Plans for the new year

[MatrixGamer]

I've been gearing up for the new year for the last few weeks. At the beginning of November I decided what games I'd put out next year. I'm thinking of one a month. They will come out as PDFs and as paper products. So in the next month I'll be doing a lot of writing a layout work. I hope to have everything in the can ready to go at the push of a button.

I have 2 intermediate Matrix Games on deck, 4 beginner MGs, 1 tactical wargame MG and 2 non Matrix Game wargames. The rest of the 12 will be a RPG book and a couple of other MGs but I haven't finalized my plans there.

Production is ready to go. I'll be doing all the production in house. Games will be laminated folios, boxed board games with wooden counters and hard boards or hardback cloth bound books (digest size). I foresee using a lot of yes paste this year - no more spray adhesive (that stuff is toxic!) I will also be using screen printing to put varnish coats on for the first time. All in all I feel very confident about this. I'm in profit with the first book or boxed game I sell.

The real work of next year is going to be marketing. I have three plans. 1. Offering a stream of new titles on RPGnow. 2. Sending out samples to pod casters and reviewers. And 3. beginning to make direct sales calls to stores. I'll continue to be at cons (to run and sell) (The Seven Years War Association Con, Marcon, Origins, and Gen Con). I'll also be out on web forums as I can. I've started up the Matrix Gamer newsletter again (which will by on my yahoo group and at Mag Web. This will come out every two months or so and include articles on a wide range of subject (in the last issue I did an article on Pith Helmets). I'll also continue to run regular PBEM Matrix Games on the yahoo group.

The thing that will be real new this year is calling the stores. I've given up on distributors ever buying from me. They've seen my stuff for years and haven't ordered. Taking Guild of Blades lead I think I need to contact stores directly and build up a network of relationships. I believe that my games can help stores but offering something that is very different at a good price that is not main stream. They can order in small amounts so they face little risk. This till take a lot of research finding lists of stores and a lot of cold calling. I know there will be a lot of stores that won't be interested. I imagine them selling only collectible card games - which wouldn't fit with my line. I'll be looking for the innovative stores.

This project will help me improve my cold calling skills and my ability to build up and maintain a sales network. I sus pect it will be a lot of work but I feel up for it. It is taking marketing and sales into my own hands rather than waiting for someone else to save me from it. I do love "controlling the means of production."

I throw this out here to make public what I'm doing and to act as a forum for discussing what you are doing to take charge of your publishing lives.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[guildofblades]

>>Taking Guild of Blades lead I think I need to contact stores directly and build up a network of relationships.<<

Good luck with that. If you work hard at it you might get some traction, but after spending 3 years selling direct, the conclusion I have arrived at is that the vast, vast majority of stores are massively overloaded with product options. To the point that even if or when you sell your product to them and it does well initially, after a round or two of restocks, most will push your product aside to give something new coming down the pipe a chance. Its all about what's new these days. There are a handful of exceptions, of course, and they are golden to work with.

However, in principle, my experience in selling retailer direct is that in very few cases has the effort proven fruitful enough to generate a dedicated market presence in a given market. That in general, unless you are WOTC and Wizkids, etc, that "building those bridges" may earn you some sales in the short term, but not in the long term. But for any of us that have been marketing our products very long, we know that most any game in hobby gaming needs to retain a steady chain of availability to foster a growing community for that game. The breaks in availability go a long way towards killing any momentum you achieve at building communities at the local and regional levels.

To that end, we're going to continue to strive to locate and select those retailers we can partner with to build a dedicated presence for our products in a local community, but where those can not be found, we're going to embark upon the process of establishing that presence through our own stores. As you might guess, this will be an ongoing effort that is going to take years to develop well. But this year we'll be opening a new retail store as a test model. We'll continue to tweak that model until we find one that can be repeated into other markets.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com

[MatrixGamer]

I certainly am not expecting a lot of traction in going direct to stores. I can see a ton of pit falls.

- The only sell cards, or comics, or fill in the blank and my stuff doesn't fit.
- "We only deal directly with distributors."
- Send me some freebies, (but I'll never put in an order)
- "I've sold out" if I reorder I'll never be able to do that again!
- You sell what? I've never heard of you. Are you certain you're real?

There are more but I can't think of them off the top of my head at the moment.

I'm a little dismayed that you at Guild of Blades are dismayed with direct contacts. I'm following the model you've discussed. I will feel successful if I can get one store in twenty major markets in the US. I will be learning more sales call skills doing this so even if I don't sell I'm still improving myself. I'm a strong believer in self help.

I have a mental image that I'm using now. In the past game making and selling was like climbing the mountain. It felt hard and terrible exposed. If I slipped and fell it wan my fault. If someone didn't like my stuff it felt like being pushed - I could lose balance and fall. And when I did fall I would feel all broke up and dead. This is a suckie image - that predicts a suckie story. Unless the big hand of god swooped down and lifted me up to heaven I could not move forward. I like my new image.

Now I imagine being in a row boat on the ocean. Waves lift the boat up and down (like the mountain top and falling off it) but it is done effortlessly and blamelessly. In fact, the boat is the same whither it is up of down. Falls are relatively gentle and if you relax and even be fun. They are just the precursor to the next rise. The boat is not at the mercy of the sea though. By rowing I can move towards a distant goal despite the waves. The sea is full of fish to ear and a sail can catch rain water, so the boat is sustainable. When I think this my insides calm down and I feel hopeful. There are real dangers (smashed on rocks, capsized, can't over come currents) but the story shows what I can control and shows a course of action to follow. Going up the mountain fails as a useful image once you're on top. It also feels much more limited because it offers only one peak to climb towards - I like having a whole ocean of directions open to me.

I use this kind of mental coaching to keep myself focused and morale up. Without it I don't think I could do sales work like this.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[MatrixGamer]

Figuring out how to quickly figure stores out is a challenge.

I plan on going to the library and pulling store names from phone books. I will do an initial round of calls to find out store hours, what they sell and store manager's name.

If a store seems like a mono culture (we only sell cards, etc) I think they are a dead end. If they won't answer my questions (I'll ask in a nice friendly, non-threatening manner) then they are a dead end. If they won't give a contract name - manager - then they are a dead end.

I've decided I'm not going to send out freebies to new stores. That would eat me alive and I really believe not produce any sales. It just pads the stores income. I don't want to be doing mailing of marketing info until I have a way of doing follow up calls. Otherwise I'm pissing in the wind. The initial marketing materials and sales calls should produce some sales.

I expect I'll learn a lot more about the stores when I do follow up calls and on going sales. I have new stuff so that isn't a problem. Stores that have managers who like having non-mainstream stuff are the ones I expect to have the most traction with. They will be people who think there is safety in diversity. I'm not certain how wide spread that belief is in retail right now.

I'd love to hear how you judge stores.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[guildofblades]

>>I'm a little dismayed that you at Guild of Blades are dismayed with direct contacts. I'm following the model you've discussed. I will feel successful if I can get one store in twenty major markets in the US.<<

Hi Chris,

Well, that had been the model we had followed since late 2004 when we had removed ourselves from distribution. At the time we had thought the problem lie largely with just the distribution chain, but have since found them to be much deeper.

What you may find is that the effort to "get into" 20 stores covering 20 major markets is that that difficult. Its then keeping your stores in those markets and then trying to leapfrog into another 20. The flood of collectible products in specific and the flood of products in general means retailers are always looking to bump out shelf space being used by an older product in favor of the new. That same flood of products and a general inability of retailers to adequately track and measure the performance of most products they carry means that most are more likely to not restock older titles as they sell because they want to make room for the new so they can take advantage on the "small" bump in sales that tend to happen from the manufacturers pre release marketing hype.

Of course, that particular scattershot method of stocking and selling games doesn't do a lot for any manufacturer that isn't releasing several new titles a month, its doing even less for the general gaming consumers. Games are a social, community driven kind of thing. Good games take time to worm their way into a broader public consciousness and a new board game release a few months ago hasn't reached but a tiny fraction of its potential saturation level into a local market. But most retailers treat 99% of games released more than 3 to 6 months ago as dead weight. There are, of course, a handful of exceptions. What happens here is a negative downward spiral that is working against the game store. Store sells new game to game customer. Customer takes game home and _sometimes_ plays it with their dedicated game group. If its available. If its not scheduled to play one of the other player's existing favorites. If the player even is IN an active game group as opposed to looking for one. But a great many times, that game sits unplayed for a while, sometimes months at a stretch or longer. But eventually, it gets played and enjoyed. Then, many months after its release, word of how good it is begins to spread to game consumers behind that tiny core of customers that comprise the store's ubber active gamers. These late adapters go looking for this awesome new game they've heard about only to find the store has long forgotten it. After getting burned a few times this way and finding the store never has the games they want, those customers turn elsewhere to find that product, or they just give up looking.

That "elsewhere" is often the very same online discounters retailers like to blame for everything, and sometimes when the games aren't high enough profile to be sold at those sites, they buy direct from the manufacturer. Direct from the manufacturer web sales have been on a steady rise since the early 2000's. Part of that may be a mere expansion e-commerce in general, but I believe the bulk of that to be the complete failures of the retailer and distributor tiers to get behind any set of products. The business model of the average game retailer is such that it is designed to alienate the casual consumers, embrace and coddle a small niche group of elitist consumers, and feeds all other business directly into competitive venues.

Furthermore, as a manufacturer with over 80 titles, why would it be a good business model for me to direct traffic into a retail shop that once-upon-a-time ordered 15 of my game titles, rapidly sold down to a handful, re-ordered a small handful once or twice and then leveled out their stock levels and maybe five of the more popular titles? I should send a customer to a location where they can only buy 5 of our games, at maximum, and lose the opportunity to sell the other 75 we have available? That makes no fiscal sense whatsoever. That foundation, as a distribution infrastructure, is every bit as faulty as the distribution tier which we abandoned for its lack of ability to provide us the sort of stable platform that can be built upon. I am much better off directing consumers to our website where I know we have the opportunity to sell that customer the full range of the products we offer.

So...retail it is for us. Testing out a new store concept to see if it can be duplicated into other markets. Then we can begin to target major markets where we have no dedicated retailer and become that retailer ourselves.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com

[Ron Edwards]

Ryan's speaking strong truth in that post.

With the admirable exceptions he was careful to mention, and which I always try to mention as well, the retailer culture for gaming is completely shot through with incompetence, delusions, hypocrisy, and ignorance of their market. The high failure rate for stores, and the fact that many of the long-term stores exist through subsidy rather than business success, is no surprise.

Chris, your goals can still be met, I think, but rather than blanketing or penetrating as many stores as possible (even in the long term), I recommend finding and cultivating the exceptional stores and store-owners who really understand their customers, really understand the publishers, and really try to bring the two together.

Best, Ron

[MatrixGamer]

That's what I'll do.

This is interesting. I've always felt that distributions looked at game companies and said "Are you sure you're real?" Now I find that we have to do the exact same thing to the game stores. "Are you sure you're real?" If they are not running a real business then how much energy will they put into selling or supporting customers. I'll pay special attention to maturity level when doing my sales calls.

I fully expect to drop a lot of stores if they under perform. (Wow! That feels weird to say.)

Chris Engle
Hamster Press

[guildofblades]

>>Now I find that we have to do the exact same thing to the game stores. "Are you sure you're real?" If they are not running a real business then how much energy will they put into selling or supporting customers. I'll pay special attention to maturity level when doing my sales calls.<<

Hi Chris,

Well, maturity can be one thing, but also remember, sometimes when you call you might be talking with counter help or other persons who are not the owners or managers, or even a "manager" who is not the owner, and sometimes an owner who is rather clueless because the store is run and kept afloat by a manager who knows what they are doing.

I have found the most promising approach for ourselves, when trying to aggressively seek out potential retailers to sell to, is to prospect out based on defined business models. You want to find the retailers that are highly dedicated to the "long tail" of the business. These are the guys with larger stores who stock the largest cross section of gaming titles that they can and don't overly spend too much time chasing after what they hope will be the next hot thing. They become destination locations, sometimes with customers driving hundreds of miles to their store because they are the ONLY place where much of the stuff they stock can be found (offline anyway). These stores draw customers to them that likely pass by 10 or more smaller trend chaser retailers to get to them.

However, more recently, our approach has simply been to market our games direct as aggressively as possible and build more sites and marketing vehicles for accomplishing that goal. We keep a retailers' terms page and we have a e-mail list that we use to keep stores informed of new releases or other relevant info. Any store inclined to stock our games can come to us and any store inclined to stock our games well and stay informed can join our e-mail list in order to so. Chasing after "potential" new retailers in this market just turns out to be a big time sink that doesn't pay nearly so well as building sales in other ways.

I store willing to stock a product line in a dedicated fashion and willing to spend the effort to stay both informed and in stock with a product is a store still worth dealing with, to be sure. Such stores are rare in the market at present.

>>I fully expect to drop a lot of stores if they under perform. (Wow! That feels weird to say.)<<

Just makes sense. As manufacturers it is only wise to focus on channel management. You can't just "toss the product out there" and cross your fingers hoping for a good result. Managing how you distribute your products, evaluating how specific sales channels perform and running a cost/benefit analysis on all sales channels is an ever ongoing process that we need to perform. If a channel is not performing as it should, then it either needs to be fixed or scraped. If you lack the influence to "fix it", that leaves you only the one other option. Scrap it and move onto something else that CAN be managed successfully to meet your company's needs.

Or put another way. Game stores do not have a god given right to have access to your products just because they happen to be a store that sells games. They have to be able to add value to your distribution network and thus your business also, or the inability to do so means they lose access to your products.

I know on the surface, as a small company, it can almost seem crazy to cut off an avenue of "potential sales" and thus potential much needed revenue, but really, a random sale or two here or there that does nothing to build upon your distribution infrastructure or to build up your brands also does nothing to build upon your business. And supporting one sales channel very well can negatively impact others.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com
http://www.1483online.com
http://www.thermopylae-online.com