Does anyone have particular guidelines for which chapter of a product to put up as a "sample chapter"?

Do you find that such a practice is necessary?

Does it seem to drive or improve sales?

I haven't seen any guidelines but usually it seems to be the intro chapter and some setting. Sometimes they include some rules but usually not all that much (the whole "if we give the rules away they'll not buy our product" fear, I guess).

Personally, as a consumer I really like it when such chapters are available. It gives me a feel for the book's contents and tone. Sometimes it might even persuade me to buy something which I had previously thought was useless to me.

Many financially limited consumers tend to view new products with weariness and begin from the assumption that we shouldn't buy it. Your job is to show us why we should.

As a consumer, I'd actually prefer a "quickstart" of some sort to a set of sample chapters. Give me a condensed version of the setting highlights, some prebuilt templates (or simplified creation system) for characters, and the basic mechanics. Something I can take to my group, sit down with, and actually play a game of, even if it's one that's limited in scope. This's obviously more work than just pulling a chapter or two out of your sources and putting those up, but it gives people something they can actually try out to see if it works for them.

If you don't have the resources to do a quickstart, I'd have to say that the introduction to the setting chapter, and if one exists, the introduction to the rules are the two most important chapters to put up. If you have a chapter on "how to run this game" that's another prime candidate. The thing you're looking to do is to hook people's interest. And in general, that means that they either think the setting and color you present is cool, the rules for playing are cool, or the things you're supposed to do are cool.

I will decline to draw a particular parallel between these three things and a certain theory for discussing games that happens to be popular around here.

Rather, I'll just say that the more of those things that you can get a person interested in, the more likely they are to want to buy your game. And you can't get them interested without showing them at least some strong hints, if not the whole of the basics. Everyone learned long ago that marketing bullets like "new and innovative combat mechanics" and "completely original setting" and "revolutionary gaming experience" on the back cover mean exactly nothing. So pick the two or three chapters you're absolutely most proud of, the ones you think make your game a great one to play for some purpose.

If you're worried that giving away those chapters will lower someone's incentive to buy the game, trim out details while leaving the structure intact. For example, if you're going to put up the character creation chapter because your revolutionary new lifepath system is utterly fantastic, cut down the number of options at each step from 10 to 3 or leave out a few of the final charts. Most gamers love a wide variety of option bits like that, and if the basics of the system intrigue them, they'll buy the book just to get all those choices.

I personally think most of the quickstarts from White Wolf are actually quite excellent; a few are guilty of oversimplifying the game a little too much, making it hard to get a good grasp on how the game would play in actuality. You could do a lot worse than to model them, though. The recent Marvel Superheroes preview that appeared in InQuest magazine was fantastic, far more than was merely sufficient to whet appetites.

-DaR

edit: added MSH example