Pricing a PDF?

[pogre]

How do you price a PDF?

I'm not about to publish one personally - I have one in line with BadAxe Games, but I'm genuinely curious.

I know this will not be popular here, but 60% of print retail price seems absolutely outrageous to me. Even 40% seems high...

Enlighten me - what am I missing?

PS - I have no idea what Ben (Wulf Ratbane) is going to price the adventure I wrote - I don't really care - it was just for fun.

 

[Crothian]

Well, it seems like you really have two queetions. Price of a Pdf and Price of a PDF that is also in print. The answer might be the same, but it might not.

 

[JimAde]

I don't know anything about the "biz", but I do know what I'll pay for. Say a short-ish hardcover supplement (like one of the complete books) sells for about $20 (on Amazon). 60% of that would be $12.00 which seems quite reasonable to me. Regardless of the fact that there are no printing costs, there's still writing, editing, art (very pricey if you want top-quality and lots of it), etc. etc.

 

[WilliamAndersen]

How do you price a PDF?

I'm not about to publish one personally - I have one in line with BadAxe Games, but I'm genuinely curious.

I know this will not be popular here, but 60% of print retail price seems absolutely outrageous to me. Even 40% seems high...

Enlighten me - what am I missing?

PS - I have no idea what Ben (Wulf Ratbane) is going to price the adventure I wrote - I don't really care - it was just for fun.

Pricing a pdf is not unlike pricing anything in a market economy. Pricers are trying to determine what people would be willing to pay. Often the best way to guesstimate that is to look at the prices of similar products and price accordingly.

Now, a main goal for many of us small publishers is to try to make enough to pay the people that worked hard to put it all together (the writers, artists, layout and such), and price it at a price that gets a lot of people to play our games.

Unfortunately, some see the lower prices as signs of lower quality (despite the fact that many of the lower priced products get very positive reviews, and people seem to like them). I disagree that lower price must mean lower quality... I buy a lot of pdfs and print games. If the book is a full book in print, I would tend to buy it in print. I love getting pdfs from smaller publishers that the economics of doing a print run just arent there... I have gotten a lot of very fun games like that... and am willing to pay the 10 to 20 cents per page that some publishers tend to charge.

So, how is pricing done... in a market economy, the price of everything is 'what the market will bear'... if you are willing to pay it, business will be willing to charge it. In this industry, however, there are also a lot of publishers that are also of the mindset of being gamers, and tend to price enough to cover their costs and make it as available as possible to other gamers.

William

 

[Sledge]

The other important thing to remember is that there are price amounts which don't sell as well. RPGNow did a poll a year or so ago, and the number have probably gone up maybe 10-20% since then, but if you're with RPGNow just ask them for the results they had in order to establish your price point. The other factors are size and "apparent" quality.

 

[pogre]

Here's where the question is coming from:

Let us suppose the going rate for 128-page softcover is $24.00 retail.

The retailer gets it from the distributor at 55-60% of retail.

The distributor gets it from the company for 40% of retail.

That is the ideal situation. If you are paying a company to place your product in the distribution stream, they are sucking off another percentage.

So ideally, the publisher is getting 40% of retail or $9.60. Subtract from the the cost of printing - let's go with a round number and say $2.00. In a perfect world the publisher is gaining $7.60 gross or so from each book sale to the distributor. I'm not including all the random costs such as warehousing and shipping companies get nailed with.

I recently saw a 32-page pdf I would like to buy listed for $6.95. I'll probably pick it up, but it still seems dang high to me. And, no, it's not offered in print - although I'm sure you could get POD.

I can only explain this kind of pricing through perceived value as WilliamAndersen pointed out.

I totally understand why folks with actual print products in distribution keep their price point high.

 

[arwink]

The other thing that needs to be taken into account is the volume of sales that can be expected from a PDF, especially when compared with print. While there are obvious exceptions, most PDF companies aren't working on the same scale as a print publisher is. If they want to make back the cost of producing the product, they have to price with somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred sales in mind.

This is usually factored against the price that customers seem willing to pay, and usually comes out somewhere in between. I'd hazard a guess that a 6.95 32 page product would have some fairly spiffy design that looks fairly pretty, which means that the art and layout time needs to be covered.

 

[Sledge]

To be honest any 32 page pdf that is $7 is probably a bit over priced. It had better have fabulous art otherwise it should be in the $4-5 range at best. A 128 page book should probably be around $10 to my subjective thinking.

Subjectively speaking I should also note that people pay more per page if the book is smaller, under the assumption that they will make use of more of it.

 

[DaveStebbins]

Two things to keep in mind.

As Arwink pointed out, sales of a PDF product will be somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude smaller than a print product (with rare exceptions).

The other thing, which you might not be aware of if you haven't published any PDFs yet, is that there is a distribution cost. It runs around 30% to 35% of selling price depending upon where you are selling your PDF. It's not the 60% which distributors and retailers get from print products, but it's pretty far from zero too (which is what many fans who whine about PDF prices seem to assume).

Let's put it all together: you're saving all of the printing cost and 25% of the distribution/retail discount; you'll be selling between 1% and 10% of a printed product's volume; and it takes just as much work to create, research, write, illustrate, edit and layout a PDF product as a print product. After that, price it however you feel appropriate.

-Dave

 

[D_Sinclair]

It's not the 60% which distributors and retailers get from print products,

Unless you're a sucker who decides to go with amazon.com's ebook sales, in which case it isn't 60% but way too close at 55%. As the saying goes, "it isn't necessarily that sales at amazon suck, but the fact that amazon sucks so much from sales."