At IPR, for Evil Hat, the fourth quarter of 2007 was one of our weakest. That said, there are some mitigating factors here that are worth considering:
- While we only have a partial year to compare to for 2006, Q4 a year ago only did approximately 10% better, in terms of the check Evil Hat was issued, vs. 2007's Q4.
- In 2006 we had put out two new products that were still reasonably fresh. We didn't put out anything (other than a freebie, Spirit of the Season) in 2007. So a 10% drop year-to-year on an unchanged catalog does not exactly suck.
- Q4 seems to have a bit of a spending pattern of a month or two of folks buying gifts, then stopping their own purchases to see if they'll get gifted something, without much time for a post-christmas spending blitz to play out in-quarter.
- Retailers might stock up for Christmas at some point in the quarter, but there's been a spate of retail orders coming in at IPR in January that suggests to me there may be a bit of a "wait until the new year" buying pattern in operation at that level.
- In 2006 and part of 2007 we didn't sell PDFs through OBS. So that could account for some reduction in IPR specific revenues.
- If there was a retailer surge on SOTC (and Leisure Games tops that list with an order of 48 copies), then the fact that we make less per copy sold through retail channels could account for some reduction as well. But I haven't dug into the data (too time consuming) to see if this has any weight to it.
So, that said, we get into the numbers.
DRYH Print+PDF Bundles: 19 DRYH Standalone Print: 66 (Print subtotal on DRYH: 85; this beats Q4 2006 by 3) DRYH Standalone PDF: 25 DRYH Total: 110
SOTC Print+PDF Bundles: 92 SOTC Standalone Print: 173 SOTC Hardcovers: 5 (Print subtotal on SOTC: 270; compare to slightly over 300 copies with IPR in Q4 2006; there's a big part of our 10% drop) SOTC Standalone PDF: 23 SOTC Total: 293
Updated quarter (final):
DRYH: 58 PDF, 93 Print = 151 for Q4 SOTC: 80 PDF, 31 Hard, 265 Soft = 376 for Q4
Updated lifetime:
DRYH: 1063 + 151 = 1214 SOTC: 2251 + 376 = 2627
A final observation -- given that my offset print run of 1000 copies of SOTC came in December, it's nice to see that our "weak" fourth quarter still moved 265 copies of the softcover. If that level can sustain, the offset run will sell out in a year; if it drops to 200 per quarter, it's still just 5 quarters or so to spool out. Regardless, I'm pretty excited that it's likely I won't have much in the way of reprint costs (for SOTC at least) in 2007.
Surprising exactly no one, YGN sold no copies of EHP PDFs in December.
e23 sold 2 copies of Spirit of the Century.
OBS sold 14 copies of SOTC and 7 copies of Don't Rest Your Head. This is pretty solid, but follows the "slowly dropping off" pattern expected with OBS.
Lulu sold 4 hardcovers of SOTC and 3 softcovers of Don't Rest Your Head -- no PDF sales.
IPR numbers won't be available until mid-month.
From this post:
DRYH gains 7 PDF and 3 print sales. SOTC gains 16 PDF and 4 hardcover sales.
Updated quarter:
DRYH: 33 PDF, 8 Print = 41 for Q4 to date SOTC: 57 PDF, 26 Hard = 83 for Q4 to date
So, I mentioned in a recent post that I hadn't worked out how to get sales figures from e23. Well, that got fixed. :)
I'm just going to lump these into the q4 numbers rather than try to back-tally the pre-October bits into things.
e23 sells only PDFs. Looks like this:
DRYH PDF Sep: 2 Oct: 1 Nov: 0
SOTC PDF Sep: 1 Oct: 2 Nov: 2
e23's outstripping YGN at the very least.
Updated quarter:
DRYH: 26 PDF, 5 Print = 31 for Q4 to date SOTC: 41 PDF, 22 Hard = 63 for Q4 to date
Updated lifetime:
DRYH: 1050+3 = 1053 SOTC: 2226+5 = 2231
When I get a chance, I'm hoping my next post will be about the completion of my first offset printing job, to the tune of 1100 new copies of Spirit of the Century, now all boxed up and sitting in one of my storage rooms.
It's December! Time for some sales numbers thinkery.
I haven't figured out how to get visibility to my sales numbers at e23, but I think I've made a few sales over there, in case folks have been wondering.
I switched Lulu over to monthly payments by Paypal at midmonth, after getting some confirmation that their method of payment, like OBS's, doesn't deduct a paypal commission; I didn't want to make less money in exchange for the convenience of not processing a paper check. As a result, Lulu numbers will start to become a monthly thing, though I'm going to have to play catch-up here.
YourGamesNow managed to sell no PDFs at all for me in November -- though that's not much of a drop: in the two prior months, it managed to sell one PDF per month. Overall a pretty weak performer -- some folks have said that YGN does best if there's some kind of promotion, but then, the discounts given in such a promotion would mostly offset the 10% profit gain in getting someone to go there instead of OBS, so I don't see myself pushing too hard for that in the future. I might try doing some sort of short-term exclusive PDF launch there at some point, just to take a little advantage of that -- though with that said, IPR's 15% cut vs. YGN's 25% does leave YGN as the odd man out yet again.
Not too shabby, given Lulu's general minimization. I love that the hardcovers continue to move a bit.
Next up, OneBookShelf (RPGNow/DriveThruRPG). I've already given the October stats for them, so this is all November.
OBS NOVEMBER DRYH PDF: 11 (vs 9 last month) SOTC PDF: 16 (vs 19 last month)
So, this appears to be roughly the cruising altitude for OBS sales at the moment, despite the late-October-to-early-mid-November doldrums I was seeing.
Add it all up with the Q4 numbers and DRYH and SOTC to date look like this:
DRYH: 23 PDF, 5 Print = 28 for Q4 to date SOTC: 36 PDF, 22 Hard = 58 for Q4 to date
Dragonmeet gave me some fun moments meeting fans. Apparently some of the Esdevium crew (a UK-based distributor) are really, really thrilled with Spirit of the Century -- I got gushing and requests to sign four copies of the book, as well as the important information that the bath-products store Lush has product labels that could all be turned into a variety of saucy aspects. I also met a woman who was very grateful that in Don't Rest Your Head she finally found a game that matched the level of dark she wanted, and which enabled her to make a tableful of male gamers utterly disturbed.
So how'd my monthly PDF sales sites do in October?
Over on Your Games Now, I again got only one sale, 1 copy of Don't Rest Your Head -- and that was on sale. Granted, my promotional efforts were very light, but this sale wasn't invisible: I indicated it here, and more importantly it was a part of the postings made on RPG.net in tandem with Horror Review Week, where DRYH got reviewed five times. Sale price was $6.66 compared to the usual $7.95.
OBS was as usual a bit of a giant:
Don't Rest Your Head: 9 (not at a sale price) Spirit of the Century: 19
This is a distinct drop from the previous month (-4 sales on both products) but it's still pretty healthy performance. I imagine month to month I'll see a bit of a drop-off as the OBS market plays itself out.
These are the first numbers to add to Q4's tallies! So for the quarter we're at:
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