Thursday 11 February 2016

A Year of Living Yoon-Suinly

About this time a year ago, Yoon-Suin was released. I thought it might be fun to do a sort of summary of what's gone on.

When I was in the later editing stages for the book, I came across this post by Epidiah Ravachol, breaking down his first year of producing his Worlds Without Master magazine. This seemed to be following the trend set by Vincent Baker and others among the story gamers towards being transparent about their sales.

I found that post by Epidiah very useful and interesting, as somebody working on a game of my own, so I thought I'd share a brief overview of sales so far and some of the lessons learned.

I sell Yoon-Suin through three outlets: OBS (drive thru RPG/RPG now), Payhip, and Lulu (for POD). Sales as of 31st Jan 2016 were as follows:

Lulu (print edition): 620 units
OBS: 369 units
Payhip: 153 units

I've sold a handful more since then. Initially the big surge was through Payhip. Now I hardly get any sales from them. I would say now, a year on, in the "long tail" for Yoon-Suin, 80% of sales are from Lulu, 19% are through OBS, and 1% are through Payhip.

What have I learned?

1) Print does better than PDF. I was initially surprised by this. I was expected about 2/3 of sales to be in PDF when in fact print outperforms digital, and seems to increase its dominance over time. But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense: print is generally better than PDF - more useful and readable - and people recognise that.

2) Payhip is objectively better in many dimensions than OBS. You get the money straight away (its all automatic - sell a PDF, the money is in your Paypal account within seconds), they take care of VAT, and they take a tiny sliver for themselves (5%). There should be no competition. But...

3) OBS has a dominant position in the market among people buying RPG stuff, so you'd be a fool not to use them. I have never ever used a single link to the OBS page for Yoon-Suin, but I've still sold more than twice as many units that way as I have through Payhip. People just seem to prefer to buy through OBS. I hope the situation changes, but for the time being, you're better off making your stuff available through them to attract browsers and take advantage of the trust people have in it.

4) By the same token, though, since Payhip and other options are a bit more profitable, you'd be a fool to use OBS exclusively. Take the slight hit (65% share rather than 70%) as the cost of having the option to publish elsewhere.

5) Creating it was bloody hard work but worth it.

25 comments:

  1. Selling 620 dead paper artifacts to a niche-within-a-niche market is no mean feat, but it sure does feel pretty special to be one of only 620 people in the WORLD to be using this treasure in analog.

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  2. To offer a customer data-point: I only buy PDFs. I actively don't want physical media. In some misty future where I own several mansions to hold my library, sure, but right now I own way too much crap, so PDFs and ebooks are a godsend.

    I buy almost all of them through OBS. Never heard of Payhip before this post, but I'll check it out.

    Glad you felt it was worthwhile. You make some cool worlds.

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    1. I can't really read PDFs. I recognise that others can, but I need physical paper.

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  3. I had never heard of Payhip either. Have I been living in a cave or have they just been rubbish at publicity? I bought the paper version. RPGs are a luxury item for me and frankly a PDF is all function and no luxury.

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    1. I think they just have no legs at all in the RPG market because the OBS sites are so dominant.

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    2. Part of the problem is if you go to their website it advertises only to sellers. - You need to have the author do the advertizing for their product I guess, sending around links? - I couldn't find an easy browsing option on there anyway.

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  4. Huh -- I had never heard of Payhip either. I googled it, and the payhip website seems to be seller focused ("a simple way to sell your eBooks, music, videos, photography, fonts, software, courses, digital art and other downloadable products!"). It asks me to sign in -- there's no indication of a storefront.

    Is there somewhere else I need to go to look at stuff I might want to buy? (Maybe this is why OBS gets all the traffic) Does it rely on the sellers distributing direct links?

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    1. It relies on sellers distributing direct links. So you get no buyers who are just browsing around like you will on OBS sites.

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  5. That is an impressive amount of print sales. Do you think print sales are closely related to the number of readers of the blog, (almost 1 for 1)?

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    1. I'm really not sure. I assume there is a big overlap, but I get the impression there have been lots of word-of-mouth sales.

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  6. That is valuable information, thank you!

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  7. Interesting. I used Payhip to publish last year and loved how user-friendly it was, if anyone wants to sell their rpg with video or soundtrack alongside- 'ah, symphony Carcosa' then Payhip is your tool

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    1. Yeah, I really like the clean, efficient way the whole experience works.

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  9. It's a masterpiece...definitely the maguffin that instigated a fresh and reinvigorated interest in my hobby. I learned about it via what i believe to have been the book's first RPG.net review.

    I've got a physical copy that I'm desperate to use directly. I keep dropping campaign hints: "they say the Yellow City is plated with gold pieces.", etc.

    My players steadfastly refuse to cease grubbing around the setting equivalent of Oldham.

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    1. Oldham has its virtues, I'm sure. Not quite sure what, though.

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  10. I'm not surprised print did better on this one. I only buy pdf when the number of pages is small enough to conveniently print it out myself in booklet format. Anything else I'd rather buy as a paper book right away.

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    1. Yeah, I can't really read things off a screen long than a page or so. At work I print anything I have to read. (And I'm sure I am due a slap on the wrist about this at some point!)

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  11. Yoon-Suin has been my introduction to oD&D, and I'm absolutely loving it. Thank you for putting in the hard work.

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    1. Not at all. I'm glad you and so many others seem to like it.

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  13. Yoon-Suin is a work of art. I'm about to drop my group into the Yellow City next week... cannot wait!

    David, you wouldn't by any chance be sharing copies (hopefully hi-res) of the hand drawn maps?

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    1. Jacques, I'm sorry I got to this so late. If you want the hand drawn maps and get this comment, email me at jean DOT delumeau AT gmail DOT com.

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  14. I have never heard of payhip until just now after reading this piece.
    I have the print version of Yoon Suin and it is an excellent product, very glad you put it out. It has spurred me to create something similar but different for my groups. I look forward to using it at the table.

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