Beast Hunters - The First Six Months

[xenopulse]

Hi there,

In the past, I've always greatly appreciated posts by indie publishers who've shared their experiences and numbers. It's helped me greatly to see how things are working out in those cases, and I would like to give back by reporting our experience so far.

Beast Hunters, our first game, was co-written by my wife Lisa and myself between the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2007. We both had different responsibilities: I did the mechanics, Lisa handled art direction, and we both shared in setting and beast design. We finished the many revisions of the text in February 2007. By that time, we had already hired Joanna Barnum for the interior work (scenes and tattoos) and Fred Hicks of Evil Hat Games to do the layout.

We opened up the preorder on March 11, 2007, almost exactly six months ago. Since then, we've sold 163 copies of the game, in hardcopy and PDF combined. We placed the game on Lulu and signed up with IPR, so the four venues for selling the game are Preorder, Direct (e.g., conventions we attend), Lulu, and IPR. The exact numbers are:

Preorder (Bundle): 32
Direct: 8
Lulu Book: 13
Lulu PDF: 14
IPR Book: 74
IPR PDF: 18
IPR Bundle: 4 (we only recently added this option at IPR)

Sales by month are harder to do, because I'd have to break down IPR's quarterly numbers, and I actually don't have their official Q3 report yet (the numbers I used for Q3 are from a combination of IPR web site stats and convention reports). Suffice it to say that probably 75% of the sales were in March-June, and only 25% in July-September.

About half of the book sales at IPR were to retailers. That's great because they are not sales we would have made otherwise, even if our profit margin is very small. Similarly, IPR sold hardcopies of Beast Hunters at conventions (8 at Origins, 6 at GenCon, without demoing in either case), which is great because we couldn't be there in person (again, the margin is reduced, but these aren't sales we would have otherwise made).

Our expenses stem from: art, layout, printing costs, postage (preorder), sending out review copies, convention costs, paypal fees, IPR fees, and web site hosting costs. We haven't recovered all of these expenses, so we're still in the red. Even not counting current stock as expense (as we'll have to for tax purposes), we're below making a profit.

Our goal for the next 6 months is to sell the 110 hardcopies that are still in stock between IPR's warehouse and our place. That will put us in the black and provide money for a new print run, so that we wouldn't have to go back into the red anymore. We're looking into how to expand the exposure of the game right now. There was a good amount of talk about it at the beginning, in no small parts thanks to marketing genius Fred, but things have calmed down considerably in the past three months. Also, I think retailers are probably satiated now, as are early adopters/the indie gaming core group of people that are most likely to know about all of the indie games out there. It's difficult to find ways to expand the exposure, given that our discretionary time in our everyday lives is very limited.

If you have any questions, let me know, and I'll see if I have an answer

[lighthouse]

Would you recommend to stick to PDF only as the initial cost would be smaller?

[xenopulse]

It would mean you'd have no printing expenses, sure, which made up 60% of our expenses so far. But you can do PDF plus list it on Lulu for print-on-demand, so that people still can get hardcopies if they want them. That was our initial plan, but then we needed copies here for Gamestorm (which we didn't get in time) and signed up with IPR. We then simply had Lulu do the print runs, which made it easy but was also costlier than finding a different printer.

(Note, learned the hard way: if you want Lulu to be able to print this for Europeans, make sure you submit a PDF 1.3 format file, not anything newer with transparencies or somesuch.)

Having a preorder, if you can get enough people interested in the game before it's released, can actually finance the first print run if you do it right.

[Christoph Boeckle]

Thanks for sharing Christian!

Have you considered translating your game in German so as to open to a wider market? If yes, care to share your reflections on the topic?

[xenopulse]

Hi Christoph,

Yes, I've considered translating it into German. I'm not sure how big the market is over there. It will take some time to translate 25,000 words, but it's basically free of any costs. Except that I either need to pay someone to input it into the layout that Fred made, or I have to figure out how to do that on my own (i.e., buy Adobe Creative Suite as an investment).

Right now, I'm thinking that it might be a neat idea to do it by the game's first anniversary, which is in March. But I can't promise anything

How's the German indie market going, do you know? BARBAREN is the only German-language indie game I'm aware of.

[oliof]

Christian,

that is a tough question. The german language market is arguably much smaller than the english language market. Ironically, there are a lot of small, almost balkanized groups of small press and indie game authors and publishers...

Besides Barbaren, there are Western City (target publication date: April), Randpatrouille (similar to Galactic!, but evolved indepently, winner of last year's  grofafo 72hour challenge; unfortunately no publication date), EPOS (that game was quite in flux when I last looked), and a few others I forgot. This is the list of games that I'd consider rooted in the online rpg cloud/indie effort one way or the other.

On the other hand there is Projekt Odysse, which bore fruit to games such as Thyria Steampunk (based on the Liquid game system), PROST, and others and also has some games on the horizon such as "Chroniken von Baal", "Himmelsstürmer"... the projekt odyssee web site lists over 50 systems, but I don't know them better than from a passing glance.

A third basin of game designers is FERA (Forum engagierter Rollenspiel-Autoren), of which I know next-to-nothing.

I have no idea of the swiss and austrian markets, with the exception of Mondagor, which seems to be an artbook/coffee table game from what I saw.

This overview is incomplete, and possibly incorrect in some details (i.e., there is some overlap between the three groups I mentioned, and there may be other groups as well that I am not aware of).

[xenopulse]

Thanks, Harald.

I looked at PrO a while back. Most of their stuff, while free, looks very traditional. Not that that's bad, but it's neither competition nor establishing a wider audience for less traditional games. I did see Randpatrouille at some point; have to look into that one again.

I'll check out the other groups sometime soon.

I figure that, if I make a German version available on Lulu (now that I know how to get their European printer to work), it can sell a couple of copies here and there, and that'd be fine. I wouldn't invest in an independent print run (and there's no German indie distributor I know of).

In any case, due to my rusting German, I'm going to need a German editor at some point

[oliof]

Ha! I forgot one important thing: StoryDSA, a story game engine for the most successful rpg line in germany.

[Christoph Boeckle]

Contrary to what my name suggests, I actually speak French better than German (which is at a similar level to my English, with a Swiss German accent).
Since Switzerland has three (actually four) national languages, each language-community turns to their bigger brother concerning RPG products (whether native or translated), namely: Germany, France (to some extent Quebec-Canada) and Italy.
As far as I know (and google supporting), the French-speaking part is the most active role-playing-wise even though it's only about 20% of the Swiss population (German is at about 65% of a 7 million population), with a number of conventions, a small publisher (French version of Nobilis in particular) and quite a few clubs. Nevertheless, lots of German-speaking acquaintances have heard of Das Schwarze Auge.
So at least on that front, there probably wouldn't be a lot of potential customers.

[Jake Richmond]

Thanks for posting numbers. I'm seeing very similar numbers from Classroom Deathmatch, which launched around the same time. I'll be interested in seeing how BH does after another six months.It seems like a game that will continue to find it's audience year after year.

Jake

[iago]

Your PDF numbers -- 32 vs 132, practically, electronic vs print -- are interesting, but not too shocking as a ratio given your sales venues.  I might suggest you give OneBookShelf a try, if you can be OK with the 35% cut they'll take for you being a non-exclusive PDF supplier.  It's definitely improved my PDF sales for SOTC and DRYH (though it has essentially reduced or eliminated PDF sales in most other venues I had going -- but the increase in volume has made it worth it).  I think -- but am not certain -- that it might help build some critical mass on folks talking about your game, which is what will build its longevity.

More radical thoughts might be to release the text (sans layout or simply the PDF itself) as a free document so folks can read the game entirely without buying it.  This might sound nuts, and ultimately isn't something I'd suggest doing until you can keep BH easily in the black, but if your primary goal is getting the game exposure, free is a hell of a way to make that happen.

That said, I say give OBS a crack first, if you're willing to expand in that way.