What kind of Sales can you expect from PDF?

[MEG Hal]

RPGHost said:

Perhaps print publishers can tell me I'm wrong (I only know what people tell me), but I think there's still a VERY wide circulation gap between PDF and print publishing.

--Erik Mona

You are not wrong there is a tremendous gap and we will release items a pdf but print is where the numbers are, Monte Cook and some of Nat20's stuff are a rare few not the norm.

Our numbers for our first pdf Interludes was reallt good until we announced print sales then it dropped fast. We are still #23 or so on top list and we prolly sold around 175 copies. Now our free release "sold" almost 100 in first month just at RPGNow.com and we have it posted at a number of sites including our own, so that was a huge difference, prolly 400+ in first 30 days.

 

[philreed]

My Numbers . . .

Interestingly, Phil Read says he's sold 170 copies of 101 Spellbooks, but it's not on the list. That means either the list is screwy (which I have suspected in the past) or that he's sellng a lot of copies in places other than RPGNow.

On RPGNow I've sold (as of this moment) 156 copies of this one. 135 copies of the Mundane Treasures on RPGNow and 75 copies of Arcane Spell Components on RPGNow.

On RPGNet I've only sold 1 each of Spellbooks and Treasures.

On my own site I've sold 15 Spellbooks, 5 Treasures, and 28 components.

None of these have been out for two months yet. (Spellbooks will be 2 months old November 17.)

I hope that helps everyone gauge how well PDFs are doing.

 

[Morrus]

[Erik, I deleted one of your posts because you double-posted by mistake].

One question which occurs to me, and which is probably the most pertinent to current PDF publishers, is how to combat the growing glut. Over the last year, sales of any given product have halved (that's a rough figure), and as time passes, they'll get less.

One thing to do is make sure you put out more products. I'm aiming at one a month right now, and total sales are still much the same that they were when I started with Wild Spellcraft all those months ago. But I can't go any faster than that, because in the current market, I'll just be competing with myself. Eventually, I'll have to change strategy again.

So, what can we do to increase sales on individual PDFs? here are some thoughts:

1) Try harder to "legitimise" PDF products. They are seen as more legit now than they were two years ago, and that will hopefully improve. Unfortunately, with the "glut" comes a large number of low-quality products, which can help to reduce that legitimacy. On average, with so many products available, the chances that the buyer will pick up something shoddy is much higher.

2) Does the fact that RPGNow pretty much has a monopoly make a difference? [Sorry, James...]. RPG.net tried to do the same and failed, and SVGames currently charges 50% or so on electronic sales, which kinda prices them out of the market. The other option is to sell them yourself, but then you lose RPGNow's publicity factor - that will matter to some less than others, of course. I've been in two-minds about it for ages.

3) How could info about PDF products be distributed better? How can we make sure that people hear about the good ones?

I'm sure there are other factors which escape me for the moment. But it is somethng which bothers me, having seen my own figures over the last 18 months. I feel kinda sorry for anyone joining in now - they missed the heyday.

 

[Morrus]

Re: My Numbers . . .

On RPGNow I've sold (as of this moment) 156 copies of this one. 135 copies of the Mundane Treasures on RPGNow and 75 copies of Arcane Spell Components on RPGNow.

On RPGNet I've only sold 1 each of Spellbooks and Treasures.

On my own site I've sold 15 Spellbooks, 5 Treasures, and 28 components.

None of these have been out for two months yet. (Spellbooks will be 2 months old November 17.)

I hope that helps everyone gauge how well PDFs are doing.

Ah, cool. I'll amend my list accordingly, and just use the RPGNow figures (with others in parenthesis) so we're all comparing like-for-like.


2: 730 (TF&T)
4: 578 (Wild Spellcraft)
5: ~530 (Inns & Taverns)
6: 528 (LE1)
9: 450 (CG1)
10: 381 (4C2F)
13: 329 (Gar'Udok)
19: 232 (LE2)
26: 160 (Enchiridon)

Below #30:

156: 101 Spellbooks (+16 elsewhere)
152: Moon Elves (+55 or so lost figures...grrr...)
149: Everyone Else
146: Drow (+6 Print On Demand not counted)
135: 101 Treasures (+6 elsewhere)
125: Enchantment
121: Death: GotG
99: Bodies & Souls
75: 101 Components (+28 elsewhere)

 

[jmucchiello]

So now you want little graphical arrows for it's volocity on the list? Is that really something a customer cares about? The lists are there to help draw attention to "popular" products, not to say X is better or being bought faster then Y.

Arrows! Even better than bullets!!! (I did compare it to Billboard, didn't I?)

Well, selling better means they are more popular almost by definition. Besides once you generate the page it is basically static and they wouldn't eat up too much disk space or bandwidth. They are a curiousity.

Rock on!
Joe

 

[philreed]

List Updated

Below #30:

156: 101 Spellbooks
152: Moon Elves (+55 or so lost figures...grrr...)
149: Everyone Else
146: Drow (+6 Print On Demand not counted)
135: 101 Treasures
125: Enchantment
121: Death: GotG
99: Bodies & Souls
75: 101 Spell Components

 

[philreed]

Great thread!

I'm very happy to see people sharing numbers. When I released my first PDF all people would tell me is "50-100" and I couldn't find anyone to give me exact numbers.

This really helps!

 

[Morrus]

I don't think that the Top 30 list is meaningless to consumers (and perhaps not to publishers, either).

It certainly isn't a direct indication of quality or current sales, but it does allow newcomers to get a quick list of works that might not currently be hot, but have been popular in the past. So if someone comes to RPG now, having just discovered Malhavoc Press, they will have a quick list at their fingertips that includes works from other publishers on other subjects that have been well received.

It could mean the difference between purchasing Dwarf Product A or Dwarf Product B, or cruising into a category that you hadn't intended to check out.

The problem with it is that all it shows is who was around when there weren't many PDF publishers. If you released a product a year ago, you're probably on that list; if you release it in early 2003 you're very unlikely to make it.

That doesn't help the consumer at all - it's just a list of the oldest products (with one or two exceptions). It also probably adversely affects current publishers who find it so much harder to get their product seen by people, which could well be better than anything on that list.

So a last 30 days option seems to me to be a much more accurate, and much fairer way to do it.

Those lists are as close to browsable shelf space outside of the catagories and current releases as exists on the site (as far as I can find). I can't help but think that removing the list (or shrinking it) will cut the sales of some products from a few per month to zero per month. It's not much difference, but you'd pull the product if you thought those few sales were beneath you.

But sales aside, it does add to the shopping experience for customers so I'm not sure that the decision to remove or contract the Best Sellers list should be taken lightly.

Again, I disagree. If you go into a music or video store, you never see shelves with the best-ever selling albums or videos. You see the "current chart". The mucis industry suffers the same problem that this one does - it's bloated. The number of sales required to reach #1 in the charts is vastly less than it was in, say, the 70s. So all you'd ever see in prominent places in music stores would be old Beatles and Michael Jackson albums, and nothing current.

 

[jmucchiello]

1) Try harder to "legitimise" PDF products. They are seen as more legit now than they were two years ago, and that will hopefully improve. Unfortunately, with the "glut" comes a large number of low-quality products, which can help to reduce that legitimacy. On average, with so many products available, the chances that the buyer will pick up something shoddy is much higher.

There was talk about an ENnies category for PDFs is that still on for next year? Maybe you could promote them more in your reviews area. (No I don't know how you would do this. Perhaps a top-20 e-products list to go with your top-20 products page.)

2) Does the fact that RPGNow pretty much has a monopoly make a difference? [Sorry, James...]. RPG.net tried to do the same and failed, and SVGames currently charges 50% or so on electronic sales, which kinda prices them out of the market. The other option is to sell them yourself, but then you lose RPGNow's publicity factor - that will matter to some less than others, of course. I've been in two-minds about it for ages.

I think their "monopoly" is a benefit. It makes it easier to find stuff outside of your normal purchasing block. The market is so small that if RPGNow had a serious competitor it would become ugly.

Oh, and if we're doing corrections, I've had two sales since this morning. Guess my shameless plug helped.

 

[2WS-Steve]

So, what can we do to increase sales on individual PDFs? here are some thoughts:

1) Try harder to "legitimise" PDF products. ...

2) Does the fact that RPGNow pretty much has a monopoly make a difference? [Sorry, James...]. ...

3) How could info about PDF products be distributed better? How can we make sure that people hear about the good ones?

I'm not sure how much the "glut" really factors into things. I buy PDFs fairly regularly and they're so cheap that having too many to choose from isn't a problem. I'm more concerned with just making sure I'll enjoy the product I buy.

One thing that might help is re-arranging the site layout a bit; you have maybe 30 products with cover face out then I can't even see the spine on the rest of them; I need to go digging through the site to find anything. Ideally manufacturer web pages and reviews here at ENWorld linked to where to buy should help address this but RPGNow is like a game store and it should be fun to browse through but that's sorta difficult currently.

Perhaps ENWorld can actually do some of the work by seperating the PDF product reviews from the print reviews (or having a way to filter for PDFs) so that those already inclined to purchase a PDF cna easily scan through the available products and read quality reviews of them. This might be helped by having more staff reviews of PDFs too since those (and the affiliates) are the guys I trust the most.

re: 1) Just doing that might help legitimize PDFs, though I think most people hold back not because they think PDFs are low quality books but because they just want to be able to read the thing on the loo...

re: 2) Actually, I suspect this might be one of those rare cases where a monopoly helps a bit since I know exactly where to go to get e-books. Also, the new publisher features RPGNow has introduced are pretty nice so they don't seem to be sitting on their laurels. That said, everyone deserves their shot at dot.com fame and fortune...

Sidenote: I wonder if the PDF customer base is a small group of 500 or so people, 100 of which spend the vast majority of the money and account for most of the sales of everyone's books...

On a second sidenote; I know I'm far less likely to buy a PDF if it's going to hit print. Since the companies that consistently publish cool PDFs are frequently getting their books picked up by a print publisher I'm more ready to hold off and just wait for the printed product. I've come to expect that most Nat20 and Ambient books will end up at my FLGS.