Half Meme Press financial chart leaked to the web

[Paul Czege]

Last time I did this, the CFO docked me a week's pay. But I just can't help myself. I was starved for exactly this kind of information back prior to publishing My Life with Master.

The chart and some stats are at http://www.halfmeme.com/">www.halfmeme.com. I'll even answer questions.

Paul

[Matt Wilson]

Hey Paul. Thanks for sharing that. You can tell your CFO you made one person happy.

It doesn't look lilke you've seen much of a drop in sales over the last two years, which is really good to know. Is that consistent with anyone else's sales? Anyone? Bueller?

When I hit the six-month marker for website sales, I'll put up some data of my own.

[Christopher Weeks]

Cool.  OK, questions: How many have you printed in what size run(s)?  What do they cost you?  Are you doing anything active to market?  Are you just fulfilling orders yourself?  Do you know how your retail placements have sold?  What's your arrangement for remuneration for the Finish sales?

[Paul Czege]

Hey Matt,

It doesn't look lilke you've seen much of a drop in sales over the last two years, which is really good to know.

Check out all the yellow at the right side of the chart. Those are sales to retailers. Yes, unit sales are consistent, but revenues are declining. Sales to retailers are http://www.halfmeme.com/retailer-orders.html">at a discount.

Paul

[Paul Czege]

Hey Christopher,

I've done several print runs. The first was 100 copies prior to GenCon 2003. The largest was 125 copies, just prior to this past GenCon. The smallest was 40 copies last November. Tax-wise, it makes sense to not have a bunch of inventory laying around at year end.

Active marketing consists of GenCon (by far the biggest expense), and engaging with gamers via The Forge, and to a lesser extent, via RPG.net. (I also gave out a few review copies. But I've pretty much decided to quit with that. My experience is that recipients of review copies have a far far lower incidence of actually writing reviews than customers who bought the game for themselves.)

My fiancé and I share responsibility for order fulfillment.

I've sold copies to three different brick and mortar retailers. The first, early last year, bought six copies and blew through them in a week. Probably some of them were sales (at a discount) to store staff who wanted to own the game. The other two were later last year. Each of them blew through about sixteen copies in a two month timespan.

Sales of Kätyrin osa are not reflected in the chart. The deal was that Arkenstone paid a flat fee up front to translate and publish 200 copies of the game. With the size of the Finnish RPG market, Eero expects that quantity to last him several more years.

Paul

[Matt Wilson]

Check out all the yellow at the right side of the chart.

All I'm looking at is the green bar, since I'm not yet selling pdfs, and I'm not planning on selling to retailers anytime soon, if ever.

That green bar doesn't look like it's fluctuated much (Gencon excluded), and I have heard that most big-press games bottom out after about 90 days.

That was all I meant.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Matt,

Here's the unit sales data underlying the green (so, print copies not including sales to retailers):

Code Select Expand

2003
July           79
August         22
September      27
October        17
November       10
December        8

2004
January        14
February        9
March          10
April          11
May             6
June           11
July           11
August         89
September      10
October         8
November       13
December        5

2005
January         5
February        5
Paul

[Valamir]

Those numbers are pretty consistant with Uni sales.  I never had the huge GenCop number or Diana Jones bump but the regular monthly print sales are comparable to what I've been getting.  Including a marked slowing since 12/04.

I'd have to check my overall numbers but I think my total sales are right around 700-750 but Uni's been out a year longer.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Ralph,

Those numbers are pretty consistant with Uni sales.

That's interesting data. With you not selling Uni as a pdf, it suggests either that My Life with Master could potentially not sell fewer units if it were print only, or that Uni could blow MLwM away with 50% greater unit sales if you had a pdf version.

Paul

[Valamir]

I'm working on a revised version for my next printing.  I'm toying with offering it PDF as well.  So hopefully the latter is true ;-)