It’s been a full year since our first product, The Blackwood Errantry Codex, hit the digital shelves of DriveThruRPG, and two full years since this website (and our business) got off the ground! Thanks to everyone who’s given us a little of your time and/or money in these early years. Your support means the world to us!
Especially since The Blackwood Errantry Codex is our first full product, I spent a fair bit of energy promoting it and tracking the fruits of my labor. Just like I did with the Deal of the Day promotion in April, I want to share this data with you all because I think small RPG publishers are more effective when they work together.
The Blackwood Kickstarter
We crowdfunded The Blackwood Errantry Codex from May 2, 2018 to May 30, 2018, a total of 28 days. 286 wonderful people pledged $6,404 to help us bring this book into the world. Of those 286 people, 21 of them believed in the project enough that they wanted to contribute to it with NPCs, locations, or both. From the time we released the first promotional one sheet to the day the book went live on DTRPG, it was a pleasure interacting with our backers, freelancer writers, artists, and designers, and all the folks who just had questions and thoughts to share with us.
DriveThruRPG By The Numbers
Note: All the figures in this section 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.
- Full Product Line
- Lifetime Data:
- Number of Products: 19 (17 standalone and 2 bundles)
- Downloads: 17,230 (average: $0.05 per download)
- Unique Customers: 2,851 (1,463 consent to receive mail from us)
- Sales: $968.58 (average: $40.35 per month)
- Year-to-Date 2018:
- Downloads: 5,391 (average: $0.09 per download)
- Sales: $536.77 (average: $53.68 per month)
- Lifetime Data:
- The Blackwood Errantry Codex
- Lifetime Data:
- Downloads: 429 (average: $1.97 per download)
- Sales: $847.31 (average: $70.60 per month)
- Year-to-Date 2018:
- Downloads: 114 (average: $4.17 per download)
- Sales: $475.38 (average: $47.54 per month)
- Less Deal of the Day: $270.42 (average: $27.04 per month)
- Lifetime Data:
Observations
A few things are apparent in this data. First, we’ve made barely anything on a per-download basis. That’s intentional: of our 17 standalone products, only 2 require payment (we also have 8 Pay What You Want products, but our experience is that most people “want” to pay nothing). Our strategy was to grow our DTRPG mailing list in these first early years, and we’ve been successful in that regard.
Second, we can see that The Blackwood Errantry Codex is our most profitable product by a considerable margin. It accounts for 87% of our total profit! We can also see the Deal of the Day promotion from April 2018 had the single biggest effect on our sales outside the Kickstarter itself. That single day of sales accounts for 57% of the book’s profit this year, 31% of its lifetime profit, and 28% of our company’s total profit over the past two years. Clearly, Deal of the Day was a worthwhile event for a small company like us.
You might wonder why the average per-download profit for the book is $4.17 this year and only $1.97 overall. Since I fulfilled the Kickstarter through DTRPG, the download numbers for The Blackwood Errantry Codex includes backers. They received at-cost discount codes, so all that money is counted as gross sales. Essentially, that money came in from the Kickstarter and was used almost entirely to produce the book.
Finally, we have the question of how “profitable” the Mythic Gazetteer has been so far. We can see that the average profit-per-month is around $40. If this went into a paycheck it means I’d be able to buy a nice dinner once a month, but this money doesn’t go into a paycheck. Instead, we use our profits to produce future products. In this case, we’re working on a few small books (~20 pages each) and a limited-series audio drama podcast set in The Blackwood. Without this profit, there’s no way we could afford to work on the creative projects that inspire us.
Trajectory
With the financial observations out of the way, I want to share some thoughts about finding collaborators, engaging an audience, and what that means in today’s world.
Collaborators: Long story short, most of what comes out of the Mythic Gazetteer is done by me, Eli. It’s work I enjoy doing but I find it to be very lonely. As a brand new publisher, I’m not “known” to the point where people approach me about collaborating (or respond to me when I approach them). I’ve approached freelance writers, artists, and designers with plenty of success (I mean look at our book) but I had an image of “assembling a team” when I first set out into the RPG world. In the past couple years, I’ve found a few barriers between me and uniting people under the Mythic Gazetteer banner:
- Most people are already involved in their own solo projects to the point where they don’t seem to want to join forces.
- Prompt and adequate pay in exchange for work is extremely important to me, and my company isn’t profitable enough to put someone on payroll. Without that, I find I’m uncomfortable asking someone to start a long-term collaboration with no guarantee of a payoff.
- I’m intensely proud of The Blackwood Errantry Codex but I can’t honestly call it a breakout success (three months after the release of the book I polled the Savage Worlds community and–despite a huge promo effort on my part–less than half of the ~150 respondents had even heard of the book). Without a product that grabs people’s attention, it feels as though I can’t get the momentum I need to properly work toward points 1 and 2 above.
My best guess is that this is just part of the game at this stage. If our fifth year comes and goes and there’s still been no/little progress then I’ll be concerned, but for now I’m just taking it as part of the way things work. Spreading news takes time.
Audiences: A timely thread from Terminally Nerdy over on Twitter summarizes my thoughts on the difficulties of “activating” an audience. I know 430 people have purchased my book and 2,800 people have downloaded my products in some capacity. I’ve received feedback from maybe 10 of those people, and I think only 2 of those 10 have told me they’re actually bringing my products to the table. I know that I often buy RPGs that I have no intention to play, either because I’m only interested in a part of the mechanics, because I’m just supporting a friend’s projects, or what have you. But I also try to start conversations about games that excite me and I can’t imagine how much it would bolster my creativity and production if more people did the same with my own games.
That’s one reason why I’ve gone from producing a full setting book to trying out supplements to trying out an audio drama podcast. Terminally Nerdy puts it best: “If you love a particular podcast because of X, Y, or Z, and never say anything, how is the podcaster to know? And when they move away from the things you like what then? Some fans will quietly leave, some will cause a ruckus. But in all cases, how was the creator to know that what they did would cause problems? Silence does NOT equal acceptance. It equals, for many creators, ambivalence. For me, personally, no reaction signals to me that no one cares. That what I am doing is neither good, nor bad, its just sorta there and it was pointless to do. And it hurts, & it demoralizes, & it makes me want to stop. And I know others feel the same.” I’m trying to find my niche and that’s hard to do when the void responds to my work with silence.
This isn’t a “woe is me” moment. This is an honest and emotionally neutral assessment of how my situation appears to me. I’m putting it out there as a way to collect my thoughts, and it makes sense to do so as part of a retrospective of my company’s first couple of years.
Momentum in 2018-19: Most of my RPG conversations have happened on Google+ and Twitter. With Google+ shutting down, I’m hoping Twitter can pick up the slack. These two sites are where I’ve made 95% of the RPG connections I have, both in terms of collaborators and in terms of audience support. They’re good platforms to talk theory and organize games. It seems Discord is gaining a lot of promise (at least for the communities I spend time in) so maybe that will become a bigger part of my life in the next year.
A couple communities in particular (especially Misdirected Mark, Wuxia Community on G+, and the Warda podcast fanbase) have been especially welcoming to me. I don’t know how much it’s translated into downloading, reading, and playing my games, but the friendliness I’ve experienced in those places has been a vital tether to keeping me in the online RPG world. Thanks to everyone who spends time in those communities, and my apologies if you’re part of a community I’ve forgot to mention.
I (and, by extension, the Mythic Gazetteer) am a new member of the Indie Game Developer Network. It seems to be a good organization for people who publish games, so if I move away from publishing and into some other kind of RPG content creation (AP games, audio dramas, etc.) we’ll see if it proves to be a valuable resource. At the very least, I’ve been grateful to be a fly on the wall while some RPG luminaries talk shop.
Go forth!
When I run sessions of The Blackwood, I always begin and end with a call for the errants (players and characters) to “go forth and walk the Way’s Margin.” Once we’ve spent time relaxing, learning, or working in one place, it’s important that we take what we’ve done and make use of it wherever we’re going. I’ve reflected on two promising years in the RPG industry in this post. It’s time now for me to go forth and walk my own Way. Thanks for reading, thanks for your support, and I hope to chat with you sometime soon!