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Rappan Athuk: Reloaded SOLD OUT by wide margin!!
- Thread starter Treebore
- Start date
Teflon Billy
Explorer
ColonelHardisson said:
Naw, it might be me. Your instincts are usually pretty good on that kind of thing.
Teflon Billy
Explorer
ShinHakkaider said:
It does, thanks
Fgs
just to add fuel to the economics debate about RaR. i went to my local gaming store today in Blacksburg Virginia and he didnt even know what i was talking about when i asked if he will be acquiring Rappan Athuk Reloaded. he was especially gung ho about selling me a black dragon miniature. he didnt even know how to spell the name. it was annoying as hell so i left.
i would love to have a competent and knowledgeable person who runs a game store in virginia.
thanks for listening.
scott mcreynolds
just to add fuel to the economics debate about RaR. i went to my local gaming store today in Blacksburg Virginia and he didnt even know what i was talking about when i asked if he will be acquiring Rappan Athuk Reloaded. he was especially gung ho about selling me a black dragon miniature. he didnt even know how to spell the name. it was annoying as hell so i left.
i would love to have a competent and knowledgeable person who runs a game store in virginia.
thanks for listening.
scott mcreynolds
Xyanthon
First Post
Wow, this has gotten pretty heated. Well, as an American living abroad in Japan, I have no choice but to order my stuff online. I tried to order directly from WW but they wouldn't ship over here. Anyway, I know it has been said that some online retailers will be getting copies so I was wondering what my chances would be of getting one through FRPGames.com, Nobleknight.com, etc? I guess it is just a matter of how many the distributor picked up and then the retailers ordered from them. I could care less about discounts as I think this would be something that would be worth the MSRP and I'm a gamer as well as collector so I'd be willing to pay more for a copy. So, I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope I get a copy somewhere.
Olaf the Stout
Hero
Xyanthon said:
Xyanthon,
I would suggest e-mailing FRP or Noble Knight and explaining your situation to them. You might have a better chance of reserving a copy if you contact them now rather than just waiting for them to become available on their website.
Olaf the Stout
Last edited:
bowbe
First Post
Numion Posted:
Actually it has happened. Not on an industry wide scale but it has happened. Large volume business decided not to carry about half of the d20 industry (AKA gaming stuff) about the time 3.5 was launched. OF course they maintain hasbro/wotc and others who had a track record of selling in good volume. However their decision to cut vast numbers of independent publishers has been like a "slay living" spell against many of the smaller imprints and d20 companies. Some of them were quite good, most of them... not quite so good.
What was sad for the ones who were pretty good, is at the time they were probably making enough money to make a living or at least a good supplemental income for their efforts, but effectively had any chance to pursue their dream crushed by the decision to cut their products which sold under 300 or so copies each off from access to the large volume business outlets and larger distribution chains. The decision to cut wasn't the only domino in the line but it was one of them for a lot of people.
Some of these good folks switched completely to PDF to stay afloat, but as a conversation at Conestoga in Tulsa, OK I was privy to over the weekend stated...
"E-books are not the future people who produce e-books exclusively think it is... alot of people get eye irritation from staring at a screen all day long. There is always going to be a place for print products." The last bit is neither here nor there but it is an interesting observation.
Numion also Said:
Now I don't mean to take any of your quote out of context! I will focus on the second sentence with my answer because I was a little confused the first time I read it and wanted to say that you posed a very good question. Many would assume that any book that sells for a company makes them the same money as every other sale! I.E. one copy is worth the same as another once it is sold. I would guess a lot of people believe this to be true, but it most surely is not (Unless like RA you have a respectable run on pre-order sales). In most cases this doesn't happen for most books that are printed, be they RPG or otherwise.
So to address that!
Actually no. You don't get the same money any which way in this business or any other print publication/book trade. You really really don't. You could get all variety of money depending on who you have your distribution deals with, how it initially sells, how many orders are given for it and so on.
Different distributors along the chain take a different cut. Different outlets require different deals of each and every product. Their marketing people have the price that they will pay for a product and a price that they will sell it for. What does the publisher get out of that?
Depends on what outlet they sell thru. Direct sales of course are always best for the publisher for obvious reasons, tho publishers have their own warehousing costs and overhead to contend with. Gotta pay your shipping people, your stockroom folks, heat/electric, insurance, mortgage and so on and so on. The same holds true if your a huge publisher or a guy with an aluminum garage out back of the house!
A distributor (and there aren't many to choose from these days as several have gone out of business) may want to pay the publisher 40% of cover or less if they can. Considerably less than a direct sale. They then sell it to retailer x/y or z for anywhere between 55-80% of cover.
The good thing is if the distributor orders a certain number of copies they are usually contracted to pay up pretty quickly. Then again there is typically the buy back clause. They 'buy" your book for a certain amount of time 3-6 months, a year or whatever is negotiated and agreed on. They take the copies, they ship them to the retailers ect. ect. If the time runs out, they send you back the unsold or damaged copies and you have to pay them back for the amount of returned merchandise. So you didn't actually sell it afterall and now you owe them money.
If the distributor is dealing with a retailer who is willing to order 500 copies but only wants to pay them 45% of cover, you can bet they go to the publisher asking for 35% when they re-order to maintain their own profit margin. If a publisher refuses to knock it down to the price that the distributor demands (due to their own market pressures) they run the risk of being DROPPED by the retailer.
You can guess what happens when you get dropped. No listing in the catalog. NO mailings or calls about your product to the brick and mortar stores and so on and so on.
Likewise a product that sells or restocks few copies, say several months after the initial release typically goes into a book trade. I don't know exactly how the book trade works but I am led to believe it is similar to the sliding scale that movie companies have with prints of their films and the profits that the theater showing their films recieves. With movies it's typically 90% of profit goes to the studio in the first 2 weeks, then drops to 85% and so on. Thus movie theaters like popular movies that stay in their theater for 2 months because they start getting 70% of the profit after 8 weeks in release. Anyhow, thats the movies LOL.
With books, the book trade comes along and, knowing you have a large volume of back-stock in the warehouse offers to take them off your hands at pennies on the dollar and attempt to sell the books themselves at a margin more friendly to their own needs. So they buy up your $35 book for 5 dollars, sell it for 6-10 and the vendor then sells it for whatever they think they can reasonably get for it...including listing on E-bay years down the road when it has become "unavaliable". That goes for all kinds of books, not just RPGs. If your product ends up in the book trade, your cut just got a whole lot smaller! But as free market goes a sale is a sale and in many instances the sale is better than the overhead of warehousing the product and not making a dime. Sad but true.
So your totally right! the market does dictate what happens. I know you know this, but I'm not sure everyone else knows how this stuff works so thats why I offer it up.
All that said, I have seen a lot of kind words for Necro and for RAR. Thanks for that! I'm pretty excited to see the box myself next week. Although I had only a smallish (almost invisible) part in the Dungeon of the Graves it is a very exciting time!
Peace
Case
Actually it has happened. Not on an industry wide scale but it has happened. Large volume business decided not to carry about half of the d20 industry (AKA gaming stuff) about the time 3.5 was launched. OF course they maintain hasbro/wotc and others who had a track record of selling in good volume. However their decision to cut vast numbers of independent publishers has been like a "slay living" spell against many of the smaller imprints and d20 companies. Some of them were quite good, most of them... not quite so good.
What was sad for the ones who were pretty good, is at the time they were probably making enough money to make a living or at least a good supplemental income for their efforts, but effectively had any chance to pursue their dream crushed by the decision to cut their products which sold under 300 or so copies each off from access to the large volume business outlets and larger distribution chains. The decision to cut wasn't the only domino in the line but it was one of them for a lot of people.
Some of these good folks switched completely to PDF to stay afloat, but as a conversation at Conestoga in Tulsa, OK I was privy to over the weekend stated...
"E-books are not the future people who produce e-books exclusively think it is... alot of people get eye irritation from staring at a screen all day long. There is always going to be a place for print products." The last bit is neither here nor there but it is an interesting observation.
Numion also Said:
Now I don't mean to take any of your quote out of context! I will focus on the second sentence with my answer because I was a little confused the first time I read it and wanted to say that you posed a very good question. Many would assume that any book that sells for a company makes them the same money as every other sale! I.E. one copy is worth the same as another once it is sold. I would guess a lot of people believe this to be true, but it most surely is not (Unless like RA you have a respectable run on pre-order sales). In most cases this doesn't happen for most books that are printed, be they RPG or otherwise.
So to address that!
Actually no. You don't get the same money any which way in this business or any other print publication/book trade. You really really don't. You could get all variety of money depending on who you have your distribution deals with, how it initially sells, how many orders are given for it and so on.
Different distributors along the chain take a different cut. Different outlets require different deals of each and every product. Their marketing people have the price that they will pay for a product and a price that they will sell it for. What does the publisher get out of that?
Depends on what outlet they sell thru. Direct sales of course are always best for the publisher for obvious reasons, tho publishers have their own warehousing costs and overhead to contend with. Gotta pay your shipping people, your stockroom folks, heat/electric, insurance, mortgage and so on and so on. The same holds true if your a huge publisher or a guy with an aluminum garage out back of the house!
A distributor (and there aren't many to choose from these days as several have gone out of business) may want to pay the publisher 40% of cover or less if they can. Considerably less than a direct sale. They then sell it to retailer x/y or z for anywhere between 55-80% of cover.
The good thing is if the distributor orders a certain number of copies they are usually contracted to pay up pretty quickly. Then again there is typically the buy back clause. They 'buy" your book for a certain amount of time 3-6 months, a year or whatever is negotiated and agreed on. They take the copies, they ship them to the retailers ect. ect. If the time runs out, they send you back the unsold or damaged copies and you have to pay them back for the amount of returned merchandise. So you didn't actually sell it afterall and now you owe them money.
If the distributor is dealing with a retailer who is willing to order 500 copies but only wants to pay them 45% of cover, you can bet they go to the publisher asking for 35% when they re-order to maintain their own profit margin. If a publisher refuses to knock it down to the price that the distributor demands (due to their own market pressures) they run the risk of being DROPPED by the retailer.
You can guess what happens when you get dropped. No listing in the catalog. NO mailings or calls about your product to the brick and mortar stores and so on and so on.
Likewise a product that sells or restocks few copies, say several months after the initial release typically goes into a book trade. I don't know exactly how the book trade works but I am led to believe it is similar to the sliding scale that movie companies have with prints of their films and the profits that the theater showing their films recieves. With movies it's typically 90% of profit goes to the studio in the first 2 weeks, then drops to 85% and so on. Thus movie theaters like popular movies that stay in their theater for 2 months because they start getting 70% of the profit after 8 weeks in release. Anyhow, thats the movies LOL.
With books, the book trade comes along and, knowing you have a large volume of back-stock in the warehouse offers to take them off your hands at pennies on the dollar and attempt to sell the books themselves at a margin more friendly to their own needs. So they buy up your $35 book for 5 dollars, sell it for 6-10 and the vendor then sells it for whatever they think they can reasonably get for it...including listing on E-bay years down the road when it has become "unavaliable". That goes for all kinds of books, not just RPGs. If your product ends up in the book trade, your cut just got a whole lot smaller! But as free market goes a sale is a sale and in many instances the sale is better than the overhead of warehousing the product and not making a dime. Sad but true.
So your totally right! the market does dictate what happens. I know you know this, but I'm not sure everyone else knows how this stuff works so thats why I offer it up.
All that said, I have seen a lot of kind words for Necro and for RAR. Thanks for that! I'm pretty excited to see the box myself next week. Although I had only a smallish (almost invisible) part in the Dungeon of the Graves it is a very exciting time!
Peace
Case
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