PDF publishing

[taalyn]

As the pioneer and arguably the expert on selling PDF versions of a role-playing game, I can tell you that this tactic is not valid. I made money selling Sorcerer and its supplements as PDFs, but that money did not produce my print budget for the book versions. A runaway success of a PDF-sale game will net you a few hundred bucks a year.

So, tell me folks, is this still a fair assessment of PDF sales? Is publishing this way doomed to minimal sales? Should I go find some investors and spring for print?

Aidan

[Matt Snyder]

So, tell me folks, is this still a fair assessment of PDF sales?

Yes, for Indie games this would be a damn good success. Likely for many "non-Indie" PDF publications as well. Monte Cook's Malhavoc Press is likely the leader in PDF publication sales using the D20 license. I wouldn't be surprised if he makes a few thousand over a given year on his most popular titles (per title).

Is publishing this way doomed to minimal sales?

No, I wouldn't say things are "doomed." There is relatively little risk and investment required, so the hundreds of dollars per year won't mean you go out of business. The business is small to begin with. (Oh, and this obviously assumes you're doing this as a moonlighting gig, not as a full time job.  Don't quit yer day job!)

Also, note that there are a small handful of folks giving this a full-time go, or at least pulling in sizable portions of their income via PDF sales. They are, as a rule, publishing material under the D20 license. They key to their success is a wide customer base and the large number of products they sell per publisher, some with releases every month or even more frequently.

Should I go find some investors and spring for print?

That one I can't answer for you. I haven't done that in publishing material of my own, despite some crazy notions to do so (asking family, for example). I just can't bring myself to do it, but that's just me.

I take it you have a goal here? What is your goal? If your goal is print publication, I ask, "To what end?" Is it that you want to see your game in print? What then? What is success for you at that point? Merely publication? A certain profit margin ("break even," "beer money," etc.)?

I ask because you're inquiring about the means to the end of publication. But once you have the publication done, what is your plan? It takes a lot of time and energy to get your publication out there, fulfill orders, do marketing, attend cons, etc. Speaking as a guy who once asked similar questions, I find PDF publishing a pretty satisfactory end (though it need not be the only end).

[gameskald]

Well Matt, question for you or anyone else who might see this. Is it ever done that a pdf company work out a deal with a company that does print and maintain its ownership?

I am just curious if that has ever happened where the two companies work some sort of arrangement out so that the pdf still makes pdf sales, but another company actually publishes the work as a physical item to be sold in stores and the profits are shared to some degree. Anything like that ever done?

[Matt Snyder]

The only example of that happening I know of is Malhavoc Press. Monte Cook has been, no doubt, the leader in PDF sales. Several of his products have been published under White Wolf's Sword & Sorcery imprint.

I can't think of any examples of that happening otherwise. I can think of one or possibly two examples (Cartoon Action Hour and MAYBE the original Nobilis -- not sure on the second, though someone here probably knows) wherein the original creators sold a game as a PDF, then worked with another entity to publish the game in print. However, once that arrangement was made, PDF sales of the game ceased.

I think such an agreement could work, but I also think it would take a very open-minded print publisher if you didn't have the runaway D20 success Monte Cook has (and it doesn't heard that he helped create 3rd edition as a WotC employee, then had great connections when off on his own -- more power to him for it, too).

[Brand_Robins]

Nobilis 1st wasn't, to my knowledge, ever a .pdf. It was, however, a print on demand book that could be difficult to get in any way other than direct order.

I know this, having tried to get the book through 2 FLGS and Amazon.com before going direct from Pharos.

As for the other issues of .pdf publishing, I have to agree with other posters that it matters what you are trying to do. .pdf publishing won't ever make you the "big money" that printing hardcopy books does, and won't generally give you enough money to print a hardcopy of the book without risking other money.

There have been a few folks other than Monte Cook that have managed to either fully fund their hardcopy books from .pdf sales, or get another publisher to print their work based on .pdf sales. However in every case I can think of this was either a d20 product being written by someone who was a "name" in the d20 field and thus had some cache attached to the product even before it hit print or was the result of a product winning an award such as an Ennie.

Now there is some indication that this could change with other licenses, such as the M&M superlink, but for games without the sales-boost of a name, logo, or system it does seem to be that .pdf is, at best, one method of helping you get money to print rather than a way to get your book to print without any expenses.

Of course, as Matt said, one has to ask if getting to print sales is the only reason to publish a .pdf. I'm currently working on an adventure under the M&M Superlink that's going to be .pdf only, and I'm not doing it as a stepping stone to print publication. (Though I won't scream in pain if I do well enough that such becomes possible, it's just that it isn't my goal.) I'm doing it because I want to get some ideas out there, to create a quality product and make enough money to recoup a small percentage of the time and effort I've put into it (not all mind you). I'm doing it because I want to create something and publish it, to give people a different setting and style for M&M adventures, and because I can do both of those without having to give up my whole life to do it.

So for me .pdf publishing isn't a dismal pit of low sales, it's an opportunity to publish something that I care about and want to do in a format that will let interested parties play games with my work. That, more than sales or money, is why I'm writing. It will also let me make the game according to my own standards and fitting my own ideas of how a game should work – and that, more than making a name or a publications house, is why I'm publishing.

Quality, care, and opportunity are what I care about and .pdfs let me have that. (Plus I get to hob-knob with Steve Kenson and his cool game-designer friends. ;))

[quozl]

Louis Porter, Jr. says he made over $8000 from non-D20 PDFs in this post at RPG.net.

[Valamir]

Slightly off topic for this thread but I pulled the following from that same thread and it just blows my mind.

Tales of Gaea, 324 pages, POD, Color Soft Cover, B&W interior

Roughly, since I do not have the numbers in front of me
MSRP: $30
Distro Discount: 60% (We Gross $12/book)
Marketing/Consolidation: 16% of Gross (~$2)
Shipping: ~$.25/book
Printing: $7

We net approximately $2.75 per book and with POD pay no storage. We sold 210 through distribution and about 10 directly in the first month. A net of about $830 in our first month.

Unbelievable that people still do business this way.

$2.75 a book on a $30 MSRP.  Insane.  Universalis breaks down more like this.

MSRP: $15
Distro Discount:  ZERO
Marketing and Consolidation:  ZERO
Shipping:  ZERO (paid for by the purchaser)
Printing: $3 (roughly).

Even allowing another $1 a book for miscellainy like printer ink and damaged books and wasted mailers etc, I'm still netting $11 a book.  That's 4x more on a book with a cover price 1/2 as much!  

But being with a distributor means they make up for it in sales volume right?  Well, yeah, they sell more books than I do I'm sure.  But I doubt enough to make up the difference.  I don't know what the continueing sales are for this book, but I know I made significantly more than that my first months sales.

The more you learn the more you realize what a rip off distributors really are.  60% of cover and they barely generated double the sales that I did with a website and a couple of rpg.net review....yeah, they're earning their money all right...

Seems like the distributors should be selling at least 8x more than you could sell direct before they start to pay for themselves.

[samdowning]

Universalis breaks down more like this.

MSRP: $15
Distro Discount:  ZERO
Marketing and Consolidation:  ZERO
Shipping:  ZERO (paid for by the purchaser)
Printing: $3 (roughly).

Actually, you are putting quite a bit into marketing.  The website, the banner network, going to GenCon, all of these are marketing expenses.

It's also being sold at RPGMall, which means your distributor (RPGMall) is taking a chunk.  So there is a distributor discount for some products sold.  Also, you've got a PayPal account, which also costs something if you're running it as a business, and I think even if you're not, but I wouldn't touch PayPal with a 10 ft cable modem line.

[Valamir]

Actually, you are putting quite a bit into marketing. The website, the banner network, going to GenCon, all of these are marketing expenses.

GenCon is the only actual expense.  Its a fairly big one, although if you discount travel and hotel on the grounds that  I'd have gone as an attendee anyway and only look at the actual booth and badge cost, I pretty well paid for that in con sales.

The website is currently hosted for free and webmastered by me.  The banner network is free, it did cost me a nominal amount to have Keith Sears whip up the banners for me, but nothing too significant.  And that was mostly as an experiment to see how well the exchange works.

It's also being sold at RPGMall, which means your distributor (RPGMall) is taking a chunk. So there is a distributor discount for some products sold.

RPGMall is also an experiment.  I've only been using them for a couple of months, and despite being their 5th best seller they represent a pretty small fraction of my total sales.  The sales I have gotten through them are most likely folks I wouldn't have reached otherwise, so it didn't cannibalize sales much.  But for most of Uni's life it was 100% direct, and could easily be again.  If RPGMall shut its doors for some reason it would effect my business exactly 0 (except for the hassle of getting my inventory back).

I'm hoping to see RPGMall ramp up its efforts soon by pushing indie games into retail and possibly generating sales through there own brick and mortar store front.  So far, quite honestly, they haven't justified the 40% cut they take.  

Also, you've got a PayPal account, which also costs something if you're running it as a business, and I think even if you're not, but I wouldn't touch PayPal with a 10 ft cable modem line

Paypal costs are built into my shipping and handling charges, so I'm reimbused for them.  

As for not touching them.  I run into a few people from time to time with a negative image of PayPal.  But I've been using them for years both for personal purchases and to take business payments and have had exactly 0 trouble with them.  I couldn't be happier with my paypal experience actually.

At any rate, the point being that 60% is a big chunk for a distributer to take, and the more I learn about what they actually do, the more I discover they don't do nearly enough to justify that cut.  With today's technology and shipping options, pull based consolidators just don't add much value.

[HinterWelt]

Those were our numbers and as with anything taken out of context it can be misleading. Tales of Gaea is our forray into POD. POD printing is general more expensive but limited in risk. We have sold over 300 in distribution. We make close to $20 net from sales off the internet. In 4 months we have done close to 80 sales in this manner. The distribution chain works as a means of advertising. I know that people on this forum think of it as evil but it is merely a tool. Something to use. There may come a day when Tales is as well known as Universalis but right now we are new and trying make a name.

BTW- We do much better with our other titles through distribution. Roughly $12 a book. Also, we sell on line, through our site and RPGMall. We use many paths to reach customers. To not use a distribution path (three tier, internet or otherwise) when it is feasible to your business model and expenses is unwise. We are slightly more intelligent than the idiots you paint us to be. Slightly. 8-D

Ciao,
Bill

[Valamir]

Hey Bill, certainly didn't want to paint you as an idiot, I was just stunned by the numbers you'd put up.

I find it telling that 80 books direct at a $20 margin has netted you double the 300 books through distribution at a $2.75 margin.
In terms of Return on Investment that's a huge difference.  If even 50 people who bought the game in stores would have bought it direct if that were the only way to get it, and the other 250 wouldn't have bought it at all...you'd actually be farther ahead having sold 130 books all direct than you are selling 380 mixxed.

Or to cut the numbers differently, Every 1 direct sale you lose to retail requires 6 (actually 6.27) new retail sales just to make the same profit.  By this I mean you need to make 6 sales to people who never would have bought your game direct through retail, for every 1 person who would have bought direct but instead bought retail to make the same money.  Otherwise you're actually losing money by going through the distributor by cannibalizing sales away from your own direct portal.

That's a HUGE difference, IMO.  

As far as Universalis being well known...it has a little name recognition to it in some circles, but its hardly a household name (even in a dedicated gamer household).  I'm certainly not claiming to be some game publishing guru, I'm learning this as I go like everyone else.

I've just yet to have anyone provide me with a list of all of the services the three tier offers that's worth 60% of cover.  Think about it.  Most game stores get a 40% of cover cut, less say the 10% discount many routinely offer.  That's a 30% profit margin per unit sold, yet most stores barely scrape by.  How do you manage to barely scrape by with a profit margin north of 30%?  Simple...ridiculously low volume.  I know car dealerships that sell more BMWs in a month than many game stores sell game books.  Centralized distributors have a lot of value added in industries with high volumes and rapid inventory turnover.  In low volume industries...not so much.

I think what we have in the three tier is a distribution system that was invented in the 70s and early 80s: pre internet, pre POD, pre PDF, pre office supply stores where the average joe can get shipping materials at discount prices, etc.  To date, its a system that hasn't reinvented itself to maintain its relevance.  

Anyway, my apologies Aidan for derailing your PDF thread in this way.

[Michael Hopcroft]

I have had the rather interesting (if distrubing experience) that the free sample PDF that i am giving away, although it is far from being a complete reporesentation of HeartQuest, has outdrawn my paid sales to the point that nobody picks up anything else. Either the foretaste ois so unappealing that nobody wants the full meal (in which case HeartQuest Lite needs either a rewrite or to be dropped altogether) of people are picking up free products without any intention of buying the full books as a general rule. neither is a very plesant prospect.

I'm planning to make a serious go of PDF publishing and will be releasing at least five titles in the next six months if the writers meet their deadlines. But I'm hoping they don;t fall on deaf ears and that they at least make back their layout and art costs, much less the royalties I will be paying out. I keep telling myself I didn;t go into this business to get rich, and if that is the case I am a very successful publisher at the goal of not becoming rich....

I really think i should have seen the musical version of The Producers when it was in town. I sometimes feel like I am living the life of Max Biyalistok in his pre-Bloom days (i.e. everything I touch turns to ashes)..

[Scott_Lynch]

Well, I made more than $3,500 from PDF publishing in the last half of 2002 and have made more than $5,600 from it so far this year, all while spending a great deal of time on the very non-commercial (as yet) project of writing a novel, so it's not as though I was even trying as hard as I could or should have been. I've had only eleven product releases on eight separate PDF projects. I'm going to be putting a great many more PDFs out in the coming few weeks than I have in the past several months, and that effort is already showing a profit-- my sales for this past week of November alone exceeded all of my sales for the entire month of October.

My PDF income is the vast bulk of my living (though note that I live very frugally in a low-cost area of the country). Two PDFs of mine have passed a sales figure of 450, which means (according to the figures available on RPGNow) they're probably both somewhere between #30 and #40 on all-time sales for games currently commercially available anywhere in PDF.  I find it very heartening that there are only thirty or so PDFs above the *Book of Distinctions & Drawbacks* on RPGNow's all-time sales chart, however, anyone who anticipates routine PDF sales in the multiple-hundreds should remember that there are something like 2,000 products on RPGNow in total; the vast majority of them quietly go "floop" and never surface again, having brought in a bit of beer and pizza money at best.

It isn't something to get into if you have avaricious dreams of wealth. However, it can certainly make you a living (or most of it) if you're young, childless, and out of debt, and if, to be frank, you get lucky. Then again, all of the PDFs I've released since July of last year have been d20 related, so my experience may be of limited use for purveyors of independent game systems.

I've had no plans for getting into print for the last year and a half; a very kind offer was tendered to me to turn DNW into a print book, but I couldn't see a way to make a 376-page "crunchy" d20 PDF anything more than a curiosity in the print d20 supers market at this stage of the game, so I politely declined. I may experiment with POD early next year, but otherwise all of my PDF income has been magically transformed into things like food, asthma medication, and clothes.

Cheers,

SL

P.S. I have just released my first free PDF product, so I hope to soon be able to see whether my experience parallels Mr. Hopcroft's... that is, whether I've opened a door to more commercial sales or helped to shoot them in the head. ;) Hurrah for scientific experiments, and for alcohol when they don't work.

[Gold Rush Games]

I realize I'm a little late jumping into the discussion here. I find the comments about direct-vs-distribution sales very interesting. There are a few things that don't seem to be realized by some folks, though.

A good quality, well-touted PDF product is lucky to exceed a few hundred direct sales.

A good quality, well-touted print product is lucky to exceed the same number via direct sales, and with much more financial risk.

A good quality, well-touted print product in distribution is lucky to exceed a thousand copies sold.

An extremely well-marketed print product that gets a lot of buzz in the industry (and thus word-of-mouth promotion in the gaming community) can surpass several thousand units in sales.

Now let's look at the gross sales involved. Let's assume $10 for the PDF version and $25 for the print version. Let's also assume it costs $5,000 per book to produce 1,000 copies (I'm throwing in production costs, art, editing, layout, printing, etc.) and $15,000 ($3 per book) for 5,000.

PDF direct sales x 100 = $1,000 - production = $1,000
Print direct sales x 100 = $2,500 - production = $-2,500
Print distribution sales x500 = $5,000 - production = $0
Print distribution hit x 1,000 = $10,000 - production = $5,000
Print runaway hit x 5,000 = $50,000 - production = $35,000

It's pretty easy to see why distribution and tretail pentration is important to a publisher. It's all about volume.

Why is this? Because as gamers, and retailers and distributors talk about a product, the more people learn about it and (ideally) the more copies are ordered through distribution. Add to that the fact that a book on the shelf is seen by a number of people, some of whom may never have heard of it before.

This effect can't be realized by people who never see a banner ad or don't know that a web site exists. Browsing physical product in a store simply can't be replicated on-line.

For giggles, let's examine the numbers using a POD print model, with a total flat cost of production of $1,500 plus an additional $4 per copy printed (with no variation for print run size).

PDF direct sales x 100 = $1,000 - production = $-500
Print direct sales x 100 = $2,500 - production = $600
Print distribution sales x500 = $5,000 - production = $1,500
Print distribution hit x 1,000 = $10,000 - production = $4,500
Print runaway hit x 5,000 = $50,000 - production = $28,500

Interesting comparison, if nothing else. ;)

[HinterWelt]

Now let's look at the gross sales involved. Let's assume $10 for the PDF version and $25 for the print version. Let's also assume it costs $5,000 per book to produce 1,000 copies (I'm throwing in production costs, art, editing, layout, printing, etc.) and $15,000 ($3 per book) for 5,000.

PDF direct sales x 100 = $1,000 - production = $1,000
Print direct sales x 100 = $2,500 - production = $-2,500
Print distribution sales x500 = $5,000 - production = $0
Print distribution hit x 1,000 = $10,000 - production = $5,000
Print runaway hit x 5,000 = $50,000 - production = $35,000

For brevity I will work with only your first example Mark. You apply you production costs to the print version but not to the PDF version. Let us just live in the happy world and say that your $3 per book holds that means $2000 in production costs (editing, art, wrinting, etc) you would then loose $1000 in the pdf version. Last time I checked pdfs did not edit themselves, produce art spontaneously or write themselves. :)

If we look at POD sales then the primary advantage is the ability to do micro runs. However, the RPG distribution network is poorly set up for this (i.e. a poor preorder system) thus requiring a certain level of guess work in having a supply on hand for order fulfillment. Yes, drop shipment from the POD printer can mitigate this but on hold up at the printer and you take on the chin for being slow in fulfilling orders thus a need for a minimal buffer. Do not get me wrong, we have used POD on our Tales of Gaea core rules and it worked well from a distribution POV but the printer was a total pain.

The thing to remember is compare apples to apples. You can say that a PDF has less art but then you should not compare it to print. Print books become a different market in this concern.

Bill