What kind of Sales can you expect from PDF?

[philreed]

Bad idea . . .

Something that often worries me is that I sleep right under two bookshelves, which hold about a thousand books all told, some of them seven feet above my napping head.

I actually had shelves of books fall on me one night while I was sleeping. Hurt like hell _and_ scared me. Not a nice way to find yourself at 3 am.

 

[rpghost]

RPGHost said:
>>>
But even in print books are lucky to sell more then 1000 copies so don't get the wrong idea.
>>>

No legitimate print publisher I'm aware of feels "lucky" to sell 1000 copies. In fact, I strongly doubt that a product that sells 1000 copies is even profitable.
...
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.

I can only go by what I'm told and from the simular products as what we sell on RPGNow.com - I'm not comparing to the old-school or the full line publishers, I'm talking about the other d20 upstarts out there and what I've heard. Selling only 1000 print copies in today's over saturated d20 market is typical. Sure Mongoose, Monte Cook, Bastin Press, and Atlas Games and such break those numbers by a large margin - but I was refering to the upstarts.

James
http://www.RPGNow.com

 

[The Sigil]

Ideas for greater publicity...

If it'll help, Morrus, I'll make a concerted effort to review the 50 or so PDF products I have - at about 3 per week - to help raise awareness. I note Joe Kushner also does a lot of e-reviews. I'm just trying to dig out from an impending home move, but I have copies burned to CD, so I can do them from work.

And if you want - and I don't know if you do - I'll be happy to be the ENWorld dedicated staff review for e-products (which would count out Natural 20 Press products in reviews)... LOL - like you really want controversial me as a reviewer.

Oh, I won't review my own products, of course.

--The Sigil

 

[Asathas]

And since half the publishers are here

Since at least half of the publishers are here, I'll toss this idea out...

I'd love to have a book on medieval superstitions with their D20 game effects. I've considered writing such a book but don't think I have the time and/or talent to do it justice.

So if one of you guys decide this is a good idea and publish it, you've got at least one customer right here.

/giving up my pretensions of creativity now...

 

[rpghost]

1) Try harder to "legitimise" PDF products.... a large number of low-quality products, which can help to reduce that legitimacy.

Effective use of the COMMENTS section of the website sure helps with this. If we get a product that has say 3 or more reviews all at 1 star, we usually pull the product. Please help us police product quality and report bad eggs to us.

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.

I don't mind you saying it- but I'm not going to feel guilty about it. How many other sites spent $10,000 on promotion? How many others have our level of customer service? How many others have our level of tools for vendors to use? I think we earned our position and I am not afraid of competion. I didn't bad-mouth RPG.NET when they came out and copied my business plan and even the same software base. Now that I have their largest vendor as an exclusive at RPGNow.com I don't think they are going to be around much longer. Besides, look what was said above. A vendor sold 153 copies on RPGNow and 1 copy on RPG.NET - where would you go to sell your product?

As for SVGames, I'll leave comment out for now - but be assured we are addressing this one too.

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

I've added some mailing lists to RPGNow that allow the Gold Vendors to automatically send mailings to reviewers and news sites. This feature and some cheap promotion we're giving out for RPGHost Network should help out. I encurrage people to join our mailing lists esp if you run a new site or are a reviewer. It's reviews and news that drive the PDF industry (besides our large regular customer base).

I feel kinda sorry for anyone joining in now - they missed the heyday.

Good product and good marketing still sell. Regardless of wether there are 500 products on RPGnow or not. Good product is the key. Good community support is just as important -- as proven by you Morrus - who has a monopoly on 3e/d20 news

James

 

[Morrus]

Good product and good marketing still sell. Regardless of wether there are 500 products on RPGnow or not. Good product is the key. Good community support is just as important -- as proven by you Morrus - who has a monopoly on 3e/d20 news

No, James. They don't. I'm not sure why you keep saying this, but all of us publishers seem to agree that sales are down by a long way. Some of us disagree on the reasons (I think it's the glut), but there's no denying that it's happened. We have numbers that say that.

In fact, even your partners, RPGObjects, have confirmed this. The big sellers happened back when there were comparatively fewer products.

These days, the front page of RPGNow is not "new products this month", it's "new products in the last 3 minutes". For any single product, the shelf life, and the total sales, are all down. they just don't get seen.

You can help with this by adopting some of the suggestions for your storefront (other than trying to wring another few % out of vendors who really aren't making anything anyway - they have to pay writers, artists etc, you know - you probably make as much from each copy sold as any given vendor). That won't solve it, but it will make a small difference. I'm looking at other ways to tackle the problem with my reviews page etc. I'm also considering offering dirt cheap ads to PDF people, to see if that helps.

But please stop telling us that things sell just as well now. We're the ones sellnig them, remember. We know how well our sales finances are doing only too well.

 

[Sir Whiskers]

A thought (as a buyer of pdf's):

I've purchased from RPGNow a couple of times, and the only reason I haven't done so more often has nothing to do with quality or promotion, but ease of use. I can easily spend 1-2 HOURS looking through the selections, seeing what each one offers, etc. (yes, I have a dial-up connection...) What I want is the ease of ordering online, combined with the ease of thumbing through a catalog to choose what I want. So, you guys tell me if this idea would be feasible at all:

Create a pdf catalog of all current products. Each product would contain only the information currently displayed on that product's information page, with no graphics. The catalog could be organized by theme, alphabetically, or however makes most sense. I suggest no graphics to save on file size. I suggest using the same text as the product page to save time preparing and updating this document. Then allow customers to download the catalog, make our choices off-line, then log in and order quickly by item number.

I see some obvious questions which would have to be answered:
1) How many products are currently available on RPGNow?
2) How many products could such a catalog list before becoming too large for a reasonable download?
3) How much time would it take to create and maintain the catalog? Would RPGNow have a reasonable expectation of regaining those costs through additional sales?
4) Would anyone besides me actually use the thing, if it existed?
5) Can much the same thing be accomplished by simply having two product pages for each product - one with graphics, one without? The prospective buyer then chooses to search with or without graphics (still a slow process, but faster than the current option).

This is all off the top of my head - no offense taken if it gets shot down.

 

[Andrzej the Firbolg]

A message from Asathas' other half...

I'd just like to take this chance to let you folks know that Asathas isn't kidding about our .pdf purchases (or God knows about the hardcopy purchases we've made).

He's also spot on about the usefulness of these tools within our group. As the "holy warrior" in our new campaign, I have been living inside of Forgotten Heroes: Paladin...

However, if you would please, DON'T let him find out when you guys have new .pdfs available. Please, I beg you. He can't resist them, it's pathalogical with him. And if I have to spend another week hole-punching printouts and sorting them into binders for him, the bookshelves aren't the only ones who'll be wishing him bodily harm. <jk>

Seriously, you guys do some great work and we do really love the products. Keep them coming.

 

[Morrus]

I don't mind you saying it- but I'm not going to feel guilty about it. How many other sites spent $10,000 on promotion?

Incidentally - looking at those referrals lists, is that working out? It doesn't seem like, for example, your Dragon and Dungeon ads really have much effect. $10,000 seems a lot of money when you appear to be getting most of your customers from here.

Of course, that's your business. But it does seem like you're spending too much on advertising that doesn't appear to be working, at least to the caual bserver.

 

[rpghost]

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...

This was an interesting question I've wondered about in the past... so I aggregated some data (on non-free product only) for you guys:

There have been 7891 distinct customers buying products.

The top 1% of these people are responsible for the top 15% of total sales.

Top 0.8% are responsible for 13.0% of revenues

top 0.4% are responsible for 8.7% revenues

What this tell you? I donno- I'm not a math major... but to me it means that we have a good amount of very regular customers that buy a lot of stuff... but it's certainly not a case of 10 people buying most of the product. It's a couple hundred at least buying heavily.

James