Basic Fantasy 4th Ed Sales across various platforms

Lalato

Adventurer
Supporter
I found this post on Facebook by Chris Gonnerman, one of the authors of the OSR Basic Fantasy rules interesting.

Chris Gonnerman:
So here are some statistics, if anyone is curious.

All of our books are available on Amazon.com and Lulu.com, and most are on DriveThruRPG.com at this time. In October, 34 of our books were purchased on Lulu.com; that number includes 13 copies of the Core Rules. Lulu is the only company that offers coilbound, which accounts for 2 of those rulebooks.
Again for October on DriveThruRPG/RPGNow/OneBookShelf we sold 45 books, of which 6 were Core Rules copies. And on Amazon.com? 744 total books, of which 189 were copies of the Core Rules.

Not that any of that matters, but I sometimes have people tell me how important one or another of these printing solutions are. The numbers tell the real story.

For the math challenged, that means that 90% of our books are purchased through Amazon, with DTRPG just over 5% and Lulu just under 5%.

I asked the following for clarification... and I would love it if others could chime in on their general experience with these platforms.

  1. Is Amazon carrying pre-printed books or is it entirely print-on-demand as-is Lulu and DtRPG
  2. What percentage of sales are for digital vs physical product by platform?
  3. How much of a cut does each platform take? If you don't want to give out exact numbers, can you share the relative difference between them? (Amazon takes the most/least, the next one takes the next most/least, etc).
  4. On your website, Amazon is the first listed option for all books, followed by Lulu after scrolling down... and followed by DtRPG after scrolling even further. Do you think this has impacted how much Amazon is used?
 

log in or register to remove this ad

Remove ads

Top