Troubles with getting Sorcerer and Sex

[Ace]

I though I would let everbody know that Alliance distribution isn't quite up to date on Adept Press products

Several weeks ago I ordered Sorcerer and Sex from my FLGS

When I came back to check on the order today and there was  book

I was irritated to say the least since I ordered by Name and Number and the guys at my FLGS are very good about filling special orders

After some grumbling and I relization that I could just get the book from Ron I muttered "fine just cancel the order".

SV our FLGS  owner jumped in and got Alliance to fix the problem. I should get my copy in a few days.

SV figured the problem was because of the size of Adept Press apparently Alliance is bad about those things.

I figured I might tell everyone about the hastles and suggest unless your store makes or will make a habit of carrying Indy games that you might want to consider buying direct.

Not only is it less trouble but more money goes to the games creator.

[Tim C Koppang]

Whoa, just realized that I haven't posted in like two months.

Anyway, I had a similar experience, but the guy at my local store was less enthusiastic about fixing any sort of problem with the distributor.  (I also don't think he was too keen on the subject matter as he gleaned superficially from the book's title.)  Basically, I was thinking the same thing you were: "Well, I could just order directly from Ron so why not cancel the order?"  This of course totally circumvents the whole support my local game store mentality I usually try to have.

So I don't know if this problem is still happening or what, but I figure someone should know about it.  I just hope Ron has a bunch of copies at GenCon... and I'm sure he will.  :-)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Anthony,

Good to see you again.

You've brought up a serious issue that needs discussing here. Bluntly, the three-tier distribution/retail system recently broke with a wet, nasty, snapping sound, just as I and a few concerned publishers predicted at the last GTS.

Here are the two issues.

1. Employees at Alliance, which may or may not reflect Alliance's management policy (opinions differ), are often dismissive about retailers' orders of small press games. For whatever reason, they apparently just ... don't fulfill them.

Notice that I'm talking about a single special order, such as you describe, not a typical monthly "Send us two copies each of these eleven games and ten copies each of all that Exalted stuff." They'll fulfill that, sure.

2. Game stores are in a weird bind regarding this issue. Historically, retailers have been forced to be fairly submissive to distributors' preferences, and Alliance has never been above playing favorites and threatening to cancel an account if someone bugs them too much. The retailers are also kind of stressed-out as a general rule, and once they've gone to the trouble of making a special single order, they usually put it out of their minds and get back to the stress.

So what these points come down to is how much a given retailer is willing to go the extra mile and perhaps even risk major wrath in order to get you the one book you want. To the customer, this is a no-brainer; the retailer's there to serve, right? To the retailer, this is (in the case of Sex & Sorcery) a whole $6 profit which doesn't even offset the wad of debt sitting on the shelves from the last big order.

So I have a request for everybody to consider, speaking strictly as the man at Adept Press. It's time to start evaluating your retailer. Does this store, or does it not, meet the needs of you as my customer?

If not, go direct, for my stuff. If so, then great. Anthony, this incident may have been a blip, but as I understand it, it's pretty typical.

This is kind of harsh, but I'm not talking about whether they are trying to get the book for you. Given that their own environment (i.e. Alliance) should be considered at least partly hostile, the question is whether they are effective in that environment, for your own purposes.

It's not a matter of "store"-ness vs. "direct"-ness at a general or principled level, but rather specific to my own company and this particular store.

All discussion is welcome!!

Best,
Ron

[Clay]

The best model might be for something akin to the way the beer market works.  First, the beer industry has a similar composition to the game industry. It's dominated by a few large players, but the barriers to entry are pretty low.  Anybody with a recipe and a little funding can start a brewery and start selling.  For a very low cost in equipment and materials, people can even homebrew.

The main difference is the distribution network.  A single distributor is limited to covering a territory limited by how far a single beer truck can drive in one day. This means that you get lots and lots of distributors. There also tend to be competition within a region, because the cost of entry into the market isn't too high. A small warehouse in a bad neighborhood, a truck and knowing a few grocers are all it takes.

Distributors are likewise motivated to carry new product, to differentiate themselves from the others.  Their drivers are also their salesmen. This means that their salesmen have frequent contact with the customers.  This provides a lot of motivation to introduce new products and revive older small-market products, because it boosts sales, which is money directly in the drivers' pockets.

This all means that in addition to Budweiser and Miller products, it's possible to get Black Star or Frankenmuth beers in my local corner grocery store (not, mind you, that my local grocery carries either, but it's a tiny store).  

The situation in the game industry, of course, is that there isn't the competition among distributors.  Based on what I read here and what I've found from talking with store owners is that everybody orders from Alliance or a couple of other national distributors. This means minimal competition among distributors, since if you want to sell games you're probably going to buy from Alliance.

With a single large distributor dominating the flow, there really isn't any incentive to carry something like Sorcerer.  The cost of the books themselves is pretty trivial to the distributor. The expensive part is the handling time. It does not take significantly longer to order 10,000 copies of DnD from Wizards than it does to order a hundred copies of Sorcerer from Tundra. Likewise, it takes about the same amount of time to stock the shelves.  It might even take less time to stock the DnD order, because they're going to show up on a pallet, and the whole pallet gets dropped on a shelf in the warehouse. Sorcerer shows up in a box or two from Tundra, possibly mixed with other product, that needs to be sorted out and handled by hand.  Furthermore, it's going to get shipped out in ones and twos, instead of by the box, the way DnD is going to get shipped.

So, how to change it?

Let's look at the beer market again. I don't get my best beer selection at the local market, but if I ask the manager nicely he can special order something for me, like a keg of Frankenmuth Dark. Where I get my good beer selection is either in the very large store (Meijer for folks in Michigan, which is kind of like a gigantic department store with a grocery section for everyone who doesn't live in Michigan), or a highly specialized party store. The corner party store carries the major market products, and if you have an enlightened owner a few minority products.

Likewise, the best game selection isn't at my local hobby shop, which is long on the major market products.  They have some indy stuff, crammed into shelves with a lot of other stock that will never leave the store via the cash register.  Instead, I get my best game selection and presentation at national chains who specialize in games, such as Wizards of the Coast (and say what you will, they carry more indy games than most hobby shops), or little highly specialized game stores.  Book stores also work pretty well in this model; I've have better luck consistently finding Call of Cthulhu materials at my local Borders than I have at my local hobby shop.

What this means is that the typical hobby shop, which is the major games seller in a lot of towns, is a waste of time for small market games. They've got lots of other things to worry about besides games, and they're just going to concentrate on just the fast movers.   Instead the best places to concentrate are places that sell nothing but games. The person most likely to buy an Indy game knows where these stores are, and they'll tell their friends.

Bypassing the major distribution channel really becomes the problem. You'd need a way to get the word out to individual retailers to carry products from the Tundra catalog. There may well be a list out there somewhere.  Someplace like Tundra might even have it.

The important part will be to really support these retailers, to make it worth their while to carry the minority product.  I think that Adept Press is on the right track, providing links to game stores good enough to carry the product.  Actively arranging product demos is another good tactic, if the store has demo space.  This again is a page right from the brewery book: most breweries have a taproom where they give free samples, and they like to go around to county fairs to host beer tents.

[Ace]

My game store is in a wierd predicament sales wise

They genuinely would like to carry and sell a large range of games including Indy games. They have had copies of Sorcerer, World Tree, Fulvimita and more in stock

I bought Sorcerer from the used table (and followed it up with 3 more supplements but thats another matter...)

As for the other games they NEVER seem to move. Only the big 3 seems to sell in fact the FLGS  used to carry a good stock of GURPS. Now  according to the owner I am about only person who is a regular buyer of anything

Adding insult to injury the "non traditional" gamers are either limited in income or divided in preferences (we have an L5R contigent and a "furry" contingent and a Buffy contigent but there is little sales cross over. There si little group mixing either. At least two folks here have TROS but we never mix groups      

The market however supports D&D, WOD (Vampire et all) and thats about it. Other games could happen but (and there always is a but) there are two major problems
The owner and his employee/cronies have the willpower and drive of a twinkie
Even when "promoting" of games it is invariably clicky or minis games. T
The  only unusual item getting any attention is Historical Minis

The problems the owner does nothing about are compounded by the very insular nature of local game groups. It can be very hard to get stable new adult players to game with you unless you recruit LARPers or non gamers

Combine all this together and you get a very small game scene for non traditional gamers

However

I still chose to use the FLGS for a couple of reasons
1- I like the owner
2 -- He is good about taking care of my needs as a customer, special orders and odd requests are no problem
3- I use the tables occasionally at the store for gaming
4- I don't want to travel 30 miles for a bigger store

5- and the most important reason I own most of the games I want to own already.
Unless I expect to actually play a game in a year or less I am just not interested in it. There are a couple of exceptions

GURPS
Systemless Game books
Sorcerer (the game that helped my campaign a lot -- but I'll deal with that in actual play )

In a way I no longer need a game store as I have
most of the games I want
a place to play
a good group

[ethan_greer]

Bluntly, the three-tier distribution/retail system recently broke with a wet, nasty, snapping sound, just as I and a few concerned publishers predicted at the last GTS.

Hi Ron, can you provide some more detail on this?  When did it happen, how did it happen, and how do you know it happened?  Not questioning it, I just don't know anything about it and am curious for more info.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Took me a bit to get back to this thread.

Anthony (Ace), I guess the only thing to say is, if you really don't need the game store, then direct order is the only way to go. To my thinking, a game store's existence deserves consumer attention exactly to the extent that it serves the consumer's needs. And since those needs no longer include just having a game (because much of the time, the stores don't have it, and alternate venues exist), stores which simply hang'em up on the shelves and wait for the excitable hordes are frankly not offering anything worth buying.

To everyone, though, really - if your store does provide any of the crucial store-only services, then embrace it and feed it tenderly. These services include: actual play in a decent social context, knowledge and promotion of specific games to specific customers based on play preferences, quick and responsible special-ordering, and re-ordering of games that move off the shelves at all.

Ethan, I'm referring to distributors carrying out several practices over the last year. I have no idea whether this is official policy or just the habits of the rank-and-file, and frankly that doesn't matter to me. The practices are: (a) ceasing to carry a variety of titles, most of them small press; (b) failing to pay publishers for their books, which in my opinion amounts to theft; and (c) providing shoddy support services for re-orders and special orders. I cannot speak from certain knowledge as I'd rather not get sued for libel, but I think that Alliance, the single national distributor for hobby games, is grossly negligent in all three cases. And unfortunately, the far-superior smaller (i.e. more local) distributors such as Centurion and others are being squeezed badly by Alliance's superior range and resources regarding the "big" games.

I should also point out that Adept Press did not itself suffer from (a) or (b). It's (c) that concerns me now.

Best,
Ron

[Clay]

In time, the Alliance re-order problem will open up space for one of the smaller distributors to step in to fill that role. It will be very important for that distributor to stay out of the market for DnD and WOD products though. They'll loose competing against Alliance. The niche that will become available is precisely the market for small games, and a big game like DnD won't fit in that niche.  It will also definitely mean that everyone in the chain is going to get smaller margins, because this distributor will have to cover a higher handling cost for their greater diversity of products. But it won't matter, because everyone is going to go to these guys to get a certain type of product.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Clay,

That would be wonderful ... if it happens. The questions in the meantime, however, are upsetting to consider.

1. Will enough store owners track their sales and understand their customers to the degree that they even perceive a demand for stuff besides WotC and so forth? A few of them won't be enough to sustain such a distributor's business - and remember, such a distributor will probably be regional, not national.

2. Will enough small press companies stay in business long enough even to be able to benefit? I call your attention to Thyrsus Games, who did everything right and by the book regarding Fvlminata - and simply did not get paid via the tiers-system. Effectively, the company was illegally shut out of doing business.

3. Can fulfilment services be established at a level between distributor-oriented by-the-box sales and one-on-one direct sales? Both Tundra and Wizard's Attic were/are primarily set up for the former; I'm thinking of something set up for the latter with the former as an add-on.

Best,
Ron

[Clay]

Some of the answers are unfortunate.  

Store owners most definitely won't track their sales and inventory well enough to notice any market for small market products. The kind of knowledge and systems required to do this are usually developed in large companies (I learned from a former Rubbermaid exec).

Store owners and managers also don't have the sales knowledge to move the small market products.  Changing the facing and placement of stock is important to get people to see new things. This is knowledge that again doesn't tend to get developed in small companies.  There are some cool tricks that I'll discuss later.

A lot of small publishers are going to fold if they rely on storefront sales. Dav got it right in another thread - alternative marketing strategies are necessary. This means things like online sales, marketing to targeted groups and event based marketing.

The sort of onesy-twosey fulfillment house can definitely be established.  Some level of compromise would need to be established, such as they won't take orders below a certain dollar amount, since there's no margin in shipping out a single book at a time. Such a house would need to put a lot of effort into promoting these games to stores, and encouraging good stocking practices in the stores.

A lot of this could be helped by good information management practices at all levels. An inexpensive POS and inventory control system is crucial. The local stores are operating with $100 Casio cash registers. Most stores have only a vague notion of what they've sold, and they don't want to make the time and infrastructure investments to correct that, even though it would do wonders for their cash flow.