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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wulf Ratbane" data-source="post: 1567019" data-attributes="member: 94">Great by any standards, or just for a "fanboy?"It's not worth it to me to print less than 2000. I'm an entrepreneur; risk is part of the equation. Since the bulk of printing costs are in setup, it will only cost a few hundred dollars more for another 500 books, with a much better upside.My experience so far has been a little better than that, which I attribute in large part to the fact that I use Osseum as a fullfillment house, and they sell into the book trade as well as the hobby trade. My first month's sales have never been below 700-750 copies for any title. My best first month ever was Haflings, I think, which sold over 1000 copies, and that during a supposed "glut" in a depressed market. Elves was a close second.As I said, my experience has been a little better than that, but this is a pretty good estimate. My second month's sales don't always drop that precipitously-- but within a few months, absolutely. However, I knew going in that I should reasonably expect even a modest print run to take about a year to sell through, so it wasn't unexpected. Dwarves sold through its print run almost exactly a year later. I haven't been out of pocket since Dwarves, and have never lost money on any book. Now, believe me, I'd love to see some stock moving quicker. There's a big difference between losing money and whether or not it's worth my time investment. Breaking even is fine for a "fanboy" for whom the reward is simply to contribute high-quality product to the community-- but the girlfriend is rather less forgiving about time spent developing products that aren't making money for her to spend. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />This is very important. Whenever folks ask me where to get my books, I always tell them first to ask their FLGS. Barring that, buy it online-- my books are carried by Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Walmart.com. Barring that, I will be happy to sell a copy direct from our webstore. So to sort of answer Eric's question-- what can you, the gamer, do?Demand high quality products (including mine, natch!). Make it clear to your local retailer that if he will not order the book for you, you will have to take your business elsewhere. As I said in my earlier post, when a retailer tells you, "I can't order that book for you," 9 times out of 10 that means, "I can't be bothered to order that book for you." If they tell you the product is out of stock, it's probably not true: Any product in today's market that is so successful as to actually go out of stock, believe me, the retailer will be jumping at the chance to reorder it for you.Make it clear to the retailer that you represent more than the single sale of a single book, that you are a regular purchaser of RPG products and your dollars can be spent in his store, or elsewhere.Wulf</blockquote>

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