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!

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.

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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:

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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.

So, for a while now Evil Hat has been offering the Brick & Mortar PDF Guarantee (read about it here).  This is a program we’ve test-driven with the help of Endgame, then expanded as a casual, as-asked-for thing with our customers.  Its implementation has always been dirt simple — the customer contacts Evil Hat or asks their retailer to, we ask for some sort of proof of the purchase, and then we use DriveThruRPG’s complimentary copy sending tool to get the customer the PDF for the physical product they bought.

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.

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We launched the Dresden Files RPG preorder on this past Sunday, and I’ve been plenty transparent about what’s going on over on Twitter, both in the fredhicks and dresdenfiles tweeter accounts.

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?

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I’m a big fan of what Daniel Solis is doing over on the Happy Birthday Robot kickstarter (and for that matter what David Hill is doing at Maschine Zeit even if the game pitch isn’t necessarily for me).

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.

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The Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design announced the following nominees for the 36th Annual Origins Awards at GTS the other day:

http://paultevis.com/blog/2010/3/26/origins-awards-nominees-and-jury-selections.html

(snip)

Roleplaying Game
Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space – Cubicle 7 Entertainment
Eclipse Phase – Catalyst Game Labs
FantasyCraft – Crafty Games
A Song of Ice And Fire – Green Ronin Publishing
Supernatural Roleplaying Game – Margaret Weis Productions

Roleplaying Game Supplement
Big Damn Heroes Handbook – Margaret Weis Productions
The Day After Ragnarok – Atomic Overmind Press
Seattle 2072 – Catalyst Game Labs
Warriors & Warlocks – Green Ronin Publishing
Weird War II – Pinnacle Entertainment Group

(snip)

Bonus content: This is the ballot presented to the retailers at GTS, representing the jury selections:

http://paultevis.com/storage/Ballot%20GTS%202010.pdf