spacecrime.com said:
Joe... if I may be nosy, how has your Ennie award for Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe affected sales? Have you seen a boost? If so, is it more in PDF sales, more in physical book sales, or about equal in both?
Also, if I haven't said so already, this is a fantastic book! It's well-written, full of useful information, and a pleasure to read. Thank you so much for writing this!
best wishes,
Original Post: The ENnies have helped quite a bit, almost as much as Monte’s 10 review. The reason for that is I think Monte’s review reached an audience who’d never heard of MMS:WE while I think the ENnies helped push a lot of people who were riding the fence into buying it. Since there are more people who haven’t heard about it that those who were debating buying it, I think the review was the bigger sales push for us. However, the ENnies sales are only slightly less than the review sales.
We’ve pushed all the way up to the 5th best-selling PDF of all time (total sales of 760 PDFS) and between our website, GenCon, and RPGmall.com we’ve sold about 250 or so hardcopies. We just sent out our first shipment of books to Impressions Advertising and Marketing, so MMS:WE should be hitting a lot of FLGS shelves very soon. We can thank the ENnies for providing us a retail market. Without them, we would
NOT be getting into very many stores as only a few distributors were willing to take a chance on us.
Its hard for me to isolate the ENnies sales against the Monte sales, but my guess is that the ENnies has led to proportionally more sales on PDF than hardcopy, probably something like 70/30 ratio. Once all the accounting is done, however, for us, the ENnies will have created thousands of dollars of sales by opening up the traditional sales channel for us. Basically, the ENnies have turned us into viable publishers that people are willing to listen to (if only briefly
)
But more than just that, I think we’ve been blessed with a group of people who picked up this book by two nobodies and loved it so much they wanted to tell their friends. We sure haven’t done anything right that conventional business wisdom would suggest for a new company to do.
We plan on keeping on doing that.
We're going for only one or maybe two books a year, but we're going to try our best to make them truly exceptional.
Reply to Morrus:
Originally posted by morrusHowever, bear in mind that the review came first. I imagine that there are a lot of people who would have bought it because of the ENnies, but happened to have bought it already because of the review, so didn't. It's impossible to judge the two effects, because one is essentially operating within the "leftovers" of the other, and thus must be less by definition.
Yes, very true. It’s hard to tell exactly what would have happened, especially because it’s hard to tell what
is happening. I also know there’s a group of people who read the review, but didn’t buy, until the ENnies convinced them.
Either way, suzi and I are trying our best to win more of them!
joe b
