Joint booth with Projekt Odyssee at Spiel in Essen/Germany?

[Eero Tuovinen]

1.
All authors who wish to sponsor the booth and have their games represented there send a confirmation email to me at frank@tarcikowski.de, which I will forward to Stefan. This email should include their your name, address, the name of your press, the games you wish represented and whether you are interested in us selling the game, demoing the game, or both. We will only accept to sell and/or demo a game if we can provide qualified booth monkeys to do that.

Frank: PM me next week with the info on who has confirmed; I'll help make a last minute round at that point, if there's anybody who has indicated interest but hasn't contacted you.

4.1
The Shared Costs are distributed in equal Shares among the participants. You take a Share when (a) your game is demoed at the booth or (b) your game is sold at the booth. So a free game being demoed is one Share, a game just being sold is one Share, a game being sold and demoed is two Shares. These count per game, so if you have two games being sold and demoed, that's four Shares total. The more games and authors, the more Shares, the lower the cost per Share.

To clarify: I suggest that "game" here more properly means "game line". That is, if your game has supplements, those ride free alongside the main product. This is so as to not discourage games that depend on supplements, and to be realistic about it: a game with four supplements is just as easy or hard to both demonstrate and sell, so there's no realistic reason for having the author pay five times the money for it. In practice any sales and demo effort is directed at selling the main product anyway.

4.2
Nexus e.V. volunteers to take a fixed number of Shares or a fixed amount of the Shared Costs (Stefan?). Same goes for Adept Press (Ron?).

I'm not 100% comfortable with Ron taking any extra costs, at least if he's coming in with several games. Of course if he wants to, but I haven't been notified about it. I can understand Nexus doing it, as they're a local voluntary association committed to making this kind of thing happen, but there's little moral imperative for Ron to commit to that degree.

4.4
Collecting the money from the authors has to be organized in time. Since international bank transfer costs are pretty high and those would have to be borne by the author, we should try to figure out the cheapest way. Stefan will convey the deadline for payment shortly. In case of need, I am generally willing to step in and advance the money, but since I'm having some other major expenses this summer, I'm not sure if I can advance it all.

I can advance a significant amount, too. I'm sure we can split the Forge share between Frank and me, for instance. So we can probably figure out a cheap way of moving the money from US in our own good time. Heck, I could take a major part of the money in books if it came to that, to lessen the amount of bank transfers. We can even discuss making the actual payments after the convention itself, so there's no unnecessary money movement, but we'll have to see if we have enough money to invest for months. The most extreme method would be to arrange a pool in US, to be moved to Nexus in one go. I guess that'd be cheapest compared to lots of small transfers.

5.2
We will provide you with accounts of the books sold and the books remaining, and transfer the money we made on the sales to the author. Again, the cheapest way to transfer the money remains to be figured out. I will be in charge of the accounting. The author can decide to donate a certain amount per book to a Booth Monkey Pool that is used to buy drinks and stuff for the booth monkeys. I will also be in charge of the Booth Monkey Pool. Furthermore, you might think about a discount for booth monkeys to buy your games.

Referring to above, the cheapest way would be to wait until after the convention to see who's getting how much money. That way there'd be only one EU<>US money transfer routine, instead of two. That would make for more complicated bookkeeping, though, and somebody on this side would have to advance the full amount and wait until after the convention to recoup. Not impossible for me, but peculiar.

So far. What say you?

Looks pretty tight, I like it. Right munificent of you to take the risk of damaging merchandise. Depending on where the merchandice goes in practice, we could probably share the risks a bit more evenly.

[Frank T]

Just a quick two:

Sure, the Monster Burner or Sex and Sorcery don't count as a game of their own.

I think the cheapest way for international money transfer is PayPal. Someone in Germany would need a PayPal account, but I was thinking about opening one anyway for Barbaren, so maybe I'll just open it a little early. Gotta check on that. But I think this doesn't have to be figured out right now.

More later.

- Frank

[Michael S. Miller]

Just finishing up an American-style overtime-filled month and catching up on my Forge stuff. Incarnadine Press is in, up to 100 Euros. I'll rely on Brennan for shipping.

[Yvie]

Hi!

I already talked with the responsible Persons from Nexus eV about the money. They are willing to provide some. 500 Euros should be no problem, but if this is less it would be great. For me it sounds resonable, that Nexus pays at least the money for the furniture needed and keeps this afterwards for further booths. For the exact numbers we should discuss further If we know exaxtly how much money we need...

Kind regards
Yvonne

[Paul Czege]

Half Meme Press is in for up to 100 euros. Would love to have both My Life with Master and Bacchanal for sale, since Eero can demo both games, but if that's 200 euros (four shares?), then it's just My Life with Master.

Paul

[Frank T]

Paul: Sad to do without Bacchanal, but we have to be fair. Maybe you can throw in a few copies on booth monkey orders (I want one). Also, I want to play it. After hours?

All: Okay, here's some more substance. I talked to Jörg (my sales expert) on Skype yesterday and to Stefan (in charge at PrO) today in person. First thing first: We have enough participants right now to finance the booth. As soon as I have the confirmation emails by all of you to frank@tarcikowski.de, we get going. This should be ASAP, but at the latest by Thursday next week, since we don't want to have our booth in the last corner of the hall.

Now, here's some important info and also some homework:

Costs and payment

Booth rent is roughly 1400 Euros. We don't figure we need electricity, but we will need some throwaway equipment like carpet,  table cloth etc. Make that another 100 Euros. The sales area will be equipped with a desk provided by PrO plus some shelves and one standing table that we hope to borrow. The demo area will need three tables and 12-15 stools, and they need to be exactly the right size to squeeze them in there. We will probably have to buy those, and PrO will keep them for next year. We estimate another 200 Euros for that. We have cars enough available to get everything to the fair without additional cost. This is just a rough calculation, but I think it figures.

On top is the fair entrance for booth monkeys. As stated, there are 6 tickets included, and the others come at a special price. However, we'll have to order these with the booths. Our suggestion would be to buy another 20 tickets so we can get in plenty booth monkeys to keep the booth running smoothly at all times. We will certainly get rid of those tickets if we don't need them all. Stefan will tell us shortly how much those tickets will cost. We estimate about 15 Euros, which would make another 300 Euros to a total of 2000.

With the authors we have on board right now, and Nexus taking on 8 Shares also, we already have almost 40 Shares together. Stefan thinks he can get NordCon in for another Share if we promote the event at out booth. We will set the Shares at 50 Euros for now (so 100 Euros if you want one game sold and demoed). Nexus will bear the risk of this not quite sufficing. If, on the other hand, we get a few more Shares, we'll have that as a buffer to buy better booth equipment or cover up unexpected expenses. If we get significantly more Shares because more authors jump on the moving train (which I actually expect), we will lower the Shares. However, we do think that 20 Forge games sold at the booth are about the maximum we can handle properly.

Time limits for payment are: First half of the booth rent within two weeks after receiving the invoice (somewhere around the end of June). Second half on September 1. That's roughly 700 Euros each. We don't know yet when the extra tickets for booth monkeys are due. We will also need the money for booth equipment and so forth by September 1.

I will be on vacation the second half of June, but I think we can arrange for advancing the first half of the payment. However, we still need to find a way to get the money to Germany. I hear some of you guys will be around Berlin in July. Maybe that figures?

Booth and sales

At the sales booth, we will create an open area for customers to enter, where the products sit on shelves and there is the standing table, but we will also have the desk behind which to keep stock, cash boxes, accounts and stuff. We will do our best to sell your games, but ask you to consider the following:

- The fair is pretty international, but still, most of the customers are Germans and speak German. I guess we can put our English-speaking monkeys to good use anyway, but having products in English language only will be a handicap.

- German customers don't like aggressive selling techniques. At all. Plus, the PrO booth has built a reputation of being a place where you can just have a chat or a game without constantly being bothered by people who want you to buy something. We will have to find a way to (a) sell as many copies as we can and (b) still keep up the good spirit and make the booth a place where people like to come. You'll have to trust us to find a "German solution" here.

- We will keep different cash boxes and accounts for PrO and Forge parts. Some of the PrO authors coming to the fair have no idea of Forge games and are not (yet) bought into this whole idea of actually selling stuff. So I will provide a sufficient crew of Forge booth monkeys that can demo and sell Forge games, and the PrO authors will help as best they can. This will be a joint booth, but still, we will have a clearly distinguished Forge crew and PrO crew, with demo times split roughly according to the share in Shared Costs.

- Stefan guesses that sales of 10-20 copies per game might be possible, but this will vary widely and he may be dead wrong. Personally, I have no idea how many copies we can sell. We can ring the bell on the internet, and there will be people coming to the booth with a shopping list, but that'll probably not sell more than 5 copies or so per game. Well, maybe you have some better ideas on this than us. I'll talk to the people of Sighpress within the next days about selling to retailers.

- Regarding what happens to left-over stock: Stefan figures that PrO cannot take very many "on tour". They might sell a handfull at Stuttgart, if at all. Eero, how many copies can you take to Finland, in total?

Sales arguments

Not all of the booth monkeys know all of your games. Apart from running demos with the booth monkeys, we want to prepare some short info material on every game present at the booth. This info material will be in German. We will also put it in a folder for people to flip through. There is already a "PrO folder" of PrO games which is always very popular. For this, we need your help. Please email me some short bullet points to answer the following questions:

- What is your game about?
- Who is your target audience?
- What is special/unique about your game?
- What might people not like about your game?

Also, we had the idea that people enter their email addresses into some sort of mailing list which we forward you, and you send them some additional stuff via email, like links or PDFs or I dunno. Got any ideas on that?

Demos

We like the idea of 15 minutes demos and are willing to do it. You need to provide us with material for this, and some instructions would be nice also. This concept is entirely new to German role-players, and many will certainly be attracted. But we think that we should not rely solely on 15 minutes demos.

PrO has made some very good experiences at Spiel and other fairs with running 1 or 2 hour slots. There are a whole lot of people at the fair that are really hot to play. The big presses offer only very few rounds to play in, so PrO has been an address people turned to. These people are queueing to sign in for a two hour game, so these have a potential of really drawing people. My suggestion would be to reserve one or two tables for those longer slots and the rest for 15 minutes demos, depending on how much interest people show in the 15 minutes demos as opposed to, say, a 2 hour game. If need be, we can always use the standing table in the sales area for an additional quick demo. No need to sit down if you only play 15 minutes.

Decorating the booth

We have two booths to decorate. Each has 9 metres of ugly white plastic to cover. It's gotta look like something. We need tons of posters, flags and stuff. Maybe you can send us your GenCon decoration along with the books. Or some Germans attending GenCon can take the stuff right back with them. Anyone got any thoughts on this? If need be, we could also print some posters here in Germany. You'd have to send us some files then. PrO has one big flag, but we need more. If we get more authors on board, we can buy more shiny stuff to make our booth look good.
______

That's it for the moment. I will go to bed now.

Best,
Frank

[Paul Czege]

Hey Frank,

Stefan guesses that sales of 10-20 copies per game might be possible, but this will vary widely and he may be dead wrong.

Just to clarify, this is his estimate for an English-language game? Would his estimate be higher, lower, or the same for a German-language game?

Paul

[Yvie]

Hi!

If you need help to translate the "sales arguments" to german for a "Forge Folder" I could help. This would train me to get familliar with the games. It would be maybe helpful to give the translated version back to the authors for further use.

Kind regards
Yvonne

[Frank T]

Paul: This is the estimate for a game in English language. A game in German language might sell a little better, but probably still not in GenCon-like numbers. This is very hard to say beforehand, since we've never done anything like this. There might be games that sell 30 copies. There might be games that sell only 3. We just don't know. All we can say is that we'll try to demo and sell them all as best we can.

- Frank

[Eero Tuovinen]

- German customers don't like aggressive selling techniques. At all. Plus, the PrO booth has built a reputation of being a place where you can just have a chat or a game without constantly being bothered by people who want you to buy something. We will have to find a way to (a) sell as many copies as we can and (b) still keep up the good spirit and make the booth a place where people like to come. You'll have to trust us to find a "German solution" here.

I don't know this from my own experience, but from everything I've ever heard the "not liking aggressive selling" in Germany is exactly the same it is in Finland (the two cultures are socially very similar). This is significant, because I have ample experience with aggressive selling in Finland. Of course it's not probably very aggressive by American standards, but it can be done, and done efficiently. So I'm not very worried about getting both sales and good spirits to fit into the same booth.

- We will keep different cash boxes and accounts for PrO and Forge parts. Some of the PrO authors coming to the fair have no idea of Forge games and are not (yet) bought into this whole idea of actually selling stuff. So I will provide a sufficient crew of Forge booth monkeys that can demo and sell Forge games, and the PrO authors will help as best they can. This will be a joint booth, but still, we will have a clearly distinguished Forge crew and PrO crew, with demo times split roughly according to the share in Shared Costs.

How are you planning to split demo times? I mean, wouldn't it be more efficient to demo what the audience wants to play?

- Regarding what happens to left-over stock: Stefan figures that PrO cannot take very many "on tour". They might sell a handfull at Stuttgart, if at all. Eero, how many copies can you take to Finland, in total?

See this thread. What I can take:
- To retail in Finland: I can take up to 12 copies of anything we've ran out of or haven't got yet and think will sell well. Up to 6 copies of almost anything else, as long as it's not unadulterated crap. Any authors should simply contact me, and I'll tell you how much of your stuff we still have left, and how much more we can accordingly take.
- To warehouse: I can take roughly a cubic meter of material in total, but some of that has to be mailed from Germany to Finland, I suppose. And we need to make a deal on what I'm doing with the stuff later on, along the lines of that other thread I linked to.

Also, we had the idea that people enter their email addresses into some sort of mailing list which we forward you, and you send them some additional stuff via email, like links or PDFs or I dunno. Got any ideas on that?

We do this in Finland. It works pretty well there, but I don't know if it has legs internationally. A generic indie customers info mailing list is certainly an interesting idea.

We like the idea of 15 minutes demos and are willing to do it. You need to provide us with material for this, and some instructions would be nice also. This concept is entirely new to German role-players, and many will certainly be attracted. But we think that we should not rely solely on 15 minutes demos.

Materials and instructions will be forthcoming. I'll make sure that we have prepared demos for all the Forge games before Essen, if the authors themselves don't.

PrO has made some very good experiences at Spiel and other fairs with running 1 or 2 hour slots. There are a whole lot of people at the fair that are really hot to play. The big presses offer only very few rounds to play in, so PrO has been an address people turned to. These people are queueing to sign in for a two hour game, so these have a potential of really drawing people. My suggestion would be to reserve one or two tables for those longer slots and the rest for 15 minutes demos, depending on how much interest people show in the 15 minutes demos as opposed to, say, a 2 hour game. If need be, we can always use the standing table in the sales area for an additional quick demo. No need to sit down if you only play 15 minutes.

Well, I disagree here. Of course longer games are popular, but at least in Finnish conventions they're also something that's arranged by voluntary GMs, who also usually get free tickets into the convention for their trouble. My point: I don't see why we should use commercial, rented space for entertainment purposes. Don't they have free playing space at Essen?

For the purposes of cultural work, commercial interest and simple publicity the short-form demo has traditional play slots beat by every conceivable gauge. You get the social contact, the tactile rewards of play and the sales opportunity once every fifteen minutes instead of once every two hours. You leave a number of people enthusiastic to actually play your game at home, instead of working yourself to satisfy them. You also don't lock people into one game for what's practically an eternity of efficient booth time. What's worse, you lock everybody else out of that booth space: it might be fine for you as the author of the game to spend two hours playing the game with a couple of people, but you have to think of the other twenty to thirty titles that could be demoed in the same space. It simply makes no sense. Doing long demos is seductive, because it's easy, fun and what the audience expects. But it's also confused about the goals of the booth: if the goal was to get to play your game with strangers, you surely don't have to go to Essen to do that!

I couch my disagreement in strong terms so nobody mistakes courtesy for tacit acceptance. Of course, in practice we'll just have to compromise so everybody gets to do their thing.

We have two booths to decorate. Each has 9 metres of ugly white plastic to cover. It's gotta look like something. We need tons of posters, flags and stuff. Maybe you can send us your GenCon decoration along with the books. Or some Germans attending GenCon can take the stuff right back with them. Anyone got any thoughts on this? If need be, we could also print some posters here in Germany. You'd have to send us some files then. PrO has one big flag, but we need more. If we get more authors on board, we can buy more shiny stuff to make our booth look good.

This is a fine thing to worry about, but by no means crucial. Here's an idea I've used with some success:
- Get a roll of paper wall-paper.
- Get some crayons.
- Get some artist/booth monkeys.
- First thing in the morning, set up the artists drawing, and decorate your booth on the fly.
It gives a nice indie wibe, and we get people interested about the process of spontaneous art as well. As an added bonus, we can change the decorations whenever by drawing some more. The most important bonus point, however, is that the costs are negligible, and the stuff packs really small.

Well, that's probably not to everybody's taste, and it depends on having good sketchers in the team. My overall advice is to not worry too much about decorations; stark non-decoration works pretty well, too, when you're all indie.

[Martin Higham]

There is very little free play space in Essen. Free play is reserved for the bars and hotels after hours.

In my long experience people go to Essen to play new games. Almost every stand selling games has space for playing a demo. Depending on the game this may be a full game or a 1 - 11/2hr introduction. Most niche sellers have demo session booking lists. Some of these fill up for the whole weekend on Thursday (or even before if publicised on the Net).

Given the nature of Forge style games I think people would look forward to  being able to play a game rather than just have a 15min example of play.

Martin

[Frank T]

Personally, I don't mind doing nothing but 15 minutes demos. We can discuss the advantages and drawbacks of both approaches further, taking into good consideration what Martin said. I think that the booth sponsors should have the final say in this, since they pay for the booth space after all.

Please note, though, that PrO is a non-commercial endeavor. So their angle on this is somewhat different, which we should respect. Maybe a split solution is the way to go. Or maybe not. What do other people think?

[TonyLB]

For my part, I'm not viewing this as an investment to be paid off at the show itself (though certainly I'm not one to turn down money!)  I suspect that slanting things somewhat more toward making the booth a fun and exciting place to be will help people to see the fun and exciting things about indie games.  That kind of thing has measurable impacts in after-con sales, and (I strongly suspect) in year-to-year growth.

So, by all means, let's not go all soft-headed about the importance of abstracts like "mind-share," but at the same time I think it's fine to say that the booth's priorities are to have fun first, to make sales second.  It's a legitimate model that I (at least) would be willing to put my share into in order to speculate on its long-term worth.

[Ron Edwards]

I agree with Tony, as indicated by my earlier post.

Best, Ron

[Ben Lehman]

I'd like to talk a little bit about fun value and culture value versus demo length.

It seems to me that in terms of the goals of fun and cultural exposure, the short demo form is uniformly better than the long-demo form.

Say that you run a "full session" of Capes, which I imagine would be a complete scene.  It takes you 2 hours.  You've shown 4 people the game, maybe, in that two hours, and had fun.  Consider if you had run a fifteen minute demo.  You could have shown 30 people the game, in the same two hours and had fun.  Better yet, those four people who were in your game could have been going and finding other games to play.  This is especially key if they end up not enjoying Capes very much: a two-hour demo is a significant time commitment at a con, a 15 minute demo isn't.  They could have moved along and tried 6 other games, and found something that they liked.

This is really key to me.  I think that a booth environment (by which I mean: try our stuff!) is quite simply the wrong environment for long games.  It doesn't facilitate trying things out, outreach, or low-commitment draw.

yrs--
--Ben