Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

Bits & Mortar is a new label for an old practice, at least here at Evil Hat: our policy of backing in-store purchases of print products at your local FLGS with complimentary PDFs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

Hold on to your hats, folks. This one was super interesting.

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!

Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

So, we kinda goofed up with our preorders when it came to planning our shipping strategy. This has been partly a case of inexperience on my part with things on this scale (IIRC the 1600+ preorders we got on Dresden Files was easily 4 or 5 times what we saw when Spirit of the Century launched), partly a case of asking more of the warehouse than they could handle (at least in the timeframe I had assumed was possible), and partly a case of life complications (medical and staffing issues) that layered on top of the other things at a time when there just wasn’t a schedule buffer to handle those sorts of issues.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

So it’s a common notion with “microbrew” publishers that some things are out of reach unles you’re willing to lay down a really fat amount of cash. One such thing is the idea of doing a full-color hardcover book, even a small one.

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

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

Turns out I was wrong.

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

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

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

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

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

So we’re done with the second quarter of 2010. Somewhere past the middle of this month I’ll cough up some real numbers on our sales overall for you data-hounds to chew on. But first, a preamble.

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:

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

Rob Donoghue, my business partner at Evil Hat, has been writing one hell of a blog of late over at Some Space To Think. You should check it out in general, because it’s fantastic.

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

Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

Evil Hat Productions is partnering with Daniel Solis to publish Happy Birthday, Robot! Now that the kickstarter funding drive is over, you can still preorder it (with instant PDF) at the Evil Hat webstore: http://www.evilhat.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=68_73&products_id=199

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

Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

In the comments on an earlier post, “qasbah” asked:

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

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

Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

So, The Bones. It’s a fitting follow-up to Things We Think About Games from the Gameplaywright gents, in the sense that it’s about gamers looking at the games they play.  Honestly there aren’t enough books of that sort in the world (though Green Ronin’s 100 Best series offers fine entries to the form). This time around, The Bones gives us more heft: six in-depth articles including “A Random History of Dice” by Kenneth Hite, and 19 essays, one of which is mine, in which I talk about how playing diceless for years made me love them bones. (Added bonus: the table of contents is a set of random-roll tables. Surprise yourself! Let the dice tell you which essay to read!)

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.

Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

Short post, but something I wanted to share with y’all.

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

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

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

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