Average sales

[Grand_Commander13]

Hey...  This is my first post here everybody (*smile* *peace sign*).

Anyway, like everybody here, I'm looking to hawk my indie RPG at GenCon (Indy 2k5), but it'd be great if everybody could help me figure out about how much I can expect to sell, so I know around how much merchandise to bring.

According to my estimates from the stats for So Cal 2k3, about 50% of GenConners are "likely candidates" for purchasing my RPG ("likely candidate" means they play roleplaying games and spend $31+ in the exhibitor's hall).

The product will be a spiral-bound book that will be 1/4 - 1/2 an inch thick, if that helps.  Pricing can be anywhere between $10 and $15, depending on what is standard (never having been to GenCon, I have no clue).  It'd be rather painful to dip below $10.

Does anybody need more information, or have I given enough?  How many copies should I expect to sell, and how can I maximize that number?  It would be very helpful for me to know how much I can expect to sell.

[Luke]

Hi GrandCommander,

Con sales are a wildly variable thing. They depend on your product, of course, but also on the crowd, your pitch, your display and your location. There ain't a fixed number.

but let's see... based on being a member of the Forge booth for two years in a row, I predict your completely unknown, cool as hell, indie rpg will sell between 10 and 30 copies in four days of GenCon. That's four days of busting your ass pushing and selling.

But that estimate isn't all that helpful in the real world. I strongly urge you to get out to your local cons immediately and spend the next 10 months practicing. See for yourself how well your game sells.

-L

[Valamir]

Those numbers jive with my own experience at Gen Con.  If your product is the "sleeper hit" of the Con...of the sort that guys like Jonathan Tweet or Ken Hite will be raving about in their journals you can expect 50-80 sales.  Generally to accomplish that you need to have generated at least a moderate amount of buzz in advance and have a really strong, easy to explain to a customer in 5 words or less hook.  

My Life with Master: Roleplaying B-grade Horror Movies.  or Horror Movies as a Proxy for Dysfunctional Relationships.

Dogs in the Vineyard:  Morman Paladins in the Old West.

[GB Steve]

And there's going to be some advice from Robin Laws about running a convention stand in next month's Page XX (http://www.dyingearth.com/pagexxintro.htm).

I definitely recommend a campaign of Gorilla marketing to drum up sales. There's nothing better than men (or women) in monkey suits to boost interest. Failing that, as Valamir suggests, go for guerilla marketing and try to increase the buzz before the Con. Post announcements on various boards, get your playtesters to ask carefully worded questions, start fake flamewars (but not here!), get reviews on the big boards etc.

So what's the game, and where's your website?

[jerry]

And there's going to be some advice from Robin Laws about running a convention stand in next month's Page XX (http://www.dyingearth.com/pagexxintro.htm).

I definitely recommend a campaign of Gorilla marketing to drum up sales. There's nothing better than men (or women) in monkey suits to boost interest.

Advertiser David Ogilvy (of Ogilvy and Mather) used to say the same thing. And I hear Scott Shaw buys anything with a gorilla on the cover, so you're in good company!

Guess I'm going to have to go find a gorilla model for Persistence of Vision.

Jerry

[Grand_Commander13]

The game is in that nebulous state of "Content-completion: 100%; Type-up completion: 50%; Art-completion: 0%."  Website may be going up as early as in a week, OR it may wait until I get Adobe CS.

Anyway, assuming the manual won't be that thick (as I said, 1/4 to 1/2 of an inch), how much should I charge?  I'm doing the whole "put pretty pictures inside the book" thing, so it's not going to be text as far as the eye can see.  I'm also going to have a very pretty cover.  Would I have a decent chance at selling for $15, or would $10 be the way to go?  Heck, how much do normal new games go for?

Also, my friend/co-creator ponders how anyone can hope to not go horribly into debt at Gen Con with the prices involved for people who need hotels (or who aren't getting a discount on their booth), unless they're already an established product who doesn't need to go to Gen Con to promote sales.

[Luke]

Gencon is a promotional expense. Expect to take a loss. Also expect to have a fun time and meet cool people.

As far as pricing your game, who knows? But I suggest you base your pricing on the cost per unit. For an unknown game, I'd suggest keeping it as low as you can.

If it costs $5 at Kinkos to produce 30 of them and you spent $300 in art -- $450 total --  $15 is your minimum retail price. Of course, that just covers art and production, but you could do worse.

Yadda, yadda, yadda.
-L

[jdagna]

Also, my friend/co-creator ponders how anyone can hope to not go horribly into debt at Gen Con with the prices involved for people who need hotels (or who aren't getting a discount on their booth), unless they're already an established product who doesn't need to go to Gen Con to promote sales.

If you look at all the expenses involved, I don't think any publisher really makes a net profit off of GenCon.  Heck, WotC paid $40,000 for their sponsorship/booth alone, and their total expenditure probably tops $100,000 by the time you include prizes, travel, lodging, wages, displays and freight.

You go to GenCon to be seen.  It's a marketing expense, just like Luke says.

For example, a distributor from Germany stopped by my booth this year.  He told me that his rule for picking up new small press companies is that he has to see them at GenCon two years in a row and have a decent opinion of their products.  

Players want to see you too... there were at least five people who told me they'd bought my game last year, shelved it and just remembered how much they liked it after seeing our booth.  They bought our new stuff and swore that they were going to get serious about playing it. (Maybe they will, maybe they won't, but it got said without any prompting from me too often to ignore and GenCon isn't the only placeI hear that).

Anyway, Luke's numbers for sales are pretty accurate.  I alsways bring 50 of my core books just in case it's a banner year, but sales have been in the 20-30 range (though they are increasing slightly each year).

[Grand_Commander13]

Well, that's all heartening stuff at least.  :)

Anyway, our RPG has been in development for nearly four years, though it started out as something that there was no intention of ever publishing.  Still, we're confident in its ability to sell, as everyone who has ever played it has enjoyed it.

Anyway, the recommendation will be to sell it as low as we can reasonably go?

Now, moving on: The game is a totally mixed-genre thing (the canon world setting is mostly modern, but magic and dragons are everyday things occurrences, and you got sci-fi stuff going on too).  If I had to make a five-word summary without my friend's approval, it would be "Fast-paced multi-genre combat."  I mean, this is the kind of RP system where a dude with a claymore in each hand could walk around, and every round of combat (three seconds game-world time), ice one or two dudes dual-wielding SMGs, and it wouldn't seem that weird.  It's tons of fun.

BUT, I'll save my pitch for later.  How would I want to do my booth for maximum sales/attention grabbing (with the game's style in mind)?  The Exhibitor Packet says our table is only eight-feet long.  I assume that means people wouldn't need to hop the table to get into our booth space?  If so, we were hoping to run some demos inside our booth.  That's always good, correct?  Anyway, what should we plan on doing to our booth to make people feel as if they should stop and give us their money?

[Valamir]

Anyway, the recommendation will be to sell it as low as we can reasonably go?

No, I think the important take-away for price is to be very certain that your absolute minimum price will recover your costs.

My rule of thumb for prices is this:

1) start with you all in cost per unit.  That's print cost plus what you've paid for artists, layout, editing, etc.  Don't include this second part if you're just doing a quicky 100 copy kinkos special, but if you're actually printing an inventory definitely do.

2) Double this number.  This ensures you'll break even after selling 1/2 of your copies.  If you manage to sell them all you'll be able to pay for a second run entirely out of profits.

3) Divide this number by 0.4.   This accounts for the normal distributor discount and ensures you'll hit your break even point even after you give the normal discount.  Even if you don't intend to go through distribution include this anyway.  Its already built into your competitors pricing, might as well take advantage of it.  If you do go all direct, you'll hit your breakeven that much sooner.

ex.  if your game cost $3 all-in your price point by the above = ((3$*2)/.4) or $15.

That's just a starting point.  Manipulate it from there.  You can cheat a little bit to the down side if you want (and if you absolutely aren't selling through distribution), but I'd only do this if your production quality or art is low quality.  Avoid under pricing your game.  If you aren't confident enough in your games quality to command the higher price than, you probably aren't confident enough in your game.  I generally recommend going higher.  

If you wind up with a starting price far above what you think people would be willing to spend than you're probably either a) spending way more on art et.al. than you're game warrants,  b) printing far too few copies to hit a more cost effective break point,  c) have far too much "stuff" in your game and you need to cut it down to get the page count lower, or d) buying too many premium components (too much color, too high a paper weight, etc.).

BTW:  If your game is coming in around 1/4 inch or so, talk to your printer about Tape binding instead of Coil.  Its kind of a poor man's Perfect Bound which I think looks much better than Coil.  Its also much less manual labor intensive and is usually notably less expensive.

How would I want to do my booth for maximum sales/attention grabbing (with the game's style in mind)?  The Exhibitor Packet says our table is only eight-feet long.  I assume that means people wouldn't need to hop the table to get into our booth space?  If so, we were hoping to run some demos inside our booth.  That's always good, correct?  Anyway, what should we plan on doing to our booth to make people feel as if they should stop and give us their money?

Do a search on Gen Con in this Conventions forum (or just scroll down a few pages).  There are lots of threads from our own Gen Con prep, to our post con discussion, to ideas for what to do next year.  I think you'll find most of your answers in those threads.

[Grand_Commander13]

Ought I start a new thread in the publishing forum for discussing my book itself?  Right now, I was going to go for Lulu.com, where perfect/spiral bound makes no price difference.  I like the spiral bound because you can lay it flat on the ground, but I could go for perfect if it really looks that much better.

According to Lulu, assuming we had a 120 page book and ordered 300 of them, it'd cost us $4.30 + shipping to get the book.  Using your formula, that'd put it at $21.50, regardless of which binding style we used.  That gives us a handy profit (versus $1.70 if we priced it at $15 and sold to distributors), but I'm in doubt as to whether or not people would pay attention to an upstart RPG if cost so much.

Would Kinkos be cheaper per unit?  Where do you even find their prices?  They aren't anywhere on their website.

Also, note that cutting the page count to 90 (the easiest thing we could do to chop page count would drop thirty pages) would still make the game cost a bit more than ninteen dollars using the handy-dandy formula.

[Keith Senkowski]

Hey,

I can say from personal experience, Lulu's perfect bound is great.  I have  products from Lulu of both types and if I had the choice I would take perfect over spiral bound every time.

As for pricing from Lulu.com, I know that they have a price break for bulk orders (100+).  Request a quote from them for 300 copies.  I ordered 100 copies of my game and got a nice price break from them.  My game is 120 pages, priced at 19.99 and when I sell 110 total books at that price (not counting retailer discount) I cover my costs (artist & editor), however I also did most of the art and all the layout myself...

Keith

[Valamir]

I personally would only do spiral if you're intentionally going for that indie-punk look.  And definitely DON'T do spiral for distributor sales.  Rightly or wrongly spiral bound says "low budget" and "low budget" gets interpreted as "low quality".  You really need to generate a good buzz about the game long before gencon to get away with spiral bound sales (like Dust Devils as a good example).

If you do do spiral you could probably get away with $15 since you won't have any discount sales really.  Perfect bound at 120 pages I don't think $20 would raise eyebrows from most reasonable customers (there's always the punks that want it for peanuts).  

Dogs in the Vineyard is about 100 pages digest size and it sells handily at $20.

But again that's just a starting point based on cost recovery.  Content is what really determines whether $20 is a bargain or a rip-off.  Dogs in the Vineyard is a freaking awesome product.  If your game is a freaking awesome product $20 shouldn't be a problem for you either.

[Matt Gwinn]

According to Lulu, assuming we had a 120 page book and ordered 300 of them, it'd cost us $4.30 + shipping to get the book. Using your formula, that'd put it at $21.50, regardless of which binding style we used. That gives us a handy profit (versus $1.70 if we priced it at $15 and sold to distributors), but I'm in doubt as to whether or not people would pay attention to an upstart RPG if cost so much.

I'd say about half of the games at the booth this year cost between $15 and $20, so you're not far off.  I'd round it down to $20 just to make it easier to make change.

I sold the 80 page version of Kayfabe for $15 last year and the 36 page version for $8 the year before and received no price complants other than the few people that said I wasn't charging enough.

The big thing is to charge what you think your game is worth.

By the way, are you intending on getting your own booth or selling at the Forge booth?

,Matt

[jdagna]

I think it's important to remember that gamers don't really buy games based on price.  In fact, I'd almost go so far as saying that I think a given game will sell as many copies at $10 each as it will at $20 each.  You can also ask anyone who has a free RPG just how many downloads they get - and we all know that many of those downloaders don't even read the thing.  At GenCon, I gave away a little over 200 copies of my quick start guide - an awful lot of people don't want it even if its free.

Ultimately, people are either interested in your game or they're not.  The vast majority of people (about 99% given the number of quick starts I gave out) aren't interested, at any price.  Of the 1% remaining, the majority will pay essentially any price as long as the price/value ratio seems about right.   In my experience, I'd say less than a quarter of the interested people are actually price-sensitive  (at last year's GenCon, I thought I might help sales by offering people discounts if they seemed interested but didn't buy... even reducing a $30 book to $20 only got one extra sale, which suggests it's much less than a quarter of them).

That's why it's so important to hook people's attention quickly.

So, I'd base your selling price based on your cost to print the things (keeping on eye on what competitive products are going for).  Valamir's pricing equation is right on - mark it up 5x if you intend to go into distribution and at least 2x if you sell directly.