That was the E-Year that was

[Bloodstone Press]

triple post

 

[Flyspeck23]

So, e-publishing may not be a viable way to support yourself yet, but it will be soon.

Wishful thinking? I sure hope not.
As far as I know, sales in the RPG PDF market don't grow as fast as the number of products on the market, or am I mistaken? OTOH, that doesn't imply a reduction of sales for certain ("quality") products.
Time will tell

(Oh, and beware those numbers. The PDF market is still young, so growth is to be expected. It's like comparing the growth rate of a young industrial nation with the rate of an old one.
Hypothetically, if the PDF market started out with $100 worth of sales in it's first year, that puts a 200% increase into perspective.)

 

[Bloodstone Press]

Oh, and beware those numbers. The PDF market is still young, so growth is to be expected. It's like comparing the growth rate of a young industrial nation with the rate of an old one.
Hypothetically, if the PDF market started out with $100 worth of sales in it's first year, that puts a 200% increase into perspective.)

Sure. I'm aware of that. But I'd rather be on this side of th bell curve than the other.

 

[malladin]

(Oh, and beware those numbers. The PDF market is still young, so growth is to be expected. It's like comparing the growth rate of a young industrial nation with the rate of an old one).

Thats an interesting point that I'd not thought of, to be honest. Worth some more discussion, surely. Was theer not a post up a few months ago saying that the PDF industry appeared to have reached its limit? I seem to remember James from RPGNow commenting as such... Maybe I'm misremembering...??

Ben

 

[HellHound]

I am certain that it wasn't James. He's actively working on expanding the size of the PDF market, as he has the most to gain from its growth as it stands.

 

[malladin]

I am certain that it wasn't James. He's actively working on expanding the size of the PDF market, as he has the most to gain from its growth as it stands.

From memory, he didn't start the discussion, but did contribute. I think his point was that we all needed to do more to help push it. I think Morrus put together the PDF site as a result....

 

[Mark]

I thought it might be interesting to have a similar discussion on the PDF market place.

Interesting thoughts. Thanks for posting them.

 

[Vigilance]

Phil, I am still available to help on Star Ace if you want some backup.

Chuck

 

[Dana_Jorgensen]

Just a few thoughts.

On the rate of product releases:

The Primal Codex was released on Dec 17, 2001. It is product #91 and stayed on the front page of RPGnow for almost 2 months (7 weeks IIRC).

Recently, on Dec 19th, I released Hell on Earth. By Dec 30 it was pushed off the front page by newer products (pushed down to the table at the bottom actually).

I don't know how many of those new titles are from WOTC, but I'm sure there is a significant increase in the rate of titles being released. I for one have put out 4 new titles in the past 8 weeks. I've got 3 more planned over the next 4 weeks.

About PDF sales:
I was reading recently about the rate of book sales in 2003 across several markets, both print and e-books (PDF, and all other formats). Sales for every genre of print (except children’s books) are down. Some genres are down as much as 16%. Sales of children’s print books grew a modest 1.9% in 2003.

However, sales in the e-book market have jumped 163% in the past year. (Last year, e-book sales were up about 140% over 2001, IIRC).

So, e-publishing may not be a viable way to support yourself yet, but it will be soon.


In fact, I quite my day job back in October.

Indeed, the release rates have become disturbingly high on RPGnow in recent months. When I released the first volume of Big Bang last April, it remained on the front page for 17 days. And now, between changes to the front page and the increasing release rate, we're lucky things get a thumbnail for 3-5 days before they become part of that ugly blue table offscreen down the page. Another part of the problem is the "chunk of a book" design trend that seems to plague the new products. There's a lot of stuff on the list that more appropriately belongs as part of a much larger product, rather than being just the latest of a long line of bits and pieces (Legion's Critical Hits, Ronin Arts' Forbidden Arcana and VShane.com's fonts are a few things up right now that stick out in this category. Sorry guys, most of that stuff is quite good, but it belongs in a product of much larger scope). Most disturbingly, this "chunk o' book" concept is one that seems to be on the verge of being pushed by publishers in other genres as well, which could result in it becoming even more commonplace on RPGnow.

There's only one way that will improve and it's an improvement that won't help everyone. Only thing I can think of is displaying the "new items" only for the category or two the visitor shops in the most. For everything aside from D20 fantasy, that would result in drastically increased "front page" time for everyone. The only other option would be for RPGNow to divide up into multiple stores; a shop for RPG pdfs, another for wargame and paper modelling pdfs, and maybe a third for D20 stuff. This would definitely make things easier on the consumer.

Another problem with sales of late has been the numerous problems RPGnow has had in recent months with outside interference. With the latest attack early in December, the attack literally destroyed sales for me, dropping $100/day sales to nothing for more than 2 weeks after the problems were fixed. Only in the last 10 days of the month did sales recover. Hopefully, there will be some extra vigilance suring the next big holiday season.

However, As others have said, if you have a niche, PDF sales aren't nearly as front-end driven as print products. These days, sales are definitely becoming more review based. Good reviews definitely help sell. Controversial reviews help to sell even more. Bad reviews, well, I don't think they help, but they aren't likely going to hurt unless they're all bad reviews.

To that end, one thing I'd like to start sometime by this spring is a PDF review site that draws in reviews. People submit reviews, good or bad, and publishers donate products. At the end of every month, the reviews are at least algorythmically scored for value (eliminates the "Thiz B00k pwns wit itz c00lzniss!" factor from the site) and reviewers are randomly selected to receive randomly distributed freebies. This lets people say what they want about a product and still gives them even odds to receive some sort of freebie item for their effort. I've tested the idea sporadically and it does seem to work. After all, everyone is looking to get legit stuff for free, so we may as well take advantage of the fact that nothing is truly free. And since many of us in the industry freely trade our books to begin with, I think it would be an interesting idea to set up a private technical peer review area on such a site as well.

ermmm... forgive any odd grammar I missed in editing. English is no longer my first language once 2 AM rolls around...

 

[JoeGKushner]

PDF Reviews?

Doesn't Morrus already have a PDF review section for this site and a PDF reviewer for EN World?

I know that I'm late on many of my own PDF reviews but there have been so many products of all types lately, that it's hard to prioritize and not offend anyone.