It’s easy to look at these numbers and respond with alarm, but remember that a) the 4th quarter of the year is typically pretty crappy, and b) Evil Hat’s catalog is aging without a lot of new-product blood, something which we should be remedying over the next two years.

Distribution continues to bring in a large portion of our long tail (seen after the cut).

I have a bunch of distro questions!  If this isn’t the place for them, no prob, I can revisit some other time.

Basically, I’m wondering what those 1095 Q3 sales of DFRPG:YS look like, the chain of ownership from Evil Hat to the customer.  That’s 77% of the total 1427, which surprises me!

My (probably incorrect) understanding looks like this:
1) Alliance gets Dresden books from Evil hat.
2) Alliance offers Dresden books to American hobby stores.  The number of hobby stores is small and dwindling.  The number of those that carry RPGs is smaller still.  The number that carry anything other than D&D is vastly smaller still.
3) Those few retailers pay Alliance for Dresden.  Alliance then takes their cut and pays Evil Hat.
4) If the retailers can’t sell Dresden, they send it back and ask for their money back.  So Evil Hat hasn’t really sold a book until a customer’s taken it home with them.

1095 in 3 months seems like a staggeringly large number to me, based on that process.  Am I simply underestimating the number of people who go into hobby stores and buy a spiffy new RPG they’ve never heard of?  (I mean, if they’d heard of it, they probably would have bought it via another channel, right?)  Am I underestimating the overseas market?

Up front, I should say that the Dresden Files RPG books don’t necessarily behave like any other product in our catalog. That’s the strength of the license at work there. DF probably makes up a good 80-90% of our revenue — which can be a little nervewracking in the long term. Part of why I’ve been using this year and will be using the next couple to try to expand the variety of games that Evil Hat produces.

Anyway, to get into your question, the good thing here is that there’s plenty of history to peruse on this blog, so to get our context straight, let’s first figure out how that ’77%’ on DFRPG:YS has been trending over time:

Quarter – Total Sales – Distro Sales – % distro
Q3 2011 – 1427 – 1095 – 77%
Q2 2011 – 1099 – 819 – 75%
Q1 2011 - 1346 - 967 – 72%
Q4 2010 - 1373 – 1004 – 73%
Q3 2010 - 2531 - 1776 – 70%
Q2 2010 - 4545 - 2741 – 60%

Now, I think if you broke down the month-by-month of the book’s first quarter, you’d see that Evil Hat and distribution were going about neck and neck at the start. We have very solid reach and leveraged it to give us a strong direct sales preorder (which trapped a BUNCH more per-sale cash for us, a real boon), but over the long haul, that reach only goes so far. So while distro started at a 50/50 kind of split with us, they’ve trended upwards since. The reason for this is simple. Or, perhaps I should say, the reason for this is “simple”. The service that distribution is offering to retailers is a simplification of product acquisition: one stop shop, many publishers. It’s a pain, and a lot of time investment, for a retail store to contact and buy from each individual publisher, so most simply don’t. They form a favored relationship with one to three distributors, and they’re done. If your product isn’t there, there’s a decent chance they won’t have your product on their shelves.

Once the spike on DFRPG:YS sales settled down, we started averaging between 300 and 400 a month, with 3/4ths-or-so of that being due to distribution. (Note: The ‘total sales’ numbers on the above fold in our PDF sales numbers as well, so if we limited the data to strictly only physical books, distribution’s percentage would be even higher.) We might have captured some of those sales if we’d stayed out of distribution, but I’m pretty certain we wouldn’t have captured all of them. It’s likely, given the interest in the game, that distribution has brought us enough additional sales to accommodate for any “loss” of per-sale revenue due to the steeper discounts that product is sold into distro. It’s been a good partnership.

Now, to get into your (in fact, semi-correct, semi-incorrect) understanding of the process:

What you’re describing is a situation where a service holds the stock, but does not own the stock, and sells it on behalf of Evil Hat, providing revenue to Evil Hat only when that sale (to a retailer) occurs. That’s not how most distribution works, though (more on that in a moment). That’s consignment, which is essentially what IPR does (not counted in my distro tallies). IPR sells stock on behalf of publishers both to retailers and direct to customers, so they’re sort of a half-distributor — as far as the retailer client is concerned, they are a distributor, because they distribute products they have not themselves created to retailers. The consignment thing is what makes IPR a little different.

What most distributors do is buy the products from the publisher, at a steep discount (often just 40-44% of the cover price). At that point, the distributor owns the product and assumes the risk. They’re responsible for then turning those units around and selling them to retailers. Since most of Evil Hat’s distributor clients are placing reorders at least once per quarter, we can surmise that all the books sold to distribution in prior quarters have at least been sold to retailers. Hopefully, those retailers have then successfully sold those books to their customers, but that’s nearly impossible to get visibility into. But, to get to the heart of your question, yeah: there’s enough interest in the DFRPG by enough retailers out there to have sustained such numbers as these for over a year.

Now — to complicate this a bit, along the way, Alliance made me an offer to take over as Evil Hat’s fulfillment service. That’s a phrase that simply means “act as shipper for”. They also are doing flooring, which means they’re warehousing our stuff for a small monthly fee (which gets reduced a little if our stuff remains active at a certain level). Because they’re doing this, they don’t need to purchase our stuff in advance in order to have it available when a retailer places an order. So this has essentially moved Alliance into the same ownership-sequence space as IPR: consignment (matching the 1-2-3 chain of ownership you theorized was applicable for all other distributors, but isn’t). So the sales numbers I get from them each month are based on stuff they’ve actually sold. Now, for business partnership reasons I don’t want to put a specific number on what Alliance sold, but I can tell you that they account for over half of Q3′s distribution tally, with Esdevium (a UK-based distributor) and ACD (Alliance’s top domestic competitor) vying for the second place spot.

Where your theorized sequence breaks down is “4) If the retailers can’t sell Dresden, they send it back and ask for their money back.  So Evil Hat hasn’t really sold a book until a customer’s taken it home with them.” That situation only exists if the publisher offers returnability – basically a promise that if a book isn’t sold, it can be sent back or destroyed and the seller can get a refund.

If you think about it a bit, returnability sounds great to a middle man — it essentially says that they face no risk for buying the product and putting it on their shelves. Which is dandy for them, but poison for a publisher (and in fact has sunk publishers of various stripe over the years, especially those that sold into big chain bookstores) because it’s utterly unpredictable, and it means that you can’t trust that the money you’ve been paid is money you’ll get to keep. But money spends — so the publisher spends some of it, and hopes that they won’t end up with a negative balance when the returns come in. Worse, when publishers offered returnability with a time limit (say, 180 days), they’d see a scenario where buyers would buy a bunch of books, return them on the last day or so of the time period, and then rebuy, essentially rendering the time limit moot and the cash situation continually in question. (And since most buyers don’t have to pay right away — they usually defer payment by 30 or 60 days — that wasn’t a momentary dip in cash on hand for the publisher, it was a canyon.)

I know some publishers still offer this, but I don’t and won’t, and that’s going to limit what distributors and retailers will buy and sell to an extent. But that’s fine by me. To be perfectly frank, I don’t want them buying books they don’t have confidence they can sell, because the point here is to get them to the end consumer – the guy or gal who’ll actually take the product home and put it to use.

To get a little quarter-to-quarter perspective, I’ve added in a “LQ vs TQ” column showing the percentage change between last quarter and the more recent one. An uptick for most titles — but not a shock. We’ll probably see some significant dropoff in Q4, so tune back in in three months to see that.

More detailed breakdown behind the cut.

As always, you can find our titles at the Evil Hat webstore and at other fine game vendors around the net and the planet.

Here’s the more detailed breakdown:

Added a couple columns to the high level summary this time, so you can see what the quarterly sales were like for last quarter, as well as the updated lifetime tallies.

And here’s how the sales looked, source by source:

Working on tallying up this quarter’s stuff now.

The high level “gut” view: sales were down (as expected) in the fourth quarter of last year, but not horridly so. In terms of sales volume, for example, Q4′s DFRPG sales were only a few hundred less than Q3′s for each title. That’s a palpable drop, sure, but not a “it’s drying up!” On top of that, we got a nice boost out of launching & selling our limited edition “Wizard” Fudge Dice, clearing over half of the units we produced in just a couple months through direct and distribution channels.

The quarter’s numbers from Q3 can be found on my previous post. While the percentage drop on the smaller volume titles was more brutal, comparatively speaking, the overall robustness of the DFRPG and the addition of the dice did nicely by us.

Here’s the high level sum-up. Lifetime sales-wise everything is looking pretty rosy. I’m particularly happy to see that Your Story is within striking distance of 10k copies sold (as always our lifetime totals reflect digital and print combined, but counting Print+PDF bundle sales as only a single sale, not one of each), and Our World falling just short of 8k. That’s a nice footprint for us and gives us a good shot at selling a few thousand copies of our in-development Paranet book, I think.

And the source-by-source particulars (“special” just means “the spirit of the century hardcover from Lulu” for now):

A little something like this.

Where We Started

Lifetime sales prior to this quarter:

Penny: 660
DLYM: 1049
DRYH: 3034
DFRPG:OW: 4777
DFRPG:YS: 5018
HBR: 9
SOTC: 5688
SOTS: 629
S7S: 1267

So, if that’s where we started, here’s where we went:

IPR for Q3 2010

Penny: 39 (12 retail, 16 convention)
Penny PDF: 9
Diaspora: 25 (20 retail)
Diaspora PDF: 4
DLYM: 31 (21 convention, 4 retail)
DLYM PDF: 3
DRYH: 46 (25 convention, 12 retail)
DRYH PDF: 4
DFRPG:OW: 300 (171 convention, 79 retail)
DFRPG:OW PDF: 2
DFRPG:YS: 407 (225 convention, 115 retail)
DFRPG:YS PDF: 6
HBR: 55 (44 retail)
HBR PDF: 4
SOTC: 52 (26 convention, 21 retail)
SOTC PDF: 3
SOTS PDF: 1
S7S: 20 (10 convention, 6 retail)
S7S PDF: 0

OBS for Q3 2010

Penny PDF: 6
DLYM PDF: 21
DRYH PDF: 31 (3 in Hebrew)
DFRPG:OW PDF: 178
DFRPG:YS PDF: 205
HBR PDF: 17
SOTC PDF: 67
SOTS PDF: 11
S7S PDF: 16

e23 for Q3 2010

Penny PDF: 1
Diaspora PDF: 2
DFRPG:OW PDF: 1
DFRPG:YS PDF: 2
SOTC PDF: 3
S7S PDF: 1

Lulu for Q3 2010

DRYH: 2
DRYH PDF: 1
SOTC HC: 1

Distribution Orders for Q3 2010

Hopefully I’m not getting the numbers wrong on this; the honest truth is that I’m not sure where I cut off my reporting last quarter, so these numbers are slightly “guessy” in the sense that I might be double-dipping on a couple sources of data from the end of last quarter.

On top of that, some of last quarter’s stuff doesn’t get invoiced until THIS quarter, so I’m essentially going to omit a big hunk of September’s sales here, treating them as part of Q4 down the line.

Still, them numbers down yonder, they don’t stink.

Penny: 132
Diaspora: 66
DLYM: 137
DRYH: 152
DFRPG:OW: 1285
DFRPG:YS: 1776
HBR: 189
SOTC: 201
S7S: 133

Evil Hat Webstore Orders for Q3 2010

Penny: 6
Penny PDF: 7
Diaspora: 32
Diaspora PDF: 7
DLYM: 3
DLYM PDF: 9
DRYH: 14
DRYH PDF: 15
DFRPG:OW: 311
DFRPG:OW PDF: 86
DFRPG:YS: 348
DFRPG:YS PDF: 97
HBR: 5
HBR PDF: 0
SOTC: 17
SOTC PDF: 10
SOTS PDF: 1
S7S: 4
S7S PDF: 3

Totals for Q3

Penny: 39+6+132=177
Penny PDF: 9+6+2+7=24
Diaspora: 25+32+66=123
Diaspora PDF: 4+1+7=12
DLYM: 31+3+137=171
DLYM PDF: 3+21+9=33
DRYH: 46+2+14+152=214
DRYH PDF: 4+31+1+15=51
DFRPG:OW: 300+311+1285=1896
DFRPG:OW PDF: 2+178+1+86=267
DFRPG:YS: 407+348+1776=2531
DFRPG:YS PDF: 6+205+2+97=310
HBR: 55+5+189=249
HBR PDF: 4+17=21
SOTC: 52+17+201=270
SOTC HC: 1
SOTC PDF: 3+67+1+10=81
SOTS PDF: 1+11+1=13
S7S: 20+4+133=157
S7S PDF: 16+1+3=20

Lifetime Numbers

Penny: 660+177+24 = 861
Diaspora: 123+12 = 135
DLYM: 1049+171+33 = 1253
DRYH: 3034+214+51 = 3299
DFRPG:OW: 4777+1896+267 = 6940 (ding!)
DFRPG:YS 5018+2531+310 = 7859 (ding!)
HBR: 9+249+21 = 279
SOTC: 5688+270+1+81 = 6040 (ding!)
SOTS: 629+13 = 642
S7S: 1267+157+20 = 1444

SOTC broke 6000, but also got lapped by both DFRPG books.  DFRPG sales numbers clocked in around 50%, very roughly, of the previous quarter. We had very strong direct sales in the hundreds, but in terms of quantity of books moved, the retail/distribution channel made the strongest showing (not a shock; that’s what it’s there for).

Remember, as always, you can pick these items up at the Evil Hat Webstore: http://www.evilhat.com/store/

What are your thoughts on the numbers?

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!

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

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

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

The Graphs

The Daily Numbers

Lifetime:

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

IPR For Q1 2010

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

OBS For Q1 2010

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

e23 for Q1 2010

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

Lulu for Q1 2010

DRYH Print: 3
SOTC HC: 4

Distribution Orders in Q1 2010

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

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

Evil Hat Webstore Totals for Q1 2010

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

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

Totals for Q1 (Drumroll Please)

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

Lifetime:

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

Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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.)

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.