That was the E-Year that was

[malladin]

Just had a thought: If reviews are becomming more and more important for sales online, perhaps we should be trying to get PDF products reviewed magazines like Dragon (forgive me if this already happens, but I can't seem to get hold of a copy Dragon over here in Blighty). This would not only increase the awarenes of the PDF industry in general, but also bring your specific product to the attention of a lot more customers.

Only problem is, how does on go about getting a review of your product in such a magazine - [sarcasm] it's hard enough with some online reviewers [/sarcasm].

Cheerio,

Ben

 

[jmucchiello]

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

Crothian is a great reviewer, but he's not exactly prolific. ENWorld Staff Reviews since 9/2003
You: 42
Psion: 23
Simon Collins: 18
Crothian: 6

Of course, all the staff reviews except you seem to have

 

[Nellisir]

Crothian is a great reviewer, but he's not exactly prolific. ENWorld Staff Reviews since 9/2003
You: 42
Psion: 23
Simon Collins: 18
Crothian: 6

Of course, all the staff reviews except you seem to have

Missing sections? Poor editing? Giant hampsters?


Nell.

 

[The Sigil]

Missing sections? Poor editing? Giant hampsters?


Nell.

Nah... you've just experienced the "chunk o' book" Dana is talking about.

--The Sigil

 

[jmucchiello]

Missing sections? Poor editing? Giant hampsters?


Nell.

WTF?!?? Um, I'll pick the hampsters. That last line shouldn't be in my other post. I'd edit it, but I don't want to make you look insane.

Originally, I was going to comment on the fact that Simon, Psion and Cro haven't posted a review since Nov. But I decided that wasn't really relevant to the conversation (and I'm not saying people can't get busy around the Holidays). After all, my track record with release dates is not one I can really hold up to the light as a good example.

 

[JoeGKushner]

I agree that EN World hasn't been the most quick turn around rate but the tool itself is still there and can pretty much be used by anyone right?

One of my problems is I have whole game systems that are OGL or settings and to be honest, I hate reviewing something if I haven't used the material in one form or another. That's one of the reasons I can get a Monster Review or a Splatbook done quicker than say a Mythic Vistas book (Skull & Bones and Testament look great, but I haven't used either yet) or Mutants & Masterminds, which also looks great, but hey, I'm not playing a supers game.

Part of it is that there is just too much stuff. I've got five book for one website alone for review overdue. All print products. To blame web reviewers for not getting material out timely is like reviewers blaming publishers for putting out too much stuff.

I think that the best way is to get the community involved with the prizes mentioned and try to use the tools already in place instead of reinventing the wheel. But then again...

 

[Crothian]

I might as well chirp in on this. My review rate has been abysimal. I finished up two reviews today and I expect to do better this coming month.

Right now I have about 80 or so pdf's submitted to me for review. That's not counting the 50 or so submitted to me before I become staff reviewer. Of those 50 a number are EN Publishing of which I'm no longer allowed to review.

One thing I have been doing is contacting friends and asking them to review pdfs. I'm just trying to get some more people to do pdf reviews and so far I've got a decent response. Some of the reviews will take a little while as a few wanted to run modules before reviewing them.

Reviews are important to the pdf industry. And there are just so many different pdf's out there it's a little overwelming. Even with a very comprehensive review database, it would take a reader days to go through all the products and reviews.

 

[Krug]

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.

To alleviate this problem I think RPGnow.com should start to subdivide it's site and do something like a d20.rpgnow.com just for d20 PDFs. Right now on the front page, 6 out of 12 of displayed products are d20. It'll help to stem the slide, though briefly.

I'm also surprised there aren't more companies selling PDFs. No there's not a lot of money to be made, but there IS money to be made and competition might actually improve the visibility of PDFs.

 

[PosterBoy]

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.

This was mentioned twice on this thread (see above post as well) so I have to comment.

Subdividing sites is NOT a good idea. It only fragments the customer base. Just cause you make a new site for d20 rpgs or paper miniatures doesn’t mean people will go there. It takes a lot of time and money to get customers to go to the new domain. Not to mention getting the new site highly ranked on search engines.

RPGMall.com is a perfect example of this. James started this site to sell the POD stuff from rpgnow.com. It only gets a fraction of the traffic of rpgnow.com or rpgshop.com.

Also, this requires people to have multiple logins, unless you share a database, but then you still have issues with session variables when using multiple domains. There’s technical ways around some of these items, it’s not like these sites makes in tons of cash to waste this ideas that won’t really help sales.

In fact, James and I have discussed the opposite; combing his 3 shops into one site so people can buy all the gaming products they want in one spot. Believe it or not, a fair % of the customers who visit rpgshop.com don’t visit rpgnow.com (and vice versa). So combining them would result in more customers to sell PDFs too.

Splitting the site up will only shrink the customer base and result in fewer sales. Customers want more options, not less. We have sub categories if people want to only see d20 fantasy or paper miniatures (and they see the covers just like on the homepage).

Look at amazon.com. Do you see them splitting their various products in sub domains or sites? Nope. It’s all under one domain with one account.

Keep the ideas coming, but this one makes no sense.

(FYI, I don’t own rpgnow/rpgshop/rpgmall, I just help James run the sites)

 

[Bloodstone Press]

perhaps we should be trying to get PDF products reviewed magazines like Dragon

I think that is a great idea. How do we do it??

To alleviate this problem I think RPGnow.com should start to subdivide it's site and do something like a d20.rpgnow.com just for d20 PDFs

I've thought about that a bit. I even thought about suggesting it to James, but then I figured his response would be something like, "if you want fantasy d20.rpgnow, go here: http://www.rpgnow.com/default.php?cPath=1_260&.

If you want Modern d20.RPGnow, go here: http://www.rpgnow.com/default.php?cPath=1_293&

etc."

I still think an RPGnow site dedicated to d20 only would help us all out, but since the RPGnow site is already set up in a way this is similar, I doubt James will see the value in making a change like that.

Note, that's not a slam against James. He's a very smart businessman and I have a great deal of respect for him. I just think that he thinks he has already anticipated this situation and corrected for it by building the site with the sub-pages that I've mentioned above. And I'm not sure he's wrong in that opinion. Witness the d20 Modern page at RPGnow (linked above). 22 Talent Trees came out in the first week of November, 8 weeks ago, and it is still getting "front page" exposure on the d20 modern page.


The problem seems to be that most customers on RPGnow only see the stuff on the front page. My guess is that a significantly smaller number of people see the sub-pages. Perhaps the answer is for RPGnow to promote those sub-pages more, rather than the whole site... but then it is not really their job to advertise for us. It is their job to advertise for themselves, which means promoting the whole site....