Okay, lots of folks are talking about how cool GenCon 2003 was, but I haven't seen a reaction from Ron, unless he put it somewhere I missed (entirely possible). So I'm forcing the issue. Or at least making a thread to bring it up...

Ron, did GenCon meet with your expectations? Are you planning to do a similar Forge Booth setup next year?

If you are, I want to start planning for it right now because I am sooo going to be there with a product (or two) to sell. :)

Here's my deal:

Ron and I run small companies. I loved sposoring the booth, but even though we both did well at the con, selling lots of books and all, I lost money and Ron (if I'm not mistaken) probably lost his shirt. Booth space and furniture is very, very expensive. So I think the Forge booth needs to be a permanant addition to Gen Con, and I want to be a primary sponsor for as long as I can, but the money issue has to be handled differently.

Jake

THE FOLLOWING IS DRIFT:
As part-sponsor of the 2002 Forge booth, I lost some cash as well (but too much). Supporting the community was the real benefit. Key 20 is willing to sponsor part of the 2004 Forge booth, or at least attach our booth to it to give it that much more space.

That's great, Jason.

The problem is that, the more "sponsor" level entrants dividing up the major costs, the bigger booth we need. Heck, we were really tight again this year as it was. I don't suppose that there's any chance that larger booths actually cost proportionally less? More proportionally, right?

Seems like a very tough problem to overcome. Anybody have any thoughts on that?

Mike

Well, increasing the cost to sell your game to $150 to $200 might help. I'm pretty sure everyone at the booth made at least that much this year.

Maybe Upper Deck will slip us some cash if we give out BreaKeys with every sale :-)

,Matt Gwinn

Well, I think that raising the entry fee for non-sponsors is a start. The year that I went with TROS as a sideline product I did very well. I sold even more this time, but the costs were 5 times greater or more. I'm just trying to see how we can continue to put together this fantastic booth without damaging its sponsers by default.

jake

There's already an open call for donations that go to the Forge website, why not have something similar for the Forge booth? The results may not end up being overly impressive but every little bit helps.

Also, I noticed in the exhibitor packet for GenCon SoCal that there are a limited number of discounted booths for first time exhibitors with only one major game/product. How difficult would it be to try and get one or two of those next to the Forge booth and kind of 'adopt' them as Forge space?

Just some ideas.

-Chris

That's an excellent idea, Chris. I'm not sure how keen the staff would be on it, but it certainly makes sense.

Mike

Chris, the entrepreneurial discount you're talking about comes with some strict limitations - including one that prohibits you from selling products other than your own or sharing the booth with anyone else. If you tried to include them in the Forge space, you would risk being charged more or kicked out of the convention altogether (just like you can get charged more if you combine booths so that they form something normally more expensive, like an endcap).

I don't know how closely these things are enforced, but the last thing you want are GenCon employees thinking "We'd better see what rules those Forge guys are breaking this year."

For what it's worth, I think raising the entry cost to people is probably fair. The booth cost is nothing compared with airfare, lodging and food anyway.

Bah, I knew there was a catch.

I do think that a "Send the Forge to GenCon!" donation button isn't too bad of an idea. Maybe a yearly raffle, but a ticket and a chance to win some swag, kind of deal.

Increasing entry costs is certainly the easiest solution though.

-Chris

I keep getting this vision of building some sort of deck that would make the booth into two stories so that we can vend on one level, and demo on the second floor....

Mike

Mike Holmes wrote: I keep getting this vision of building some sort of deck that would make the booth into two stories so that we can vend on one level, and demo on the second floor....

That would Rock Mike!! We could have a Booth Tower.
They'd probably pull out some fire hazard rule or something though. Grr.

One thing we need is booth babes or costumnes or something. I checked out the 1300+ pics at the gencon web site and there wasn't a single picture of our booth and with the execption of Mike Holmes playing guitar (again) there were no Forge people in photos. There were lots of chicks in costume though, including the chick with the duct tape bikini.

They did take a picture FROM our booth though, so at least we were useful to them :-(

,Matt Gwinn

Hi there,

Here's the costs, approximately, for the booth this year:

$2400 for the booth itself
$850+ for the furniture.
$700+ for the extra badges
$1600 for the two hotel rooms
plus a bunch more for shipping books to and from the con

All of this was shouldered by Adept Press, which is not built for such stresses. I have to do kind of a do-si-do between the cash and checks I brought back, my business checking account, and the credit card payments. Fortunately I'm not kiting anything because I started with a solid capital basis, even after all printing two books in the last few months.

Now, a fair amount of that does come right back to me from others. People have been great about hotel room reimbursement, the $100 and badge fees were all met, and one co-sponsor has paid right up. Managing this is tricky, but a fair portion of the above isn't going to be shouldered by me permanently.

I haven't done an across-the-board cost-benefit analysis based on booth-use and badge repayments from the other sponsor, Forge members, and my own sales. Frankly, given the piecemeal nature of the costs and reimbursements, it's an accounting nightmare.

However ... I can see very easily, at the end of the day, that GenCon loses me money, even with mad game sales. I can also estimate that if I'd done, instead of a Forge booth, a Sorcerer booth (like 2001) with all the help I could pull in for it for both 2002 and 2003 ... well, let's just say Adept would be an awfully rich little company at this point instead of its break-even-but-solid status.

What I'm sayin', guys, is that two years of altruism is enough. The Forge booth is a great thing, and I plan to organize it again for next year. But I'm going to have to put the sly Adept tactics-hat on and figure out a better way to do it, financially.

Oh, and the main reason I didn't post all sorts of post-GenCon stuff this week is that I got pretty sick upon arriving home, and real-life has been demanding too.

Best,
Ron

I was keeper of the cash box last year and I kept an eye on things this year. We did a lot more business this year, and I think that means we can build on this fact for future years.

We need more shelf space arranged in a more store-like way. Paul's excellent stand was just a start. The more we make the booth like a store the more people will buy. I'm not saying that we should ditch the whole cafe table thing, but we need even more wiles to get people to stay and to buy.

Some kind of unified forge T-shirt for everyone that isn't a sponsor could be a good thing...or not...mostly just thinking out loud here...

Also, the payment needs to be differnt. Just paying for some badges and a little more won't do. OTOH some books don't really make enough to cover more, so perhaps a percentage of some sort...something that wouldn't bleed the smaller guys and that wouldn't let others make a large profit on the con when the sponsors eat it.

Lastly, I think that the booth needs to be larger, but that raises prices, so...

Jake

Donations are always a good thing. Any money you can get from people who are willing to give, is less money to bleed ANYONE dry. But they shouldn't be counted on. Forge T-Shirts are a pretty nifty idea - any sort of income that can be added to the booth is positive, and T-Shirts are a good way to do that. Short-term, booth-related, collectible... people are going to pick up the "I was at the Forge Booth 2004" shirt, I think.

I also think the percentage idea seems fair at first glance. The more you sell, the more you make, the more the booth did good for you. Keep it small, of course, maybe 1% or 2% of gross on top of whatever the initial buy-in is?

That wooden shelf thing was excellent - without it, it would have been harder for me to decide what I wanted. And it looked like there was barely enough room for games on it this year - next year, yes, maybe two of those shelves, or some other setup.

On the other hand, all the cafe tables were welcoming, AND gave a lot of room wherein demos could be run. Three thousand dollars split even ten ways, plus badges and a hotel room, is a whole lot of hurt and pain. And then if you go bigger...

You guys had an "Endcap" this year, which matches both Ron's price quote and my own memory (2400). The next largest booth is 4750. Assuming random "this rounds to the nearest whole number" inflation, that's probably $5K next year, plus another $1K for furniture. That's a lot to be split up several different ways, even without badges and the like. But a bigger booth is a good thing!

Thinking really big: there's a lot of small creator-owned companies, much more than even post on the Forge. If we could somehow encourage more of them to join in for a forge demo/booth/sale/convention thing... heck, for each place that DOESN'T get their own standard ten-by-ten booth so they can sell at "The Forge Booth," they could save money AND the size could possibly be bumped up.

But now I'm pipe-dreaming. It's unlikely that we'll see the "Forge 15 booth island EXTRAVAGANZA" next year. And I'm not sure if we'd want to, either. So let's go back to a more reasonable size increase, and just double the size. $6K (or whatever) plus badges plus hotels.

Obviously, hotel rooms should be split by whoever stays in them, without prejudice. It's honestly the only fair way to do such things. And each person should, at the very least, pay for their own badge, so that can be discounted. Any book-shipping also seems to be the providence of individual publishers... (Ron, how much would you estimate shipping the books you had was? I'd be interested to see, if only to plan)

So the only part whose financial load needs to be considered is the $6K itself. T-Shirts plus Donations plus, maybe 2% of gross (okay, I sold ten fifteen-dollar books, that means I owe an additional $30 towards the booth). Or would it be "more fair" to, do some bizarre number crunching, and say something like:

"Okay, we've got to pay $6000 for booth and furniture. Money from t-shirts and donations made up about eleven hundred, leaving $4900 to split among the various parties. Let's add up all the money we made here for games over the past four days, and then split the remaining cost proportionally. Looks like, in total, all the publishers in here made five thousand in game sales, combined. Individual X made $300 selling twenty copies of his $15 product. $300 divided by $5000 is 0.06. 6% of 4900 is $294, so that's how much Individual X owes. Now for individual Y, big seller, you made almost two thousand..."

What I'm sayin', guys, is that two years of altruism is enough. The Forge booth is a great thing, and I plan to organize it again for next year. But I'm going to have to put the sly Adept tactics-hat on and figure out a better way to do it, financially.

Oh, and the main reason I didn't post all sorts of post-GenCon stuff this week is that I got pretty sick upon arriving home, and real-life has been demanding too.

Thanks Ron and others for all the info. So there will be a Forge booth at GenCon '04. Cool. I will be there selling unless something real-lifey gets in the way of that (and it would have to be pretty significant, BTW). As for the logistics and financial business of figuring out how to make it happen, I'll leave that to others since I have the business/financial planning acumen of a small cube of cheese.

Carry on. :)

Greetings!

Too bad we couldn't have altered the Twilight Press booth and The Forge booth to create a super booth this year. I think it would have helped everyone involved. But, that's water under the bridge. For GenCon 2004 you can count on Twilight Press being a sponser, and we always pay for things like this up front. We did about 500 dollars in sales which means we lost a fair ammount too. If I'm going to lose money, I'd prefer it be with my fellow indie game designers.

It was great to meet folks from the Forge and I look forward to being a part of it next year. If there is anyway I can contribute to making it a success, let me know.

Peace,

-Troy

Lxndr wrote: Here's the ones I can remember (names are "those related to the company" rather than "those I necessarily know were there myself"):

Okay, you SHOULD have thrown me to the lions...

I knew my poor, frazzled brain was forgetting someone. I just didn't know what it was forgetting, which made the knowledge OF forgetfulness pretty danged useless, if you know what I mean.

(Btw, if by some sheer luck I manage to follow through on my "I wanna be an indie game designer" life-thread well enough that I have something for next year, I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable share for a GenCon Indy booth and sponsoring a GenCon Socal Forge booth...)

Ron Edwards wrote: Hi there,

Here's the costs, approximately, for the booth this year:

$2400 for the booth itself
$850+ for the furniture.
$700+ for the extra badges
$1600 for the two hotel rooms
plus a bunch more for shipping books to and from the con

Hi Luke,

Your analysis is solid, especially since those secondary costs that cut the profits down are real - it's hard to list them without a careful itemization, but they include things like shipping from the warehouse, spotting another publisher some bucks in a pinch, and so on.

And just for historical & disclosure purposes, my share of the primary booth cost was disproportionately high, i.e., considerably more than half, and I paid for the furniture. Therefore my overall GenCon experience cost me somewhere between $500 and $1000 despite pretty decent sales. Given my book sales in general, I absorbed this cost without trouble (he says, having made a rush trip to the bank to slam a wad from Business Checking into Business Visa), but my company benefit from GenCon must be counted in the "intangibles" file.

I'm still a little dubious about the appropriate entry fee for the secondary publishers at the booth. (And I wouldn't mind a better word than "secondary" or "smaller" to describe them, but whatever.) It strikes me, based just on last year and this year, that people tend to do better sales at their game's debut. Whether this is due to novelty to the consumer or to a certain tendency to relax and help others rather than to plug one's own game, I don't know. Kayfabe, Charnel Gods, Universalis, and Dust Devils flew out of the booth last year; this year, it was My Life with Master, The Burning Wheel, and kill puppies.

So I'm thinking maybe the $150 should apply to the new folks and keep the $100 entry fee for everyone else. I'm not sure. The thinking cap is still humming. Remember: the primary goal is the success of the small-press guy. The costs of attending cannot be permitted to be reliably higher than the benefit ... and that means, by the way, that in figuring booth profit, we have to look at the average sales of the secondary publishers, not the high end alone.

Best,
Ron

I would suggest throwing into the mix of possibilities to mull, a post con adjustment. A system whereby after the con the the best sellers among the "secondary" games are asked to ante up a little more. Basically a simplified way of dividing costs proportionally to sales.

Of course, if one wanted to get really radical, you just keep one big cash box, pay all the expenses from that and then divide the remainder among the participants proportionally on sales at the end. Possibly extreme, but would simplify things, and make sure that if the booth makes money, everyone at the booth makes money.