One Year of Tabletop RPG Sales

RPG Role-playing

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About a year ago, I published two role-playing PDFs, an adventure (War in the Deep) and a sandbox setting (The City of Talon). I posted my earnings-to-date six months ago. Here’s what I’ve earned since then:

Sales For The Past Six Months (June-November 2009)

Product Number of Sales Gross Net War in the Deep 4 $20.00 $13.00 The City of Talon 3 $15.00 $9.75 TOTAL 7 $35.00 $21.75Sales For The Past Year (November 2008-November 2009)

Product Number of Sales Gross Net War in the Deep 19 $90.00 $58.80 The City of Talon 22 $100.00 $65.00 TOTAL 41 $190.00 $123.80I won’t bother charting the month-to-month sales, as they’ve obviously tailed off dramatically.

Web Traffic

Total hits for War in the Deep on DriveThruRPG: 6,649.

Unique pageviews for War in the Deep on the Musaeum in past six months: 7

Total hits for The City of Talon on DriveThruRPG: 3,852

Unique pageviews for The City of Talon on the Musaeum in past six months:

Source Pageviews bluedwarf.co.uk 32 ENWorld.org 11 Direct 7 Google searches 8 DriveThruStuff.com 4 Others 3 TOTAL 71The keywords used to find Talon: “the crimes of talon” (7!), “brent p. newhall”, and “d&d quest ideas”

bluedwarf.co.uk appears to be a text adventure inspired by Red Dwarf. No idea how that links back to Talon; maybe somebody linked to it on their forum?

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Advertising

None.

Marketing

I described each project here on my blog in a couple of different blog posts. I’m a member of the RPG Bloggers Network, so those posts showed up there.

Analysis

I’m happy to have made over US $120 on two PDFs, though it’s still not that much considering the amount of time I put into them. Even so, $120 is at least a return on my time spent on this hobby.

Plans

I now want to publish more supplements, of course.

In my last “Plans” section, I wrote about my intention to publish two settings and one adventure by…now. That hasn’t happened, though one of those settings is now about 80% complete.

So. I will make that 80%-complete setting a focus, and will ramp up work on an adventure to publish.

I would like to develop an overall theme for my adventures, so I’m not just publishing random ideas. So, I’ve decided to build a broad campaign idea, and set each adventure somewhere within that campaign. Each adventure can be played alone, of course.

I’m also thinking about expanding into systems beyond D&D 4E. Everyone’s building for that. Imagine a series of adventures just for Star Wars players, for example.

Hmmmmmm.

Miniature picture courtesy adobemac on Flickr

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