What kind of Sales can you expect from PDF?

[rpghost]

Re: Sales Figures

As a person working on my first product for sale, I think it would be useful to me and others here if we could have the top 20/40/whatever lists for both units sold and cash generated .

It would be informative to see what difference if any it made to the list. It should show if the product cost does indeed impact sales and help me (and other "newcomers") set the best guess at a price.

Would it be possible to do this for us?

While I agree it's what people "want" to know, it's definatly not something I can or would make public. These numbers are private.

But if you look above in this thread Morrus already as a lot of it assembled from guess work.

James

 

[jmucchiello]

Problem is, I need to figure out a way to get the database drive HTML pages to actually store as HTML that is locally navigated. If I use a program to spider the whole site I'm afraid it may spider a lot of places I don't want... anyone know a tool to do this sort of thing? I want the output in HTML not PDF.

Have you tried QuadSucker or UltraSucker from http://www.quadsucker.com? It's a spider that can relativize the URLs in the links. Quadsucker is also an image viewer (designed for porn sites: from which all internet innovation flows) so you'd probably use UltraSucker. I ran it for a few seconds on the website and there's a glitch in the More Comments... link in the left sidebar that might be caused by my having an old version or a bug in your webpage. You'd have to check that out. Also, hopefully the newer version supports cookies since all the URLs end up with that &PHPSESSION=blahblahblah.

The good thing about it is it can grab offsite image but ignore offsite pages. You can also exclude URLs with a search string such as exclude "/private/" any anchor tag with /private/ in it is removed.

Hope that helps,
Joe

 

[DanMcAllister]

Re: Re: Sales Figures

While I agree it's what people "want" to know, it's definatly not something I can or would make public. These numbers are private.

But if you look above in this thread Morrus already as a lot of it assembled from guess work.

James

I can definately see RPGNow being unable to do this. However if some of the publishers would give these figures of their own products it sure would be appreciated... I'll go back through the ist and do this work for myself, but thought if anyone was willing to share this info it wouldn't hurt to ask...

I have been very happy with everything I have bought from RPGNow, by the way guys, except one product which was setting specific and was my own falt for not catchjing the fact...

I'll try to match your guys' standards when I do have my own product ready....

Dan

 

[DanMcAllister]

Does this seem reasonable?

The product I amn working on will be useful to at least 5 of the major D20 settings (D&D, CoC, Star Wars, Traveller, and Modern) but the versions would have to be slightly different to fit each setting's unique qualities...

I was thinking of selling each setting-specific version seperately and also selling a "Bundled" version with all 5 for the price of 3.

Does this seem to be a good idea? (It does to me, but then again I thought of it, so OF COURSE it seems to be a good idea to me...)

Guidance appreciated,

Dan

 

[rpghost]

Re: Does this seem reasonable?

The product I amn working on will be useful to at least 5 of the major D20 settings (D&D, CoC, Star Wars, Traveller, and Modern) but the versions would have to be slightly different to fit each setting's unique qualities...

If there are only a small or definable changes for each setting, I'd suggest adopting a formating at that would indicate which genre a particular rule or note applies to and make one book. I'm all for splitting up large books into smaller ones as people don't like to read (print) huge PDFs... but this seems like a case where just some careful presentation should make the book only a few pages longer and serve all needs.

But, this isn't really a topic for this thread. Start another if you want more feedback.

This topic was about the "potential" sales of PDF products. How to increase the PDF buyer base, etc... I hope we can continue on along those lines. I for one would like to know how to attact more non-d20 users and more non-EN World users. To that end I expect to spend some advertising money in the near future. The fact that most of our customers come from the 2 most popular producers of PDF's means that many of our customers are coming straight from product announcemnt links and fan support sites. I'd like to try to tap into the regular book-reading crowd as well as some more non-d20 people. Thoughts?

James

James

 

[Temprus]

James,

When do you expect to start offering the PoD services mentioned earlier in the thread?

Also, will any pdf vendor on your site be allowed access to it or only top sellers?

 

[rpghost]

When do you expect to start offering the PoD services mentioned earlier in the thread?

Also, will any pdf vendor on your site be allowed access to it or only top sellers?

Soon, not postive when I'll have final details. But hopefully this year yet. Waiting on a sample to arrive and to make final arrangments.

All vendors who are willing to pre-pay for 10 copies of their product will be able to participate. We'll of course want a higher resolution PDF, but most specs shouldn't change.

James

 

[2WS-Steve]

Re: Re: Does this seem reasonable?

...

I'd like to try to tap into the regular book-reading crowd as well as some more non-d20 people. Thoughts?

Do you mean fiction PDFs, like putting novels on sale via RPGNow?

This would be a hard sell to me and I already like PDF products. Most printed fiction books sell for about $8. That's a small enough amount of money that I wouldn't give up paper to catch a price break. Frankly, I'm more than willing to spend $8 for a printed version of an excellent book that I could download for free (Guttenberg project for instance).

If I had one of those e-book readers then I'd give a downloadable book a try but I have a feeling that the e-Book market is pretty miserable.

I think to make something like this fly we need to offer something besides a cost break. The current advantages of e-products are speed of delivery and vast selection but we need something extra for the end user. The Darkfuries maps worked really well as an e-Product because having them in HTML format made using them easier than using a printed map book (at least in certain ways). I suspect that whatever is going to add appeal to e-products will occur on the software end and that means you'll need programmers as well as a writers for the books.

 

[DanMcAllister]

Re: Re: Does this seem reasonable?

If there are only a small or definable changes for each setting, I'd suggest adopting a formating at that would indicate which genre a particular rule or note applies to and make one book. I'm all for splitting up large books into smaller ones as people don't like to read (print) huge PDFs... but this seems like a case where just some careful presentation should make the book only a few pages longer and serve all needs.

But, this isn't really a topic for this thread. Start another if you want more feedback.

This topic was about the "potential" sales of PDF products. How to increase the PDF buyer base, etc... I hope we can continue on along those lines. I for one would like to know how to attact more non-d20 users and more non-EN World users. To that end I expect to spend some advertising money in the near future. The fact that most of our customers come from the 2 most popular producers of PDF's means that many of our customers are coming straight from product announcemnt links and fan support sites. I'd like to try to tap into the regular book-reading crowd as well as some more non-d20 people. Thoughts?

James

James

Agreed on being off-topic. Have started new thread. (Excuse a newbie to the boards....) And thanks for the thoughts you gave.


Dan

 

[James Heard]

Has anyone tried to ask regular computer game publishers about piggy-backing pdf products or catalogs onto the blank spaces on their cds? I mean, they already put all of those useless demos and EULAs... Aren't folks that play computer games already a higher percentage of the folks that might have played D&D at some point?