I've been trying to better gauge print runs of our products. For adventures, I'd like a book to be out of print (meaning, we have no more in our warehouse to ship to distributors or stores) in 3-6 months. For most sourcebooks, the lifespan should be longer (and for some "evergreen" products, it may be indefinite -- I'm sure White Wolf will keep the Creature Collection in print for years, though it may get revised with a new edition).
It looks like I've only hit the mark in setting the runs of two releases: Thieves in the Forest (which sold out in about 3 months) and The Ebon Mirror (which is running low quickly, and will probably sell out about 3 months after release -- though maybe a little sooner, so I may have set the print run a wee bit too low).
It's worth noting that, more than a year after selling out, I know distributors that still have copies of Thieves available for retailers, and on Saturday I visited a Madison-area retailer who still had two copies in his store (along with 1-2 each of everything else in the Penumbra line). So something being "out of print" (the manufacturer has no more) by no means should mean that you as a consumer can't get it. For that matter, in the internet age, it is often just as hard to get a copy of an in-print product as one that is out of print. Your local store may have OOP stuff on the shelves, while not carrying (or not wanting to re-order) many in-print items. (Stores have finite space, and it's usually not enough to store everything available in the game industry!)
As manufacturers, we have to be careful not to mistake "I'm sold out" with "the market is sold out," especially when weighing the appropriateness of a reprint. (Even for hot items, it often makes sense for a manufacturer to leave something out of stock for months, so that consumer demand pulls through the copies that already are out in the system, creating demand for a higher initial shipment when the reprint is in.)
-John Nephew
President, Atlas Games
