PDF Industry - How do we help it grow?

[rpghost]

As the owner of RPGNow.com I'm obviously very interested in brainstoming this topic:

Originally posted by Mike DeSanto
1) PDFs don't sell well, so they don't pay well. How to increase PDF sales?
...
I was thinking a vending machine/kiosk model might work. An online distributor, using RPGnow as an example, pays store owners (flat monthly payment or a percentage of sales) to put a kiosk in their store. This kiosk is connected to the RPGnow site, or contains a copy. A person comes into the store, uses the kiosk to buy stuff, and the kiosk produces the product somehow; send an e-mail to the purchaser with a download link or spit out a CD or laser print the product.

I've had this idea before and it was talked about on EN World... problems are:

1) we'd have to pay for a computer to be placed on site as no store owner is going to invest in them

2) the revenue shares RPGNow makes now are very slim. There would have to be some sort of up charge for costs of making the CD and paying the retailer.

3) Even then how many retailers have the space to donate to this kiosk/machine instead of books? Esp when it's not a big money maker?

4) We'd have to provide printed examples or some sort of previewing system on the machine. Costs add up...

5) We have a security issue with all the machines having all the products on them. If they don't you're talking a lot of downloads. Worse, you'll have to have some sort of nightly sync to the main site to get new downloads (which are added daily) and upload sales info.

6) Ever try to collect from a store that's not making much money? Ever expect to get your new computer back if they go out of business? Lots of risks.

Ok ok... you get the point I think. I hope you do.

So, what do we do to increase PDF sales? I wish I knew... I've tried:

- Ads in Dungeon, Dragon, KORT, Valkrie, Games Unplug, etc. Also convention registration books (Origins, GenCon, and a couple others). They have all resulted in very little return. At most 10 or so new customers per issue. That's a high price per customer.

- Electronic demos/ads in Game Play CD, Over 1500 Demo CDs handed out at conventions (Origins, GenCon, FlatCon, etc). To date I've seen only a few new customers with this code (granted it's a bit early but still dishearting).

- Customer Drive through online promotions. Was handing out hundreds of dollars of prizes but only got about 10 new customers out of it. So, either everyone online knows about us or the people who know about my network RPG Host already have all their friends on RPGNow. In short, not even big free giveaways helped current users get us new customers.

- Prize and Seminar support. We've set out prizes and demos for seminars at conventions and local gaming shops/groups... Little or no mesurable return other then them buying ePublisher Guide here and there.

- Flyers / stuffers. We've stuffed hundreds of brochers in orders at RPGShop.com but with little results. Probably because most shoppers of our network know about both sites. Trick here would be to get OTHER physical online book stores and also brick and mortor stores to help distribute flyers to raise awarness. Problem is, they consider us and esp RPGShop a direct competitor or don't want to help cause there isn't anything in it for them or its just plain viewed as undercutting their prices.

- Portals: http://www.digitalrpg.org - this has had some small effects on attacting people but nothing overly noticable. Problem is most people who know about these portals also already are well aware of RPGNow. The trick is to use these portals to help drive non-ebook buyers to us.

- Free print product give aways. Full verisons of Ars Magica, Deadlands, Tri Stat system, and shortly on more. This to date has been the one success story in that it has producted 1000+ new customers from all over the world and is directly responsible for about another $1000 in purchases at RPGNow. This is very effective, but very hard to promote. one more

- Convention pressence. We tried to display at GenCon 2002 and even burn disks there and even had some "bundle deals" ... but we sold about 5 CDs the whole weekend. It was a hard concept for people to understand and people wanted books at conventions, not a CD to take home. Granted there was some issue with the fact that I was selling a lot of other things to help pay for the booth (T-Shirts) so it confused people even more.

- Banner ads. Online we have banner ads running on WOTC main site. They do send us some customers on a pretty regular basis. But not much more then any website doing product announcements and such. In other words there is a steady flow of customers coming from here, but slowly.

- Online bid links and search engines. We use Overture, Findwhat, Kandodle, and a few others... we pay for links for e-books and a few other things like "free downloaded RPG" and such... but they result in few new paying customers. We're also listed well on GOOGLE which helps traffic a bit.

- Mailing Lists. I don't have access to much in the way of general RPG mailing lists... I do however make use of the customer base of about 60,000 at our stores, plus mailings to some lists for the industry. All in all, I'm not sure they are of much good other then to promote something like getting a new deal (like TSR products online, or the free Ars Magica). Does anyone know a place to reach non-PDF buyers in a mailing list? I would suspect that would be some sort of REAL MAIL physical mailing list to RPG gamers.

- Acknowledgements: some publishers are greatful for RPGNow and have put thank yous in their print books. I can only hope this helps gain a few more customers as it's pretty hard to track.

One other thing... I'm not so sure that introducing competitors to this marketplace is going to be of much/any help. Not unless it's backed by a publisher that wants to release a lot of old print stock (WW, SJG, etc). RPG.NET failed to make any significant sales. Products that are listed on RPGNow and SVGames.com (non-TSR stuff) sell 10 times or more the volume on RPGNow then they do at SVGames. So in short, listing your products at other shops isn't going to drastically increase sales.

Overall, RPGNow and PDF sales are growing steadly dispite not being able to find any particular effective promotion. As you can see from these two charts I did a few months back (the curve has more or less continued):

http://www.rpgnow.com/customer_graph.jpg
http://www.rpgnow.com/gross_graph.jpg


So what to try/do that I haven't yet? How do we reach more people? To date the most effective methods have involved some sort of partnering with larger publishers or communities.

Since we already sell to most every EnWorld and RPG.NET user, where else is there a large online community? Muds? Everquest?

While at Origins/GenCon most all of the Publishers (even big ones) have some sort of PDF plan or want to specifically work with us. I had verbal commitment from many large publishers, but of course no one seems to ever have the time to follow through on those. Who else is worth teaming up with? What next product can we hand out for free to draw more users?

James Mathe
Minion Development Corp.
http://www.RPGNow.com

P.S. RPGNow has a "source" field that a publisher can use to help us track where users and sales come from. We also have a generic question of such when a new customer signs up. But the data is usually only filled in about 60% of the time...

[annadobritt]

What about a bimonthly print catalog? Something that could be put on display at FLGS and conventions.

Wouldn't have to be fancy, just use black and white thumbnails for the pdfs and a color cover. To help defray costs, sell advertising in it.

[rpghost]

But why would a game store give up shelf or counter space for something that gives them no revenue? It's a nice idea but I know the gamestores won't do that. I could also offer them the free DEMO CD for all that matters... has 300mb of previews and free products on it already.

We did do a print full color catalog for RPGMall that helps at conventions, but it was like $1.50 per copy and it's only digest format at that. Looks real nice, Phil Reed did a great job laying it out.

http://www.rpgmall.com/finalcataloglowres.pdf

James

[annadobritt]

Well, if a game shop gives up counter space for flyers, a catalog might work too. After all, you're not taking any business away from them since the products are all pdfs.

I looked at the catalog for RPGMall and that's really nice looking.

[jgbrowning]

Idea off the top of my head....

go to an illegal file sharing site and write down all the RPG files being traded. go to those companies and inform them that their products are being traded illegally in PDF format and offer to provide them a way to at least make some money of the trade.


dunno if it would work, don't know a lot about kazaa or such....


joe b.

[Morrus]

Beats me. Although, the growth in that graph seems OK to me - if you're getting that without spending much money on promotion, then I suggest you just sit back and let it continue. How much more growth are you expecting?

It would be nice to see the number of customers increase at a greater (or even equal) rate to the number of publishers at RPGNow. Can you provide stats on the number of publishers in a similar graph? it would be interesting to see. Based on sales and share-of-pie logical extrapolation, I'd guess that the publisher base increases faster than the customer base, but I'd like to see some figures on it.

If the publisher increase isn't faster than the customer increase, then I'm at a loss to explain diminishing sales figures over the last year. Admittedly, it could be that people just don't want to by ENP products any more, but they usually do pretty well on the Hot Sellers list, so relative to to other publishers ENP is doing fine. That leads me to the conclusion that other publishers *must* be experiencing diminishing sales to the same extent - otherwise logic doesn't work and the universe is about to end!

PDF publishing is barely paying for itself these days, and I can foresee a time when I get the hell out of dodge!

[rpghost]

Well the glut of new products and new customers, though adding up, isn't nearly as bad as I thought once I ran some numbers and made a chart... roughly 60-90 products have been added every month for all of this year. Of course that means there is still a lot of back-catalog product competing for your $ but it's not like it's accelerating as fast as one would think.



And here is one showing accumulative totals:



Clearly the growth of publishers and products alone doesn't match the curve of customers and spending. But if you take into account the cost of all the new products added, it's certainly much closer to the curve. Still mostly not as steep, so why are so many publishers complaining about slacking sales? Maybe they themselves are releasing more and their bottom line hasn't changed drastically but the units sold per product has... Humm.

James

[Cecil]

I have a few ideas for this area:

First, most conventions I've gone to have an area to display flyers--you may want to ask convention organizers if you can provide information to distribute. They are generally overjoyed to work with you, particularly if you provide a few prizes (2-3) to distribute. Some of your free products on CD wouyld be an excellent example--and will probably get some of your e-print products in the hands of people who have not seen pdfs yet.

This would also work if you can team with some of the indies demonstrating at the smaller conventions. Perhaps offer them a small print run (10 copies) to hold at RPGmall in trade--provided they generate sales.

Finally, word of mouth--similar to the grateful publishers putting ads in their print products. I have let many of my friends know about PDF products and let them see a couple of products printed out. But this brings me to the next point--probably the real issue that needs to be addressed.

Unfortunately, there is a perception that PDF products are inferior to print products. After all, if the product was any good, wouldn't the company release it in print? I'm not sure how to overcome this perception without exposure to e-published products.

[rpghost]

Originally posted by Cecil
[b]most conventions I've gone to have an area to display flyers--you may want to ask convention organizers if you can provide information to distribute. They are generally overjoyed to work with you, particularly if you provide a few prizes (2-3) to distribute. Some of your free products on CD wouyld be an excellent example--and will probably get some of your e-print products in the hands of people who have not seen pdfs yet.

I've done this with a few already... not that I ever see anyone enter "convention" in the "Where did you hear about us" line... but I have tried. For example I sent 100 CD's to Flat con.

As for perception of product... regretfully some product is crap. Some product is ok but has crap for a cover... if a new person comes by and grabs that, we've lost a customer. But short of setting up a review board, what am I supposed to do? I can't read 3 or 4 books a day, hell I can't read a book a week. Who's going to be the judge? Certainly can't get other publishers as that would cause issues...

Anyway, in general your right. We need to improve the perception of PDFs. My efforts with getting the "big boys" on board are slowly working and I think that helps with our image.

James

[HellHound]

I've written an article for Polyhedron about d20 PDFs that should be in the September issue (although it is sadly out of date already... I wrote it over three months ago and the new products just keep showing up!)

[Ashy]

I think that the root of the problem is that the largest percentage of gamers do not utilize the RPG networks on the internet. GASP! I know that it is hard to believe, but even despite my incessant ranting, my own group has NO IDEA what EN World is all about and moreso they could care less. I guess they simply do not have the spare time/energy to "play" on the Net...

So, if you could find some way to bring THOSE folks into the fold, I think that you'd see a fairly dramatic surge in sales.

Just my two greens....

[rpghost]

Originally posted by Ashy
I think that the root of the problem is that the largest percentage of gamers do not utilize the RPG networks on the internet. GASP!...
So, if you could find some way to bring THOSE folks into the fold, I think that you'd see a fairly dramatic surge in sales.

Very true and that's the one major egg I donno how to crack. Do they read magazines? Will the d20 article or my ads help? They haven't yet. What do they do to learn about new games? Just from you?

Oh, and I posted this same thread over at RPG.NET and there is some excellent discussion there you might want to check out:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=65650

James

[Morrus]

Originally posted by rpghost


Very true and that's the one major egg I donno how to crack. Do they read magazines? Will the d20 article or my ads help? They haven't yet. What do they do to learn about new games? Just from you?

If I knew how to crack that one, I'd be doing it. I'd love to see all those people coming to EN World. Not sure keen on the potential bandwidth costs, though.

[rpghost]

Originally posted by Morrus
If I knew how to crack that one, I'd be doing it. I'd love to see all those people coming to EN World.

Right... maybe when we/someone figures it out we can do a co-promotion or something.

But how do you get people who don't surf the internet for their gaming needs to do so?

James

[astralpwka]

Hi James!

I'm really curious about whether or not you've approached game stores. I realize its a good assumption that the attitude would be "What's this going to do for me?", but maybe not in every case. For those store owners who care, they might take the sacrifice to promote the industry.

You could also offer the store a trade, in the form of free advertising, especially if they have an online store. However, you could also offer a similar service that Diamond Comics does, putting a "Find A Game Store Near You" on your web site.

Also, what about getting your epublisher's guide in stores? A lot of gamers might be interested in publishing their game worlds or house rules, and never considered this more financially agreeable direction. I think that alone would be a great tool for bringing new people to rpgnow.

Just my thoughts...

The Astral Pwka

aka Garth Wright

[Ashy]

Originally posted by rpghost


Right... maybe when we/someone figures it out we can do a co-promotion or something.

But how do you get people who don't surf the internet for their gaming needs to do so?

James

Well the only thing in my mind (and it is probably not a viable solution) is to have a product evalangist (sp? - sorry, the tiefer is tired today) - basically someone to go and SHOW them how easy/cool/awesome the web is as a tool to find new stuff. Other than that - I know not....

To answer your questions, James - I don't know how they find out about new games - I guess word of mouth or just walking into their FLGS and seeing what is on the shelf.

Maybe you could rent shelf space at FLGS's! "YOUR PRODUCT HERE".... Billboards maybe???? I don't know, but it is frustrating....

[rpghost]

I have contacted a lot of game stores online and at conventions. Surprising there are a few who don't mind handing out my free CD's as they have content... but beyond that they have no reason or desire or time or space to promote us...

My online store RPGShop.com is my main money maker and lively hood. I feel the same way about them - I'm not to interested in pointing our customers to their LGS.

Originally posted by astralpwka
Also, what about getting your epublisher's guide in stores? A lot of gamers might be interested in publishing their game worlds or house rules, and never considered this more financially agreeable direction. I think that alone would be a great tool for bringing new people to rpgnow.

This is something I actually decided to to at Origins. I am working on reformating it to digest form and getting it released under RPG Objects. Probably only as a print on demand so we just fill those that are pre-ordered. But it's worth a shot I think. Not sure if game stores will understand what it is though and wether they'd support getting it to their customers.

James

[malladin]

Here's one quick thought...

The products at the top of the heap sell 500+ copies. That means there are 500 people who regualrly buy PDFs, however the average D20 product sales is about 100 copies.

Therefore I think there might be room to expand the market place by encouraging more spending by existing customers. Lets say we can get all the products (of quality) that sell about 100 up to 400-500 copies it would really boost the pdf 'industry', which would in turn allow for much better quality products to be churned out.

Being stung by a bad product is a big problem, and I think this is why there are a few products that do really well, as people trust Monte and the Game Mechanics because of their pedigree. They are not people who regularly come to RPGNow and so will not only miss many products, but will probably not trust us smaller publishers. I also think that this group probably includes most of the new customers and so getting them to spend more widely will gradually increase the whole customer base.

One possible solution I've thought of is a portal site that concentrates on D20 pdfs and draws a line based on quality. The idea being that people will learn to trust the quality of the wider market and there will be a smaller content so that you won't effectively drop of the front page quite so quickly. I've even gone so far as to design a web page that would allow people to build there own company site within the portal and to update product details and post news items and that has linked reviews. The only trouble is that I don't have the time to code it. I also fell that there might be a perceived conflict of interests if I were to run such a site.

Cheerio,

Ben, Malladin's Gate

[rpghost]

Don't forget the 1000's of customers that came for and only took the free Ars Magica or Deadlands releases...

A portal site or some sort of industry award or rankings system might help... I own PDFGames.com if that helps with anyone creating such a site I'm open to letting them use it.

I could see maybe some sort of independent (eg not publishers) board of judges that help rank publishers and products. Then at least the people in the top spots there could brag about it or at least the top half ranked could use it to gain the trust of customers.

Still, I'm sure there are going to be plenty of publishers who would also hate this idea. Plus I can see that most of the GOOD product is already selling GOOD and so patting them on the back helps the industry in what way? Helps sales in what way? What we need is to draw attention to good product from first time publishers.

Also, I don't think a d20 only slant is the way to go. Only half the product on RPGNow is d20 and I don't wish to alientate the others.

In summary I think there is a need/desire for a community portal that helps rank publishers/products that is driven by a staff/board of non-publishers. Digital RPG does a reasonably good job of displaying new products - but it doesn't help highlight good stuff or warn of bad stuff. It also is driven/run by the publishers themselves.

http://www.electronicd20.com was trying to be a d20 PDF review site, but the people running it disapeared. I own the domain if someone wants to continue it...

James

[malladin]

I'm not really thinking about the portal as patting good products on the back. If you have a good product you'll suffer a big drop in sales when it drops off the front page of RPGNow. As RPGNow is so successful with publishers it means that you drop off the front page really quickly.

As an example, Forgotten Heroes: Paladin and Unearthed Adventurers both had similar first month sales, but as Paladin was released at a time before RPGNow exploded it stuck around and generated a further 3 or 4 good months sales. Unearthed Adventurers had the first month's sales and then slowed right down to the same sort of trickle paladin did after 4 months. There may be something in the relative appeal/quality of the products, but I'm sure that the time spent on the front page at RPGNow plays a big role.

Therefore a portal site with a more restrictive mandate and an assurance of quality, I believe, would be well received by consumers. It would help sales by providing a better reliable quality assurance and retaining a shelf of new products for 2-3 months rather than 2-3 weeks.

I'm not suggesting alienating non d20 pubishers, I think two portal sites, one for D20 and one for non D20 would be ideal. Maybe you could have another for Wargames and another for support products, such as card models and clip art. At the moment I think we all interfere with each other's sales by pushing so much through the front page.

Cheerio,

Ben