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Deal of the Day: By the Numbers

I submitted The Blackwood Errantry Codex for DriveThruRPG’s Deal of the Day promotion a little while ago. The book was featured in the Deal of the Day spot yesterday, so I spent the end of my weekend collecting and processing some data. I think small RPG publishers are more effective when they work together, so I’m sharing my data in the hopes that it will help other publishers decide if DriveThruRPG’s Deal of the Day is right for them.

Note: all the monetary figures in this post are net sales, not gross. My exclusive publishing deal with DriveThruRPG means that they take 30% of all my sales, so gross sales are higher than the numbers I provide. None of that money makes it to me, so I’m not interested in it as far as my calculations are concerned.

First Quarter 2018 and Year-to-Date Comparison

All Products

From January through March of this year, the DriveThruRPG store had 1,732 downloads for a net total of $136.54 in sales. That works out to $44.18 per month on average.

If I add in the month of April up to the 21st (the day before the Deal of the Day promotion), those numbers improve to 2,266 downloads for a net total of $181.17 in sales. The additional $44.63 earned in April implies that April would have been an above average sales month. The store only earned $10 in January, so other months this year have all been higher than the average.

The Blackwood Errantry Codex

In the first quarter of 2018, there were 20 downloads of The Blackwood Errantry Codex for a net total of $112.74 in sales. That’s an average of 6.66 downloads per month, or $37.58 per month. As you can see, The Blackwood Errantry Codex accounts for the majority of my monthly sales.

Adding in the the month of April, sales of The Blackwood Errantry Codex improve to 24 downloads or $146.34 in net sales. Again, this is right in line with the trajectory from the first quarter.

Deal of the Day Promotion

The Blackwood Errantry Codex

During the 24 hours between 10am CST on April 22 and 10am CST on April 23, there were 61 downloads of The Blackwood Errantry Codex for a total of $204.96 in net sales. That’s an average of 2.5 downloads and $8.54 per hour.

All Products

During the Deal of the Day promotion, there was a total of 290 downloads from my DriveThruRPG store for a net total of $207.76 in sales. Subtracting downloads of The Blackwood Errantry Codex, that’s 229 addtional downloads but only an additional $2.80. I noticed dozens of downloads of the bundle of free one sheets, character archetypes, and the setting primer (which is expected), and a few downloads of the PWYW map bundle (where these additional sales came from).

Promotional Costs

Deal of the Day is a promotion DriveThruRPG offers as part of their Publisher Promotion Points (PPP) system. You can purchase PPP for a dollar each from the DTRPG store, although that’s discouraged in favor of accumulating them for free. If you have a DTRPG store you earn 10ppp per month, plus an additional 10ppp per month if you’re an exclusive publisher with them. Beyond that, publishers earn 1ppp for every $10 sold in their store (note: this is the only figure in this post that is based on gross sales, not net).

Buying into the Deal of the Day costs a variable number of PPP depending on how many other publishers have submitted products for the promotion. When I bought into the promotion on April 5, it cost around 430ppp. As you can probably tell, there’s no good way to calculate the value of 430ppp. Still, I felt it was worth it to at least put these numbers out there. I accumulated a couple hundred PPP during my first 8 months on the DTRPG marketplace, and got a big boost when I released The Blackwood Errantry Codex in October 2017.

The only other money I spent on this promotion was to boost the post on the Mythic Gazetteer facebook page for $10. My typical reach over on facebook is between 50-150 views and 5-15 engagements (clicks, comments, or shares), whereas my post yesterday reached a total of 1,995 people on 58 engagements. I don’t know how many sales it actually generated, but less than 5% of my total earnings for yesterday is money I don’t mind spending on a little extra promotion.

Totals and Conclusion

So far this year, The Mythic Gazetteer’s DriveThruRPG store has had 2,556 downloads for a total net of $388.93 in sales. In the end, the Deal of the Day promotion increased my net year-to-date sales by 112%. That means in the space of 24 hours, I more than doubled by sales for the previous 3+ months combined. I also gained somewhere between 200-250 new customers yesterday, most of which consent to receive mail from DTRPG. The Blackwood Errantry Codex also went from a Copper Best Seller to a Silver Best Seller, although I didn’t notice it hit any of the other lists on DTRPG’s homepage.

I was dubious about the Deal of the Day promotion going into this thing. I told myself it was worth trying once to collect some data. Now that the deal is over, I can say with confidence that it really worked in my favor. I think it’s best suited for full books (a 60% discount on a $5 lightweight RPG isn’t as enticing as a big deal on a full-length $12 RPG), so it’s not something I plan to do again until I have another core setting or RPG book ready to go.

I don’t have adequate data on this point, but I suspect there’s a benefit to getting into the Deal of the Day slot during a certain time window. I published The Blackwood Errantry Codex six months ago, in October 2017. About a month ago, I did a soft poll of the Savage Worlds communities on Google+ and Facebook and discovered that a substantial portion (somewhere around 40%) of respondents had never even heard of The Blackwood. I’m not sure how many totally new customers I gained vs. people who were aware of the Blackwood but hadn’t bought the book yet. Still, I know my posts yesterday were highly visible in the Savage Worlds communities, and at least two people commented to say they’d never heard of the setting but were excited to take advantage of the deal.

Hopefully this information will help other small RPG publishers to weight the benefits and risks of the Deal of the Day promotion. I have no idea how well it works for big publishers, but I’m comfortable calling this a success for my purposes. I hope it can be a success for you too!