Let’s just suppose you have a product that is 8.5 x 11 inches with 96 pages long, Black & White with a retail price of $20 meaning that you sell it to retailers for 50% off the retail cost of the cover - $10. And the actual production of the books to get printed is $5, you will walk away with $5 profit on each book you sell. $5 whole dollars.
When you try to make $5,000 of profit with only one product that is VERY tough. You need to sell 1,000 copies of that product each month. Now for argument sake let’s say they are 2,000 retail RPG stores. So you need to sell 1 book per 2 retail stores every month. Now that is a LOT of units per month.
BUT what if you had 10 products to sell? Then that number of 1,000 breaks down to only 100 copies per month over 2,000 retail stores. You still get the $5,000 you just move is over 10 products over one. This follows the "law of exponential growth" which I have used to expand my PDF business where I now have nearly 500 products. I sell more products, because I have more products to sell. The big issue of most RPG start-up companies is they spend everything on just getting the HUGE 300 page core setting book out and then they can follow it up with anything because they are tried AND out of money to do it.
If they made a 96 Page core book and made seven 24 page supplement books they would sell better over the long term and over the long term is how we win at being a publisher or in business. Best of all this works just as well with the retail stores too. Always ask yourself when you are making a HUGE product, is this about the quality of the setting or your personal ego? Leonardo da Vinci said “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” It is a sin to do more with more when you could do more with less. Stop being sinful. Talk to you later…
Good advice!
ReplyDeleteVERY good advice! I would think that this would be very obvious to anyone who has either been in the rpg business or even just as a consumer, for any amount of time. Just about every rpg system has supplements, supplements, and more supplements!
ReplyDeleteI would just say, from a consumer standpoint, that people are VERY aware of quality when it comes to game add-ons. Re-hashing art over and over is a turn off! As is forcing a consumer to purchase a supplement:
The Elf player characters of Lian Woods have a special ability known as 'Forest Walking'. In order to know what this ability is, you must purchase blah, blah, blah. I HATE that!