR Works As Our Primary Outlet For Retail

This also legitimizes my feeling that I’d prefer to stick with IPR as my primary retail method in the USA. As I mentioned before, we do sell to an honest-to-god distributor (Esdevium) as well, but that distributor’s scope is outside the USA. That helps manage the whole exorbitant overseas shipping cost thing (at least for the European market) for direct and retail customers across the Atlantic.

I do think I’d be willing to sell direct to retailers (i.e., selling directly from Evil Hat to the retail store) on a case by case basis, but IPR’s continuing retail strength for us means I don’t have to feel like I must. (Tho if you’re a retailer and want to talk to Evil Hat about making a direct order, speak up.)

Invincible has me from the word go. I know a few folks I’ve recommended the series to found it to come off a little flat, though several others have seemed really jazzed by it. I flippantly described it on Twitter the other day as “what Smallville wanted to be before it succumbed to a fatal case of kryptonite poisoning”, though I suppose that does more to tarnish the appeal of Invincible than elucidate it. (Ah, Smallville, what an acid-trip of a show you were before I took my leave of you.)  At its core, Invincible is the story of an alt-Superman’s kid, run through a heavy Peter Parker’s Life Sucks filter.  And boy, does it make my I-want-to-play-in-some-supers-genre-games itch flare right the hell up.

But I’m also not sure that I would want to play a straight up “adaptation” of Invincible at my gaming table.  So I need to deconstruct this thing, figure out what its basic working parts are, and which of those parts speak to me as a gamer. If only so my friends can get a little closer to running the game I want to play in! (That said, the analysis will not go that deep in the interests of keeping things spoiler-free.)

The Art, Part 1: Dark things might happen, but it’s all brightly colored (I think the colorist has said that folks have called his colors “fruity” before). In a way the colors reflect the exuberance of the supers genre. It’s all a brightly-colored mess sometimes, a rainbow chaos. To read Invincible is to fill up your eyes with the truth of this. It’s a reality like our own, but poppy and bright and a little bit nuts.

The Art, Part 2: Those rubber faces! I’m not talking about some sort of super-deformed cartoony thing; I’m talking about how faces look in Invincible when they take a punch from someone who can bench a couple hundred tons. We are squishy beings, and the art shows that. It gives the bodies a sense of floppy, squishy volume that really serves the presentation of violence in the comic — which can get pretty bloody at times.

The Fights: Like I said, they can be bloody. But they can also be wacky (bad guy has device strapped to chest containing super-strong alien pet that looks like a knot of semi-sentient rubber bands), comical (squid-headed extradimensional freak has speech impediment during villainous rant), dreadful (our hero gets turned into meat paste), and poignant (family issues playing out on the battlefield). Best of all they’re pretty unpredictable. People are fragile, and this is a world where hypersonic fists and explosive power get flung around. Injuries result. Characters you’re sure will be around for a while longer turn up with a sudden case of being dead.

The Relationships: The relationships in Invincible get probably a good 75% of the screen time. You can get multiple pages of a conversation between the hero and his mom. Or his girlfriend. Or that girl who’s had a secret crush on him for years. Or his college dorm-room buddy best friend. Or the government agent guy with a mysterious facial scar. Or his tailor. You get the idea. It’s a story about growing up while shouldering the burden of massive, save-the-world responsibilities, and it never turns away from the chance to dig deep on how it’s affecting his “normal guy” life.  It regards all of this as such a priority to the story, in fact, that folks looking more for the pow-bang-zoom part may find the title disappointing. But if you buy in, as I do, it’s eat-this-up-with-a-spoon time. (And this is where the Smallville touchpoint came in for me: that show is also a place where the relationships are meant to shine, but good god the writing of those relationships is just dreadful. Invincible by contrast gets the relationships just right.)

The World, Part 1: The world is new, but recognizable. Looked at from the corner of my eye, Invincible is a DC Universe parody (among other things). The hero’s from-another-planet father is Omni-Man. There’s a big group of superheroes called The Guardians Of The Globe. Etc. But like I said, the world is still new. When they show up, they’re not standard takes on the tropes of other comics — something is askew and bent about it. At the end of the day I dig reinvention. When it’s done right it’s just magnificent — like a great, reinterpretive cover of an original song. That’s what Invincible is pulling off for me with its reinventions and homages.  It’s easy to dismiss the comic as “just another Superboy story” — which is both correct and completely off the point.

The World, Part 2: The implicit world of the comic is so much larger than the part that intersects with the hero’s story. This is a big one for me, because in a superhero story the universe itself is one of the stars.  Invincible really shines at implying a huge amount of story and setting in a small number of pages. Check out the one-page revelation (I think it was one page) of  The Immortal’s back-story as one example.  Or the just-around-the-edges bits of alien cultures. Characters that show up seem to be coming out of the middle of something else — and that makes the world feel weightier, bigger, realer.

There’s more I could get into, and specifics I could cite, but the avoidance of spoilers is important to me here.

For gaming application, my takeaways, none of which are particularly revelatory I’m afraid:

I like pain and consequence, whether it’s in relationships or in physical injury. That just about sums up the first four parts from the above list. Being a hero requires that a price has to be paid. You can either pay it deliberately or let the law of unintended consequences play out. Either way, it’s gonna hurt.

Reinterpretation/reinvention is fun and does a nice job of excusing liberal borrowing from other sources. By enabling that kind of borrowing, you bring along a lot of ideas that exist in the original source, ideas which can be understood quickly by the others at the table without having to front-load a lot of original setting knowledge. That’s a powerful shorthand (and tangentially, a big part of why I think Amber works so well for gaming).

Don’t bring anything into the story without knowing what its story is — even if it’s just to give 15 seconds of added detail. This is really a broad story-telling lesson, when it comes down to it, but is super effective for GMing. (I know that Jim Butcher has plenty of backstory in mind for the supporting cast of the Dresden Files, for example, that will rarely make it into a story, but it’s there to be tapped for his stories when he needs to motivate a character or provide foundation for a quick few paragraphs of dialogue.)  Knowing that there’s a story there, even one broadly sketched in two or three sentences on an index card, gives your world volume, weight, and life.  While the game’s story might be all about the player characters, the world isn’t all about them, and many players will respond well when it’s clear the world is not a paper-thin mirage existing only to serve them.  And by keeping these hidden little stories implicit, you’re free to change the unspoken details if you need to later. The only thing that’s locked down about that particular iceberg is the tip that’s showing above the waterline.

Pacing is a matter of paying attention to player priorities. That’s a fancy way of saying that if your players are showing up with a lot of investment in how their characters’ love lives are falling apart, don’t respond to that by giving them a session-spanning fight scene. Sometimes the fight is just a quick-cut breather between the heavier relationship stuff. Then again, sometimes it’s time to fly off to Mars with a team of heroes to see what you can do about that nasty mind-controlling squid-thing problem. Look where the camera of the players’ attention is pointed, and make things happen there. That’s a choice they’re making, and you should make sure there’s something for those cameras to film there. Combined with the implicit story strategy from my earlier point, this is a pretty easy one to follow. If everything has a little bit of story already going on with it implicitly, then wherever the cameras get pointed there’s going to be something to see.

I think there’s more here, but I’m running out of steam. Share and enjoy.

So that’s somewhere around a “get these products for 99% off!” deal.

You should perhaps take all of us publishers up on that. You’ll get Spirit of the Season from Evil Hat, and a bunch of other products too (several of which I did some or all of the layout on, I’m happy to say).  It’s one of those “you’re insane NOT to spend $20 on this” sort of things, even if you aren’t in the least bit humanitarian in your mindset.

There are so many products on this thing that the bundle’s attempt to alphabetically list them all craps out somewhere late in the letter C.

That’s C, for crazy.

Since the listing craps out, I thought I’d grab the full list of what I got after I made my purchase for the curious. Holy crap! Beast Hunters! Chronica Feudalis! Kerberos Club! Damnation Decade! Three Sixteen! It’s just ridiculous. Buy it.

17 Archer Feats
17 Bard Spells
17 Magic Shields
17 Monk Feats
17 Plants
17 Rogue Feats
43 Space Opera Adventure Seeds – Space Opera Support #6
90 Phenomena in the City of Copenhagen
API Demon Codex: Lochs
API Demon Pack 01
API Worldwide: Canada
Advanced Fleet Designs: Titan Class Scout
Adventurer Essentials: Holy Water
Adventurer Essentials: Rope
Afterpeak Systemless Setting
Albenistan: Election Day (Modern Dispatch 113)
Apocalypse Prevention, Inc.
BASH! Basic Action Super Heroes (New and Improved)
Barbarians Versus
Basic poker playing cards 1
Beast Hunters RPG
Behind the Monsters: Skeleton
Behind the Spells: Sanctuary
Best of The Rifter
Bits of Darkness: Dungeons
Bits of Magicka: Pocket Items
Blood Games II
Blood of the Innocent: A Savage Worlds mission set in the jungles of Evil
Book of Races
Book of the Faithful: Power of Prayer
Brandy’s by the Bay
Breathe Life Into #1
C&C Arms and Armor
C&C Shadows of the Halfling Hall
COPPER DRAGON: Basic Dungeons 1         5 downloads remaining
Castlemourn Campaign Setting
Character, Hero
Chronica Feudalis
Class options volume II: Paladins Prevail!
Classic Spycraft: Shadowforce Archer Worldbook
Classic Spycraft: Spycraft Espionage Handbook
Colonial Gothic: Secrets
Cortex System Role Playing Game
Counter Collection 4th Edition Paragon 1
Creatures of the Wastelands: A Menagerie of Mutants and Mutations (Revised Edition)
Creatures of the Wastelands: Habitats
Creatures of the Wastelands: The Thrasher Gang
DRAGONSHIRE: City Interiors
DRAGONSHIRE: City Ruins
Damnation Decade
Dark Raiders of Misty Ridge
Degenerate Seaside Town
Demimonde
Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: Bar Room Berserker
Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: Gravity Slinger
Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: Lucky Bastard
Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: NeoWitch Guardian
Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: The Innocent
Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: The Prince of Doggs
Dept. 7 Adv. Class Update: The S.L.A.M. Soldier
Dept. 7 Technology Update: AAP/CPR Med Kit
Destinations: Spaceport Trident Vespa
Diana: Warrior Princess
Divine Homelands
Divine Quests
Dork Covenant
Earth Space Marines
Ephemeris
F-211 Copperhead
Fantastic Maps: The Dragon’s Lair
Fantasy Firearms
Fantasy Women Clipart JPEG 7
For the Love of Dungeons
Forlakh’s Tower – CR 4 D20 Module
Full Light, Full Steam
Future Firearms Pack One
Gravitic Thrust Vehicles
Grumlahk’s Troll Tales
Hollow Earth Expedition Earth Drill
Instant Antagonist: The Selfish Succubus
Interface Zero: Modern20 edition
Items Evolved Rituals
Karma Roleplaying System Core Rules Book
Kiddy counters
Kids, Castles & Caves
Kobold Quarterly 11
Labyrinths & Lycanthropes
Lady’s Rock
Liber Sodalitas: The Dream Healers (Pathfinder edition)
London Fires module A101 for Fellowship of the White Star
MADS Role Playing Game
MARS: Savage Worlds Edition
Magpie Codex 2
Martial Cultures: Arytis
MegaCity Sector Maps
Mini Nuclear Plant
Modern Dispatch (#104): Line Zero
Modern Dispatch 120: Cyber-state Avatar Toolkit
MonkeyGod Presents: From Stone to Steel
MonkeyGod Presents: Frost & Fur
More Mighty Than Steel
NEO MONKS: The Dragonlord
NEO RANGERS: The Spider King
No Dignity in Death: The Three Brides
OSRPG CCG Card Template 1
Objective Interim Modern Combat System
One Shot Adventures! Days of Knights
Open Game Table – The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs, Vol. 1
Piledrivers and Powerbombs: Chokeslam of Darkness Edition
Pimp My Paladin
Police Precinct
Portrait of a Villain – The Desire
Power Pics Heroes 1 -Female Speedster
Power Pics Villains 1 -Male Cyborg
Privateers and Pirates
QAGS Second Edition
Qalidar
Quirin Encounter #3: Healing Device
Quirin Maps #14: Bandit’s Territory
RIO DRACO: Base Set
Reign of Discordia (Traveller Edition)
Rise Of a Legend:NEW Issue #1
Roma Imperious
Rugged Adventures
S.C.A.R.E. Vol. 2-Viesca Melin Aella
Scenes of Space Hex Battle Maps
Serenity Role Playing Game
Seven Leagues roleplaying game of Faerie
Shambles
Shaolin Squirrels : Nuts of Fury
Shrouded Agendas for D&D 4E: The Purifiers
Slivers of Dawn
Special Vehicles
Spirit of the Season
Squirrel Attack! Operation: Get Mr. Jones’ Nuts
Stolen Blood
Summerland Revised and Expanded Edition
Tales of Wyn D’mere Role Playing Game!
Tendril’s Oak Inn
The Black Book
The Black Spot
The Book of Dumb Tables
The Book of The Dead
The Fate of Inglemia – Superlink Edition
The Kerberos Club
The Lazy GM: Lizardfolk
The Lunar Scrolls
The Otherworld
The Squared Circle:Wrestling RPG
The Veggie Patch
Thousand Suns: Foundation Transmissions
Thousand Suns: Transmissions from Piper
Threat Record Vol. I, Issue #2
Three Sixteen
Thrilling Tales 2nd Edition (Savage Worlds)
Torn Apart by Radiation Wraiths
Trail of Cthulhu Player’s Guide
Treasure Chests: Volume 2
Turris Lemurum : Tower of Ghosts
Unorthodox Sorcerers
Valherjar: The Chosen Slain Core Rulebook
Vampire Castle
Wayfarers
WorldWorksGames / Deadly Encounters Combo
WorldWorksGames / DungeonLinX: Dragon God
WorldWorksGames / Uncharted Space: Sathrican Homeworld
WorldWorksGames / UrbanMayhem: Streets of Mayhem
WorldWorksGames / Wormhole
Wyrd of Questhaven (PFRPG)
Zombacalypse
Zombie Apocalypse
Zombie Bytes: The Anthology
[PFRPG] GM’s Aid VII: Condition Cards – Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Edition
[PFRPG] Loot 4 Less Vol. 1: Armor and Weapons
[PFRPG] The Book of Arcane Magic
[Savage Worlds] Strike Force 7 – Savaged!
d66 Ship Names 2
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Ápocrypha – Myths of the World

I was looking at Chad Underkoffler talking about whether or not to go to Dreamation this year, and it reminded me of my perspective on conventions in general.  Since I’m both a publisher and a hobbyist, conventions are always composed of some mix of selling (and buying), talking (networking), and playing.  The question, then, when I consider whether to attend a convention is what that convention does best, and whether or not I’m already getting that “best thing” itch scratched by some other convention that year. If I have limited ability to attend multiple conventions, it also becomes a game of prioritizing those three activities and choosing the one or two that get to “win” that year.

In my own personal constellation of conventions, this boils down to a choice among the pros of three specific cons.

I go to GenCon to sell (and, if I make it out of a booth, to buy). For me, the commerce element of GenCon absolutely dominates it. I recognize that part of this is because I’ve never attended the convention as anything other than a boothie. Even my first GenCon was done to spend some time hanging about in the Lulu booth, talking about Don’t Rest Your Head as a Lulu product, as well as a little-known upcoming game called Spirit of the Century. The booth-staffer perspective skews this already commerce-heavy convention more thoroughly in that direction, enough so that the other two points on the triangle are pretty minimal for me.  I’m okay with that.  There are so many people to talk to at GenCon that the talking part tends to drown under the weight of its own embarrassment of riches. And while I fully recognize many folks get great play experiences at GenCon, whenever I’ve peeked over towards that side of things it seems like such stark chaos.  So my personal ranking of GenCon, then, is: Sell, Talk, Play, in descending order.

I go to Origins to talk. I love this convention. This is the convention where Ken Hite took me out to lunch to talk about Don’t Rest Your Head and generally get to know one another. The same day I sat down with Paul Tevis and the guys from the Game Master Show Podcast in the “Big Bar on Two” and talked forever, with drinks getting poured down my gullet (I eventually declared myself The General, which kicked the GM Show crew into later awarding me with a T-Shirt as the head of the Hicks Army, or HA).  Chris Hanrahan and I finally met in person and have become fast friends. And Tevis also brought me along to a dinner (at the resplendent Burgundy Room) where I got to sit down with Will Hindmarch, Jeff Tidball, Chris Hanrahan, Ken Hite, Hal Mangold, and of course Paul. I may be forgetting one other there, in which case I am profoundly embarrassed.  Hal leaned over to me at one point that night, grinned, and said, “You might be one of those indie guys, but you know how to hang.” And overall this is a convention where the completely artificial membrane that separates fans from creators is permeable enough that it all but dissolves. Sure, I’m naming a bunch of awesome creators here, but there were just as many fantastic moments just talking to brother and sister gamers. So many good moments at this convention, and they’re all about talking — also paired with eating, and thankfully the food options here kick GenCon’s ass. The convention center’s right across from the original location of Jeni’s Ice Creams after all. The convention’s all right for commerce, and I hear it’s pretty good for playing, but I get very little of either done on a personal level when I’m there; talking occludes all other activities. For my experience, this is Talk, Sell, Play, but I suspect for most attendees it’s Talk, Play, Buy.

Finally, there’s Dreamation, which happens twice a year but gets called Dexcon when it happens in the summer. But that summer instance is hard hard hard to accommodate when you’ve bracketed it with GenCon and Origins in the same summer, so Dreamation tends to get the somewhat larger attendance (though it’s still small) as it kindly takes place in January or February of each year. Dreamation is hands down where I get my play on. It’s crawling with small press designers and play opportunities. Absolutely crawling. Occasionally we get crazy bigger-press outliers like that Chuck Wendig joker — it’s where I met him, over breakfast or something with Rob. Plus the convention often ends with a Indie Design Roundtable event that I’ve occasionally helped run — an incredible pressurecooker for taking peoples’ game ideas and adding extra sauce of the awesomeberry. So Talk gets a strong secondary placement here. But anyway, the play. Oh god, the play. It’s so abundant, so good, that it took me several years to get to a point where I remembered to give myself permission NOT to play in every slot that I could. This is where Judd won my cold dark heart with a session of Dictionary of Mu. This is where I met Bill White’s Ganakagok. And much much more. Plus there are sightings of the elusive Jennifer Rodgers in the wild. Anyway: Play, Talk, Sell. No two ways about it. (The “sell” part would be vanishingly small too if it weren’t for the presence of the IPR booth.)

This year, Origins is going to get the win as I attempt to amp up the sell side of it just a bit — we’re going to be launching our Dresden Files release or preorder there, as I’ve announced over on the Dresden Files RPG website. And because of that, the usual “rank my priorities” approach doesn’t really fly this year. I mainly have time for one convention, and Origins is preordained. If I make it to Dreamation, it’ll be last-minute at best, but I’m not planning on it. I’ve got layout to do.

What’s to be said about it? Turns out I have a few short thoughts.

Milestones Galore! Wait — What?

Spirit of the Century hit the 4000 copies sold mark (digital and print combined) right around the end of the third quarter. Huge, huge news, there. SOTC launched its preorder in the third quarter of 2006, so that means it took us almost exactly three years to sell that amount.  SOTC’s first year total was 2168 , and second year total was 3815 … wait, that can’t be right … apparently I can’t add! Turns out that back in October of 2008, I added 3815 and 13 together and got … 3128. So I dropped 700 copies off the SOTC total and never noticed, and then kept propagating that error forward. BEHOLD! The 4000 mark was actually broken much earlier in the year. Whoops.

Let’s try that again. SOTC’s first year total was 2168, and its second year total was 3815 (about 1650 sold that year). Third year, 4722-ish (about 900 sold that year).  Sure, it trends downward, but we’re within sight of the 5000 mark (with the total up to this point of 4812 copies sold). I’d we’re likely to hit that somewhere this quarter. And again, no IPR data for 2009′s fourth quarter yet, so we’re likely a fair bit closer than 4812.

Other products hit some lovely totals as well: Our youngest product, Penny, broke 300 nicely. Don’t Rest Your Head broke 2400 and Don’t Lose Your Mind broke 700. Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies has been doing Chad proud, breaking 800 sales by this point, putting it within striking distance (with a little bit of reaching yet to go) of 1000 copies, a goal of ours.  Spirit of the Season sold out its last print run and is now solely virtual.

Opening Our Own Store: Good Idea!

If for some reason all this Evil Hat talk is making you think, “Hey, I should go pick up…”, don’t forget that Evil Hat’s webstore awaits you. We opened it late-ish in the third quarter, but the initial numbers — especially given that they’re all direct sales, which means that aside from paypal transactional fees the money’s almost entirely ours — were promising, and got way more promising in the fourth quarter.  Combined, the two quarters grossed us shy of $3900 in product sales (about $2600 of that was our fourth quarter).  We contracted with the same shipping agency that serves IPR to do this, which means that transferring stock between the Evil Hat store and IPR is easy, reasonably fluid, and incurs no extra shipping expense.  It does look like the webstore may be pulling a few PDF sales off of One Bookshelf (OBS) and some direct sales traffic off of IPR, but I suspect we’re also capturing a few extra sales direct at the site that we weren’t otherwise.

In the end, we’re optimizing the sales potential of the Evil Hat web presence as the point of entry, sending people preferentially to the webstore that gets us the highest percentage of the sale.  But that doesn’t mean that the webstore replaces the need for those other presences — they still act as potent points of entry in their own right. Speaking of which…

IPR Sales: Still a Good Idea!

IPR is definitely skewing more and more towards retail sales for us, while still making a significant number of direct-to-consumer sales. IPR used to trend more towards a 50/50 split between direct sales and retail sales, but in the most recent data from Q3, it was more like 75% retail or convention sales. Prior to that, the 50/50 split shows more with newer products, with older leaning more towards retail — so I suppose that the long tail of our longer-running products lives in game stores. I can’t say as I expected that, but I’m pretty excited to see it: it suggests that there are at least a few retail stores out there that aren’t afraid to bring in somewhat older games, at least experimentally.

I think the EHP webstore and OBS have largely eaten IPR’s lunch regarding PDF sales, however, as many PDF purchases are one-item, and the preferential funneling of the EHP store and the massive eyeball grab of OBS eats up the vast majority of those.  Back when IPR and OBS were the only places I was doing significant PDF business, IPR was hitting about 20% of the total. I think (though I have not calculated to prove) that that percentage has dropped off a bit.

But the IPR outlet to retail is a strong one that I’m not inclined to ignore. IPR’s brand has grown and gotten recognition with enough retailers to provide us with a lot of extra business. Yes, we’re not making more than a thinnish profit on each of those retailer sales, but we’re getting more eyeballs that will turn into future fans and purchasers, and I believe making sales we wouldn’t have in other channels. Worth the expense.  IPR also offers s an easy way to get our products showing at a few conventions across the year — especially GenCon, which is becoming increasingly onerous to personally attend on my part.

And in the end, the direct sales might be a smaller percentage, but they’re still offering people an option the EHP store can’t — the ability to buy other games from other publishers at the same time, together with Evil Hat’s stuff. The EHP store requires you to have a singular interest; I like serving folks with a diverse palate as well.

OBS Sales: Good!

I’ve said before that OBS (DriveThruRPG and RPGNow) is the big dog of PDF. They continue to be. Woof. We’re still making several hundred a month off of our small catalog there; yes, we’re giving them a 35% cut, but the sales volume supports me sucking that up.  And given that OBS’s exclusive deal only saves you 5%, making that a 30% cut, I’m confident that staying non-exclusive was the right move as well.

Lulu and e23: Anemic As Expected; YGN vanished

Lulu lets people buy the hardcover of SOTC, and seems to have a very small “walk-in” crowd. This, for no risk. Since that means free money, I’m happy to stay, even though Lulu long since dropped off my list for getting books printed (we print in quantities over 40-or-so copies, which is the point at which Lulu stops being cost effective if you’re preprinting stock, if not well before that point).

e23 was looking anemic (for us) before, so we haven’t been particularly motivated to list newer products there.  That’s fine — it’s another sort of walk-in opportunity for a handful of sales once every month or two.

Your Games Now has dropped off the list — we stopped having our products listed there when it went off the co-op model. The YGN folks are lovely people, but the sales volume was never more than a trickle, and often ran dry. Not worth the hassle of setting up a product.

Penny Dreadful?

I feel like Evil Hat could (and likely should) be doing more to get A Penny For My Thoughts more sales. Over 300 isn’t bad, especially given that the game is a little “weird” in terms of how to pitch it and who will be interested, mind you, and neither Paul nor I have had abundant primary-focus energy to put into the thing. But we’ve talked a lot about this and we’re fine with it playing out over a longer timeframe.  Penny made back its money, no problem, so more than anything it being a laid-back product suits us just fine given our mutual tendency to be involved in many often larger projects at the same time.

Invisible Experiment

There have actually been a few sales that I’m not reporting in the numbers, partly because I haven’t been tallying them and it’s a little bit of a pain in the ass to go and do that. A number of months back I started toying with distribution (gasp!) in the form of Esdevium. Esdevium is a distributor serving (I believe) primarily the EU — I was referred to them via Angus of Cubicle 7 (and formerly of Leisure Games).  It helped that several of the employees at Esdevium appear to be fans of Spirit of the Century.

Since IPR’s retail channel is global but best serves the USA, and Esdevium’s channel largely does not point at the USA, I thought this would be a safe way to experiment with the wild and wooly wildness of the dreaded “distro”. Turns out it’s not all bad, but the increased risk is definitely there: you’re sending out product before you get paid for it, something which is unique among my other sales vectors, the rest of whom get paid at the time of sale. That’s a little scary given the degree to which I’ve played it safe before.

Still, it looked like it worked: I’ve probably moved over a hundred SOTCs through them, and a not insignificant number copies of my other titles too, and that includes several reorders past the first biggest one. That said, I haven’t heard from them in recent months, so I think they sold through their initial burst of interest at those titles being suddenly available to the markets they touch.

Jury’s out as to whether or not I feel that distro is something I need to do to get out to the fans.  The combo I have going of EHP Webstore/IPR/OBS is situated right about where I want things, I think, in terms of eyeball reach vs. risk. But time will tell if I feel differently, especially as the Dresden Files RPG monolith moves closer to Origins (I’ve been doing a few days of layout on it at this point, even — the writing folks are taking it easy, because they’re done, making it an editors and layout guy thing now).

It’s Late As I’m Writing This

So I’m probably forgetting something, or missing some observation about the data. What questions do you have that I haven’t commented on? What do you see in the numbers that I haven’t?

On May 1st, these numbers were where we were at, including all of Q1 2009 for IPR, and adding in April for Lulu, OBS, e23, and YGN.

2009Q2 to date (prior to May 1st)
DLYM PDF – 10
DRYH PDF – 20
DRYH SC – 1
SOTC PDF – 25
SOTC HC – 1
SOTS PDF – 3
S7S PDF – 44

Lifetime:
DLYM: 462
DRYH: 2099
SOTC: 3563 (DISCOVERY! I dropped 700 copies from this total back in October 2008. Whups. Make that 4263 instead.)
SOTS: 500
S7S: 100

Let’s see how things went from there, shall we?

Note: This is all raw data, with some interesting totals along the way. I’m saving my conclusions for Wednesday’s post.

SECOND QUARTER

May

OBS:
DLYM PDF: 9
DRYH PDF: 10
SOTC PDF: 16
SOTS PDF: 2
S7S PDF: 27

Lulu:
DRYH PDF: 1
DRYH Print: 2
SOTC HC: 4

June

OBS:
DLYM PDF: 5
DRYH PDF: 7
SOTC PDF: 7
SOTS PDF: 5
S7S PDF: 15

Lulu:
SOTS PDF: 1
SOTC HC: 2
DRYH PDF: 1

e23:
SOTS PDF: 1

July 15th – 2009Q2 for IPR

Penny PDF: 0
Penny Print: 120 (47 from retailers)
DLYM PDF: 7
DLYM Print: 72 (51 from retailers)
DRYH PDF: 24
DRYH Print: 103 (65 from retailers)
SOTC PDF: 16
SOTC Print: 183 (114 from retailers)
SOTS PDF: 10
SOTS Print: 6 (1 from retailers)
S7S PDF: 46
S7S HC: 245 (67 from retailers)
S7S Print: 143 (72 from retailers)

Totals

2009Q2:
Penny PDF: 0
Penny Print: 120
DLYM PDF: 31
DLYM Print: 72
DRYH PDF: 63
DRYH Print: 106
SOTC PDF: 48
SOTC Print: 183
SOTC HC: 7
SOTS PDF: 22
SOTS Print: 6
S7S PDF: 132
S7S Print: 143
S7S HC: 245

THIRD QUARTER

July

OBS:
Penny PDF: 1
DLYM PDF: 14
DRYH PDF: 18
SOTC PDF: 13
SOTS PDF: 4
S7S PDF: 25

Lulu:
SOTC HC: 4
DRYH PDF: 1

August

OBS:
Penny PDF: 5
DLYM PDF: 6
DRYH PDF: 7
SOTC PDF: 13
SOTS PDF: 3
S7S PDF: 18

Lulu:
DRYH PDF: 2
SOTC HC: 1

e23:
SOTC PDF: 1
DRYH PDF: 1

September

OBS:
Penny PDF: 1
DLYM PDF: 5
DRYH PDF: 9
SOTC PDF: 14
SOTS PDF: 4
S7S PDF: 9

Lulu:
DRYH Print: 1

Evil Hat 2009Q3 – Our first few months with a webstore (partial quarter)

Penny PDF: 2
Penny Print: 5
DLYM PDF: 2
DLYM Print: 2
DRYH PDF: 10
DRYH Print: 6
SOTC PDF: 3
SOTC Print: 18
SOTS PDF: 3
S7S PDF: 2
S7S Print: 11

October 15th – 2009Q3 for IPR

Penny PDF: 4
Penny Print: 173 (76 to retailers, 48 at conventions)
DLYM PDF: 8
DLYM Print: 85 (46 to retailers, 22 to conventions)
DRYH PDF: 8
DRYH Print: 97 (54 to retailers, 22 to conventions)
SOTC PDF: 6
SOTC Print: 164 (101 to retailers, 23 to conventions)
SOTS PDF: 7
SOTS Print: 0 (out of print at this point)
S7S PDF: 7
S7S Print: 131 (56 to retailers, 29 to conventions)
S7S HC: 0 (out of print at this point)

Totals

2009Q3:
Penny PDF: 13
Penny Print: 178
DLYM PDF: 35
DLYM Print: 87
DRYH PDF: 56
DRYH Print: 104
SOTC PDF: 50
SOTC Print: 182
SOTC HC: 5
SOTS PDF: 21
S7S PDF: 61
S7S Print: 142

FOURTH QUARTER

October

OBS:
Penny PDF: 2
DLYM PDF: 5
DRYH PDF: 11
SOTC PDF: 10
SOTS PDF: 2
S7S PDF: 4

Lulu:
SOTC HC: 4
DRYH Print: 4

e23:
SOTS PDF: 1

November

OBS:
Penny PDF: 4
DLYM PDF: 6
DRYH PDF: 8
SOTC PDF: 8
SOTS PDF: 7
S7S PDF: 7

Lulu:
SOTC HC: 3
DRYH Print: 1

e23:
SOTS PDF: 1

December

OBS:
Penny PDF: 3
DLYM PDF: 5
DRYH PDF: 9
SOTC PDF: 10
SOTS PDF: 9
S7S PDF: 9

Lulu:
SOTC HC: 5
DRYH Print: 1
SOTC PDF: 1

e23:
SOTC PDF: 2
SOTS PDF: 2

Evil Hat 2009Q4 – Our first full quarter with a webstore

Penny PDF: 10
Penny Print: 12
DLYM PDF: 5
DLYM Print: 7
DRYH PDF: 13
DRYH Print: 19
SOTC PDF: 17
SOTC Print: 33
SOTS PDF: 8
S7S PDF: 3
S7S Print: 12

Totals

2009Q4 to date:
Penny PDF: 19
Penny Print: 12
DLYM PDF: 21
DLYM Print: 7
DRYH PDF: 41
DRYH Print: 25
SOTC PDF: 47
SOTC Print: 33
SOTC HC: 12
SOTS PDF: 30
S7S PDF: 23
S7S Print: 12

Lifetime:
Penny: 342
DLYM: 709
DRYH: 2473
SOTC: 4812
SOTS: 576
S7S: 814

Note: No IPR until January 15th or so, so we don’t have complete Q4 data yet. I’ll post an update when that comes in.

CONCLUSIONS…?

Tune in Wednesday. I’ll have a few things to say about this data. For now, simply getting the numbers out there was the goal, and I’ve done it. Less catching up next time, more prompt disclosure!

Also

The guys over at VSCA have posted about their Diaspora sales numbers. Celebrate this practice! I tend to believe that the industry is made healthier by disclosure.