Basic Fantasy 4th Ed Sales across various platforms

[Brendan Byrd]

The sales across platforms is definitely interesting and, yeah, really underscores that, at the end of the day, even for incredibly inexpensive titles like the Basic Fantasy books, people will go to Amazon and save a little more.

I wonder how much OSE sells in a month, as they're probably Basic Fantasy's closest competitor and are, I believe, more expensive across the board.

In my case, saving a few dollars off the cover price isn't my motivation. I'll scrimp on the Amazon shipping, since I rarely need instant gratification.

Like @Jahydin, I was already set up on that platform, and can pay for stuff using gift cards (they don't have my cc info.; I don't buy enough from there to justify giving it to them.)
You can set up an account with only a gift card...and a gift card is how I came to have an Amazon account.

I'll buy things from the FLGS even if it is more expensive than Amazon, on principle.
The FLGS's impressive selection does not include Basic Fantasy, and doesn't carry titles from DriveThruRPG. If that was possible, I'd let the FLGS handle the logistics for me.

I won't be opening an account with DTRPG any time soon for multiple reasons, among those are: tarriffs & boycotting...

 

[Nikosandros]

I wonder how much OSE sells in a month, as they're probably Basic Fantasy's closest competitor and are, I believe, more expensive across the board.

I'm also curious about OSE sales, but it's probably difficult to compare the two products. BFRPG is free in PDF and sold at cost in POD. OSE is a commercial endeavor with much fancier layout and art and also has some limited edition hard-covers.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm also curious about OSE sales, but it's probably difficult to compare the two products. BFRPG is free in PDF and sold at cost in POD. OSE is a commercial endeavor with much fancier layout and art and also has some limited edition hard-covers.

The differences are why I'd love to hear the sales figures. I think conventional wisdom is that free beats everything, but if deluxe treatment overcomes that, it'd be interesting to know by how much.

 

[Lalato]

Here are Chris's replies to my questions...

1. Yes.

They preorder books from themselves for items that sell in volume and warehouse them, but items that sell at lower volume won't be handled that way. BUT. There's no way to know exactly which is which.
2. If by "digital products" you mean PDFs... we don't "sell" PDFs. DriveThruRPG is the only platform that effectively requires us to distribute in PDF but we don't charge for them so we don't keep stats for them.
3. I don't have the time or the energy to figure this out. See, for each platform there is a minimum price based on cost of production, and some of that is naturally profit for them but I don't have access to that information. Then, whatever markup you apply, each platform does a different secret calculation of how much of a cut they take. So while I could figure out the answer to this question, it would be a lot of work, and I honestly do not care how their math works.
4. Possibly, but I doubt it. I organized that page in response to sales figures in the first place.

1. So it's possible that some folks who get a book quickly from Amazon are receiving it because it was pre-printed rather than going through the full print-on-demand cycle.

2. Makes sense. PDFs are free and only DtRPG has an actual download option that is required.

3. This would have been very interesting to get a general understanding of. My guess is that economy of scale means that Amazon can charge a little less for their services while still making roughly the same profit. Or possibly Amazon, like it has done in the past, uses this as a loss leader and charges less despite a hit to profit.

4. Amazon was the clear "winner" without any inadvertent endorsement like listing them first on their page. So there are other factors like the anecdotes we've seen in this thread where folks just happened to already have an Amazon account and it was easier.

 

[Lalato]

One of the key anecdotal comments from the Facebook thread is the cost of international shipping from DriveThruRPG essentially drove people to Amazon where the shipping was an order of magnitude less expensive... or "free".

This could be due to the pre-printing that Amazon does or it could be that they just have more print-on-demand partners around the world so that shipping is more local.