When to put a product on sale?

[SkeletonKey Ed]

When, during the lifecycle of a PDF, do publishers usually discount the product?

Any opinions on whether it is more beneficial to discount a product upfront for a limited time or discount it when sales start to slow down?

Any input is welcome.

Thanks -

Ed Bourelle
SkeletonKey Games

 

[Dana_Jorgensen]

Well, one obvious answer is temporary discounts at holiday time. Take a look at sale papers. They're always associating a sale with one holiday or another, even if there's no reason to associate sales with non-gifting holidays, like President's Day. Just don't etsablish a blanket sale covering everything you publish ever holiday. shuffle them up and only put a few on sale each holiday.

As for lifespan-based discounting, that's a tough question to answer. I've noticed that reduced pricing on older PDFs doesn't influence sales rates for those products. Of course, I haven't tried using a massive discount of say 50% or more, so I don't know if the size of the discount is what really counts.

One thing I do use is putting on sale for a few weeks the immediately previous volume of a series when a new volume gets released. This does influence sales quite a bit for me. If I don't do it, the previous volume will see at best 35% of the sales of the latest volume, while if I do put it on sale, it sees about 80% of the sales of the new volume.

 

[SkeletonKey Ed]

Excelent input, this is the kind of info I'm looking for. Thank you so much, Dana.

Cheers -

Ed Bourelle
SkeletonKey Games

 

[afstanton]

I suspect that also the *amount* that you drop the price by has an effect. Dana, that's a significant increase in sales volume. What's the typical percentage you drop?

Aaron

 

[Dana_Jorgensen]

I suspect that also the *amount* that you drop the price by has an effect. Dana, that's a significant increase in sales volume. What's the typical percentage you drop?

Aaron

I knock off $1.50 on a $7.50 SRP, so that's a 20% discount. Of course, it does help to have a product line that makes many people drool with anticipation of the next volume.

 

[Mark]

I'm a firm believer that unless the value of a product has changed, the price should remain the same. It can be argued that a product has a certain shelf life, and therefore the value decreases with time, but this is something that needs to be examined on an individual, product-by-product basis. I am, however, also of the belief that a discount for packaged products (bundles, etc.) is a fair reason to discount and does not detract from the perceived value of a product (or products) when purchased and/or discounted in that format.

 

[Morrus]

Over the GM's day week, Natural 20 Press (now EN Publishing) reduced all products to $2. It was well publicised, and we sold well over 1,000 units in that week.

That is the only time that I've noticed a sale make a difference - and believe me, I've experimented. The size of the sale *does* matter with these (comparative) low priced products, and the sale price has to be enough that people blink and look again to make sure they read right. That, and the sale has to be publicised well - just reducing the price at RPGNow has absolutely zero effect, I promise.

 

[Swiftbrook]

Over the GM's day week, Natural 20 Press (now EN Publishing) reduced all products to $2. It was well publicised, and we sold well over 1,000 units in that week.

That is the only time that I've noticed a sale make a difference - and believe me, I've experimented. The size of the sale *does* matter with these (comparative) low priced products, and the sale price has to be enough that people blink and look again to make sure they read right. That, and the sale has to be publicised well - just reducing the price at RPGNow has absolutely zero effect, I promise.

How's your current sale going? I'm going to pick up a few of the sale products.

IMO $2.50 is the right price for a 50 page PDF. If it was a print product that would translate to about $10. ($2.50 for publisher; $2.50 for printing, etc; $5.00 markup for FLGS). But I am also on a tight budget and can't spend a lot for games these days.

Sure wish a few more were on sale (like Three Arrows ).

-Swiftbrook

 

[jmucchiello]

How's your current sale going? I'm going to pick up a few of the sale products.

IMO $2.50 is the right price for a 50 page PDF. If it was a print product that would translate to about $10. ($2.50 for publisher; $2.50 for printing, etc; $5.00 markup for FLGS). But I am also on a tight budget and can't spend a lot for games these days.

Sure wish a few more were on sale (like Three Arrows ).

-Swiftbrook

$2.50 x 100 sales (best seller!) = $250 - 20% for RPGNow = $200 for the artist, writer and publisher. Even if you give all of it to the writer, at 50 pages it should be at least 40,000 words (and 800 per page is not that dense) thus netting our writter about 0.5 cents per word. Going rate in RPGs is 3-4 cents a word. Are PDFs somehow 6-8 times less worthy of fair pay than printed materials?

 

[jgbrowning]

$2.50 x 100 sales (best seller!) = $250 - 20% for RPGNow = $200 for the artist, writer and publisher. Even if you give all of it to the writer, at 50 pages it should be at least 40,000 words (and 800 per page is not that dense) thus netting our writter about 0.5 cents per word. Going rate in RPGs is 3-4 cents a word. Are PDFs somehow 6-8 times less worthy of fair pay than printed materials?

If the PDF sold 600-800 copies the pay would be the same. To me, the pay is proportionate based upon sales. You could reverse the question and say, "why shouldn't the pay be less if it doesn't generate the income the paper pay rates are based on?" Writing pay is based upon performance, not upon effort.

However, he's the purchaser and that's his right price, regardless of what we think about it.

joe b.