Demand

We ran some ads during the Gamefound campaign.

Which is still open to late pledges

The ads led to a bump in website sales as they always do.

The ads finished when the main campaign finished - at the end of October.

But website sales remained high.

Higher in fact.

The average for the last eleven weeks has been double the average of the preceding quarter.

Which itself was crazy high.

Website sales have been amazing.

And I’ve no idea why!

No ads.

The traffic comes from mostly Google.

With Paul having been ill, then hospitalised, then recovering, then at mine last weekend, then recovering again, we have struggled to keep up with demand.

We’re on top of it again.

Thanks to a quieter week this week.

I’m guessing the Christmas present traffic has peaked now.

Still don’t know where they heard of it.

Or what drove the demand.

Very grateful though, whatever it was!

Success

Rocky ‘Roid was over 500% funded.

The ads didn’t do very well though, probably broke even at best.

Still, FlickFleet is going great.

Website sales for the last five weeks are over 13 times our normal sales.

13. Times.

That’s crazy.

A run of great reviews.

More people finding out about FlickFleet.

The Expo. 

A bit of buzz.

It’s been great. 

At the beginning of the year we had 4 weeks without a sale. 

This week we had eight consecutive days of sales.

It’s our best ever week for sales outside of a convention or crowdfunding fulfilment.

Feels like we’re building momentum.

Scaling

For the last two years the vast majority of our sales have been through our three FlickFleet Kickstarters. And the subsequent pledge managers.

Like over 95%.

Kickstarter FTW!

Our Kickstarters have been huge. And getting huger. For us.

But they are still small fry in the Kickstarter tabletop games space (£18,000 versus $10,000,000).

We have only one retail stockist as our small hand-made runs have too little margin to sell to retailers, let alone distributors.

We sell some through the website, but only a little.

If we want to continue growing, and I'm convinced FlickFleet has great potential, we need to do better in all of these channels.

How can we get more website sales? Get the cost down enough to sell into retail? Have Kickstarters that are 10 times more successful?

I'm thinking about these questions a lot.

Growth

I started Reiver Games in 2006 with £1,000 of our family savings. That's a lot of money. I was lucky that we were able to gamble it - but it’s not enough. I turned it into £4,800 in two years. That wasn't enough.

I 'invested' £12,000 of my life insurance in Reiver Games. That wasn't enough.

I got a bank loan to cover Carpe Astra, another £13,000 I think. That wasn't enough,

The bank loan repayments killed Reiver Games. That and a lack of sales. I lost most of my 'investment'.

£30,000 in total. Not enough.

So I did it again.

I started Eurydice Games three years ago with £1,000 of our family savings again. But it's not enough.

Kickstarter is a game changer. We've been able to slowly change that initial £1,000 into tens of thousands of pounds of assets. Without the major commitment. Without the bank loan.

In our first year we sold £1,217 of Zombology. In our second we sold £12,857 of (mostly) FlickFleet and Zombology. This year our orders have more than tripled. 

Doing alright!

Though due to supplier woes we've not been able to 'sell' half of that.

3,167% growth in three years. Happy with that.

The Scale of Retail

In these days of wall-to-wall Kickstarters it’s easy to forget how critical retail (both online and through FLGSs) is to the success of a game.

Back when I ran Reiver Games I started off with small hand-crafted runs (like I’m doing once again with Eurydice Games). When my Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis led to a life insurance payout I decided I wanted to be a ‘professional’ publisher selling through shops and distributors. I went from selling 100-300 copy print runs to 2,000-3,000 copy runs - which in fairness I didn’t sell out of and I ended up getting rid of a load to liquidators.

With large print runs comes economies of scale, which is just as well since selling through proper channels means more people take a cut: Shops want to buy at half retail plus tax (they have to fund staff, expensive retail locations, absorb the sales tax and want to make a profit), so distributors want to pay 40%. The ideal manufacturing cost is hence 20% of retail (so a game that retails for £50 should cost you £10 to make).

With small print runs you can’t afford to sell to distributors and even selling to retail is a stretch so my whole business plan this time round was based on selling through my website and at clubs and conventions.

As feared, it’s difficult to get people’s attention in the age of Kickstarter and sales have been slower than I would have liked via my website. Sales face-to-face have been pretty good, but I don’t have a lot of time to go to conventions since weekends are my family time and I don’t want to be skipping loads of them to attend conventions. I’ve tried to make it to clubs when I can (sales have been great at Newcastle Gamers) and where possible I’ve tried to include a trip to a local club during my work trips.

But sales are slow.

A couple of months ago I popped into my FLGS, Travelling Man, and spoke to the staff about my game. They have a small press section that is full of hand-drawn comics that are printed at home and thought Zombology would be a good fit for it. By pricing the game at £13 we found a price where it was cheaper than buying it from my website including UK shipping and my cut after they had taken theirs was not too low. They took them on Sale or Return, so I only invoice them for copies sold - so there’s no risk for them of unsold stock and hence lost investment.

Zombology in retail!

In the first month they sold two of their three copies and in the second another two (I’d restocked them back up to three). Last month I met them at the UK Games Expo (I knew several guys from the chain from my Reiver Game days) and their MD wanted to take another 12 copies - four each for the remaining three shops in the chain. That month across the four stores they sold five.

It helps that I’m the only game in the section and that the box design is strong (thanks to advice on BGG), but still this is off to a great start.

Over the last ten months I’ve sold 83 copies of Zombology. Nine of those (over 10%!) have been through retail in the last three months. Despite not wanting to go into retail this time round - it just goes to show that you need to be able to adapt your plans as you gain more data.

FlickFleet is another case in point of adaptability - I was adamant I didn’t want to use Kickstarter, but the only way FlickFleet will see the light of day at a reasonable price is through Kickstarter funding of the laser-cutter so that I can do the laser cutting myself.

What changes have you made to make your game a reality or more successful?

Promotion Response

Three weeks ago I mentioned that I was trying to set up a promotion to encourage US shops to stock my games, and to help those that already stock my games to sell more.

The deal was that Alliance one of my US distributors, who have my games on consignment would offer my games at a discount price to their retailers. The games would be offered at 25% of US MSRP to shops that buy from Alliance. The restriction was that each shop could only buy at most one copy of each game, for demo purposes only - this wasn't a way for the shops to get cheap copies for resale.

The way my consignment deal works with Alliance is that at the beginning of each month they email me purchase orders for all the copies they've sold during the previous month, and then I invoice them for those sales.

This means I've got a very good idea of how well the deal is going, since I'm told at the end of the month how many copies they've sold. Sales last month were up on January's sales, and I know that in the first two and a half weeks of the deal they've sold 28 copies of It's Alive!, 32 copies of Carpe Astra and 25 copies of Sumeria through the deal. Since I know that each shop can only buy a single copy of each game I know that at least 32 shops have taken advantage of the offer already.

I arranged to offer the promotion for a month, and then we'd check how it was going and work out whether it was worth continuing it. I'll be checking in with my buyer at Alliance in a week or so to work out whether it's worth continuing the promotion.

In the meantime, I'll be able to track over the coming months whether sales seem to have increased (remembering the seasonal dip in sales at this time of year).

One thing I'm still not sure about. Why the differences in sales of the promotional copies? Why has Carpe Astra sold more than the others (considering it's my slowest selling game overall). I'm also wondering whether the total is more than 32 (i.e. did every retailer than bought a cheap copy of It's Alive! and Sumeria also buy Carpe Astra, or are there more than 32 takers?

Liquid Assets

In the publishing business you want to do two things: make stuff (in my case board games) and make money. If you're honest you're doing thing A to do thing B.

But the whole process is cyclical. You can't make games without some money to buy them (and pay for the artwork and marketing), and you can't make money without games to sell.

Publishing is one of those businesses where you have to shell out a lot of cash up front. I pay my artists before the game has been manufactured. I pay my manufacturer before I've sold more than a handful of copies.

For the last three years my company has been profitable, i.e. it's worth more now than it was last year, and so on. All sounds fantastic doesn't it? The problem is that my assets are mostly stock. Stock is not a liquid asset. What's a liquid asset? According to Wikipedia:

A liquid asset has some or more of the following features. It can be sold rapidly, with minimal loss of value, any time within market hours. The essential characteristic of a liquid market is that there are ready and willing buyers and sellers at all times.

Clearly I can't just sell all my stock instantly at full price, it takes time to sell stock, so stock is not very liquid. Why is this a problem? If I receive an excellent prototype tomorrow that I want to make immediately I need to be able to pay for it. The manufacturer will only accept cash, so I need lots of cash on hand to fund the manufacture of my next game. If all my assets are stock then I can't make another game until I've sold enough to fund the next game.

Of course, the other problem with stock is you don't know how much it's worth. You know what you paid for it. You know what it could be worth if you sold it all at full price, whole sale price or even the average price of your sales to date. But you don't know how many you can sell. You might have sold the last game you will ever sell yesterday and all your stock is all firewood. Or worse: firewood you are paying to warehouse.

What can you do to avoid this problem? Probably the easiest thing is not over-produce. If you order 5,000 games and only sell 1,500 then you're in trouble. If you produce 1,500 and sell 1,500 you're on to a winner. The problem there of course is that the more copies you make the better your profit margins or the cheaper the final product - which could lead to more sales.

Another thing you can do is try to drive sales early. The faster you sell your games the sooner you turn them into cash that can be re-invested into new games. It's probably worth making less money sooner than more money later.

Breaking into Shops

If you take a look at my stockists page on my website, you'll notice that there are almost as many UK stockists of my games (that I know about) as there are American. America however is a much bigger market (I know of 600-odd games stores in the US and Alliance service 2,500 game and comic shops.

So why is my market penetration so much better in the UK despite several US distributors? There are several reasons:

1. UK shops like to carry UK publishers' games: they're local
2. It's easier for me to contact UK shops by phone and in person
3. It's easier for me to organise events in UK shops
4. My games are cheaper in the UK (less shipping)

So what can I do to improve the number of shops in the US (and Canada, Germany and the rest of Europe for that matter) that carry my games?

The first thing I did was to email all the shops I could find an email address (or web form) for, introducing my games and asking them to consider stocking them. That seemed to go pretty well, but several of the shops wanted demo copies of the games, either to see them before deciding whether or not to stock them or to allow demos of store-owned copies to help them sell the stock they have.

It costs me at least £21 to send a set of all three games to the US so it would be a very expensive effort was I to supply copies to all those who wanted them from the UK. However, my US distributors have stock on hand in the US, and can fold demo copies in with the rest of their stocking order to the shop in question, so the shipping is effectively free. So I'm trying to set up a promotion where one of my distributors allows shops in the US they service to buy my games at a reduced price. Apparently some big US publishers offer shops the chance to buy demo copies at 25% of the full retail price - so that's the deal I'm trying to set up.

One of my US distributors currently have my games on consignment: they have a decent amount of stock of all three games, and they just let me know how many they've sold each month and then I invoice them for those sales. Since they haven't already paid me for the stock they've got on hand, it's going to be easier to set up a promotion with them than someone who has already paid me full wholesale price for the stock they are offering at a reduced price.

Obviously the price I've negotiated with the distributors for the ordinary copies is based on them selling the copies at the ordinary price, so I've got to negotiate a new price for each game when sold through the promotion. Also, I don't want each shop to stock up on cheap copies - I want it limited to one copy per game per store, purely for demo purposes. Fortunately, this is something the distributor can organise.

I've gone around the houses a bit trying to find the right person at the distributor to talk to about this, but hopefully it's going to be sorted pretty quickly, now that I'm talking to the right guy. Things are also being slowed down by the time difference - it usually takes 24 hours to get an answer to my questions :(.

Contacting Shops

Over the last year or so I've managed to pick up twenty distributors for my games. This is obviously a Good Thing(tm), since I can now get my games in more shops and hence more exposure and hopefully more sales to actual customers.

So far, when I bring out a new game I get initial stocking orders from my distributors, and often a restock of the others. Occasionally I get a restock order for one or more of my games out of the blue.

Over the Christmas and New Year period, with no new games released, I've not had many restock orders - most of my distributors still have stock of my games on hand. In an effort to help them sell their stock and encourage them to re-order, I've been contacting shops in the US introducing myself, my company and my games.

I've managed to build a database (read spreadsheet!) of 611 stores in the US, including their location and contact details. That's great - if I could sell two copies of each game to all those stores I'd have sold a huge percentage of my print runs in one fell swoop. Now obviously, lots of those won't want to carry my games because they're not that heavily into board games and they only want to carry the really big names. However, a few of them would want to carry my games, only they've not heard of them - they've slipped under the radar as they receive a welter of information about hundreds of new games.

I think my email marketing campaign has been remarkably successful. I've got to assume a lot of my emails will end up in a spam filter and in many cases won't even be read. However, of the stores I have contacted before today (the ones I contacted today haven't had much of a chance to respond!), 10% have responded to me via email.

That 10% includes 4% who already stock my games, and another 2.5% who have placed orders with their distributors as a result of my emails. Where I've been copied on the emails to their sales contact at the distributor they have usually picked up two or three copies of each game.

What surprised me the most though was the number of stores with no website (not even a Facebook or MySpace page) and the number who don't provide an email address on their website. I can see why they wouldn't want to expose an email address to the world (I get enough spam on mine), but there are ways around it (online email forms, possibly with captchas, obscured email addresses (e.g. jack (at) reivergames (dot) co (dot) uk). I would have thought as a store you would want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to contact you. In total, I couldn't find an email address or form for 113 of the 611 (that's 18%!).

I think this has been a pretty successful effort, I'm just kicking myself that I didn't do it sooner - especially when I had a new game coming out. I'm going to extend my efforts to Canada and then Europe, and possibly other countries where I already have a distributor.

Incentives

In my last quarterly newsletter I did a special deal for subscribers where they got to buy my games at a discount price. There were a few takers, but not a huge number - there's only four hundred or so people on my newsletter mailing list, and most of them already own one or more of my games.

At the moment I'm running another incentive: free shipping on all my games (but not the Sumeria Expansion) when bought from my website - regardless of where I'm shipping the games.

Incentives like these seem pretty harmless - I get a bit less money than selling at full price, and the customer gets it a bit cheaper than full price plus shipping. However, it's not quite that simple.

I've already agreed to sell my games to a bunch of shops and distributors. Those shops and distributors want to sell my games in their backyard, and due to their nature they will be much better at it than I am: A game shop in Lancaster, PA will have a much better idea of who in Lancaster, PA buys board games than I do, and far more people there will know about the local game store than my website. So I want to keep them as customers, and support them however I can.

The shops and distributors that have bought from me have invested their money in buying my games in the hope that they can sell them on at a profit. If I invite a few select people to get the games cheap from me, that's not really any skin off their back - those people were unlikely to buy from them anyway. In fact, as more people get my games and play them, the awareness of my games increases and it might even lead to more people interested in my games and more sales for my stockists.

If, however, I start undercutting them and making a big splash about it, then it might drive some of their customers who would have bought my games from them to buy them from me instead. That's not playing nice. Instead of supporting them in return for buying my stock, I'm hurting them. In that situation they'd be unlikely to buy more of my stock - leading to fewer sales overall.

There are some places in the world where I've got pretty good distribution: the UK, the US, and a chunk of mainland Europe. Similarly, there are a bunch of places where it's really hard to get hold of my games: Australia, New Zealand, Africa and South America. The free shipping deal was designed to help those hard to reach customers, while having minimum impact on my stockists in the well-supplied regions.

So far, it seems to be working, only one of the orders I've received since starting the deal came from a country where I've got good distribution, the rest came from those hard-to-reach countries - people who probably wouldn't have bought my games otherwise.

So I've sold a few extra games to people who were unlikely to get them otherwise; some people who wanted my games but couldn't afford full price plus shipping got them and the shops that stock them didn't get screwed. All sounds good.

The downside is that I really don't make much money on these copies. For example a sale of Sumeria (plus the expansion) to New Zealand gets me £25. £3.72 of that goes to the tax man as VAT. £1.18 goes to PayPal. £8.81 goes to the Post Office. £0.58 goes to Staples for the packaging. I'm left with £10.71. Still, it's more than I'd get selling to a distributor, and it's money I wouldn't have got without the incentive.

Sales Over Time

Happy New Year everyone. I hope you all had a good Christmas (or other appropriate holiday season). I had a proper break for Christmas and New Year - it felt like the first proper break in years, but I'm sure it wasn't.

I read something recently (I think it was on BoardGameGeek but I can't be sure), that said that the vast majority of sales of a game are in the three months after release. I think they even gave a percentage. I can see that for companies with big marketing budgets that would be the case. Before the game is launched lots of money is spent to prime the market to expect and want the game. When the game comes out lots of people will buy the new hot game, but over time there's another new hot game, and then another, so sales tail off. However, I can think of at least two occasions when the front-loaded sales profile is not the case:

The Smash Hit

I've also read that over 15 million copies of The Settlers of Catan have been sold in the 15 years since it was released. Settlers has been a breakout hit, being re-published in tens of languages and becoming a perennial best seller. I can guarantee that most of those 15 million sales weren't in 1995. It's the same for Carcassonne, Magic: The Gathering, Monopoly, Munchkin, Risk, Trivial Pursuit, and any other game that becomes hugely successful. As more people play it, more people buy it and it becomes a juggernaut.

These games sell because people try it, love it, introduce their friends to it, they love it, some of them buy it, they introduce others to it and so on. As time goes on the demand for the game increases - not decreases.

The Sleeper

When the game is unknown and the company is small and has limited marketing budget then it's possible for initial sales to be slow. Distributors and shops don't pick up the game initially, waiting to see if it's got legs before investing in it. Maybe they get demo copies, try it out, like it and get a few copies in. Those copies won't fly off the shelves because no-one's heard of it, but maybe someone takes a chance and tries it out. Things then follow the Smash Hit path but only on a much smaller scale.

Without much of a marketing budget to speak of, I need my games to fall into the Sleeper category. I've not sold the majority of any of my print runs in the first three months. I've sold a decent chunk of my games in their first three months, but not a majority and certainly not 2/3 or 3/4.

How do I intend to do this? Two main strategies. I need to reach new markets where I don't currently have any presence, and improve my market penetration in markets where I do currently have a presence.

For the first point, I'm going to be contacting as many new distributors as I can, focussing on those that have recently expressed an interest in carry my games (particularly those who approached me at Essen) and those in territories where I don't currently have a distributor (notably France and Australia).

For the second part I'm going to continue contacting shops in North America (I'll do Canada once I've finished working through the US States), this seems to be working - several stores are now going to carry my games as a result of me contacting them.

I need sales this year to be at least as good as last year - it's a tall order, but I've got to make it happen. If you've got any ideas on how to boost sales, I'd love to hear them in the comments.

Hobby Publishing: Less Risky

In my last post I showed you just how scary the figures could be for trying to make games for a living. They weren't actual figures for one of my games, but they were indicative. In the comments Daniel asked what about hobby publishing - how does that compare (I paraphrase!). So here's the answer.

Just over three years ago I decided to make and sell some copies of Border Reivers, a board game I had designed over the preceding five years. With little money to throw at the effort and little faith in my ability to sell a lot of copies I chose to go down the hobby publishing route: I would make a small number of copies, largely by hand to keep costs down.

I worked out that I could make 100 copies for £1,255 plus £376 on overheads (I wasn't paying warehousing costs, or myself any salary, but there were a bunch of tools I needed to make the games. To keep costs down I ordered the wooden and plastic pieces all at once (the more you get the cheaper they are), and did the same with the printing. I got a digital printer to do all the printing for me, just onto SRA3 sheets of paper and thin card. I got them to laminate it all to to make it more durable, but I was going to do all the assembly myself. The total price was £1,631 or £16.31 per copy. To cover my costs (plus the cost of attending various conventions and setting up a website I chose to price the game at £30, less than twice the manufacturing cost. I doubted very much whether anyone would pay more than that for it, especially as the cost of shipping would be on top of that. Obviously I couldn't afford to sell to distributors or shops, so I had to hope that I could win enough people over at conventions and via the internet to cover my costs.

With no fixed overheads (no warehousing, no salary) the time it took me to sell the copies didn't really matter - it just came down to whether or not I could. I needed to sell 55 copies to break even, which considering I had no market presence and no reputation seemed like a lot. If I did sell all 100 copies I would stand to make £3,000, or a £1,369 profit.

In the end I damaged some pieces so I only ended up making 96 out of the 100, and some of those I gave away (or kept), I made £2,600, so just under £1,000 profit. Since all those sales were within the first year I gained 60% on top of my original investment, a far better rate of interest than any other savings investment would have offered!

Boardgame Publishing: Not for the Risk Averse

I get lots of emails from people who are interested in publishing a game of their own design. Some want to start small, like I did with Border Reivers and the limited edition of It's Alive!, others want to jump in at the deep end and get their games manufactured professionally and try to sell to shops.

To do the latter you've got to be prepared to risk a large chunk of money and hence the possibility of failure and the loss of that large chunk (or a proportion of it). I thought I'd give an example here with some numbers, so you can see what I mean. These aren't accurate figures from one of my games, but they are indicative, so not miles out either.

Let's say you're a small publisher (like the now legendary Reiver Games), who want to aim at the smaller, lighter, cheaper end of the market. You've designed a game, and you think it's a winner. You think it would sell well at around £20-25. So the first thing to do is to price up getting it made. The more copies you make the cheaper it will be per copy, but the bigger the risk involved as you will have to invest more money, and sell more copies to break even/make a profit.

To sell to shops and distributors you need to be able to make a profit when selling the games at 40% of retail: i.e. £8-£10. Out of this you need to be able to pay your overheads, wages and marketing, so you really need to be getting the games make for around 20% of retail: £4-5.

You approach a manufacturer and get some manufacturing quotes. Your quotes come back as: £9,000 for 1,000 copies (£9 per copy), £12,000 for 2,000 copies (£6 per copy) or £15,000 for 3,000 copies (£5 per copy).

If you want to only make 1,000 copies you need to either sell it at £45, sell it at £25 with almost no margin, or do something in between. Remember to make a profit you need to sell at least the break even number (if you are selling at £10 to distributors and they cost you £9, you won't break even until you've sold 90%, i.e. 900 copies, and even if you achieve a sell out, you'll only make £1,000 profit, which is probably not enough to cover your overheads, wages and marketing budget). If the market for your game at £25 is only 900 people will buy it then you will at least cover the cost of manufacturing, but you will lose money on overheads, etc.

Making 2,000 copies you need to either sell it at £30, sell it at £25 with a 66% margin, or do something in between. Now the break even number at £25 RRP is a smaller percentage of the print run (60%), but with the bigger print run this means more copies (1,200). If you manage to sell 1,200 you've covered the cost of manufacturing, but not your overheads. If you sell out, you've made £8,000 (minus overheads, wages and marketing budget), but can you sell 2,000 copies? It doesn't sound that many when you consider there are 300 million people in the US and more in Europe, but with your marketing budget what proportion of those people will hear about your games? And what proportion of those who hear about them will be interested? If the market is 900 people you will lose £7,500.

If you go for 3,000 copies then selling at £25 RRP (i.e. £10 to distributors) then you will break even at 1,500 and if you sell out you will make £15,000! Of course, that means selling even more copies. If the market for you game is only 900, then you will lose £10,500.

The million dollar question is how many copies of a game can you sell? It depends on a lot of factors. The quality of the game. The effectiveness of your marketing. The price point you've pitched at (you'll sell more games at £5 than at £50 all other things being equal). When you start out in this business you don't really know what you can achieve, that information comes from experience. If you've never made a game in your life you've no idea how many copies you can sell. If you've sold 20 games, with sales of between 1,200 and 12,000 copies you've got a much better idea of how many copies you can sell of a given game at a given price.

A further spanner in the works comes from the time to sell out. Say you make 2,000 copies and you will sell them all. Great. That's £8,000 in the bank. Minus overheads. Let's say your overheads are £1,500 a month (which includes a modest wage, warehousing and a few other things). If you sell out in a month you've made £20,000, minus the manufacturing cost: £12,000 and one month's overheads: £1,500. So £6,500 of profit. Nice work. But one month seems a little unlikely. Let's say it takes you six months to sell out. Now the overheads are £9,000 and you've lost £1,000. If it takes two years, then you'll lose £28,000!

How on earth can I still be in business I hear you ask? My overheads are extremely low (I'm still not taking a salary), and having multiple games means I've spread the risk. Also the overheads only apply once. My overheads are the same whether I have one game or several, so getting income from multiple games all offset the overheads.

For the record, It's Alive! has been out nearly 15 months and I'm still a good distance away from selling out of it.

Off To Essen

This evening my journey to my second Spiel convention in Essen begins. Despite my best intentions it's been a largely last minute panic yet again, but now most of the panic is over. I've just been told my games have arrived at the convention centre, and I've collected my float (a whole bunch of five Euro notes for change at the booth), so the only thing I'm waiting on now is the banners which will hopefully be delivered shortly.

As I've mentioned before, last year's Spiel was a huge success for me and I'm hoping to repeat that this week. Several things are different though, and since this is only my second Spiel I don't have enough previous information to judge how that will affect things.

Last year I had rented out a third of my stand to Peter Struijf of Geode Games, and I only had one game of my own (though I had posters for Carpe Astra and a homemade prototype, the finished product was still a month away). My games weren't available in Germany yet (I picked up my first German distributor at the show, with my second signing on shortly afterwards) and It's Alive! had only been out for about five weeks - so it was pretty new.

This year I've a whole stand to myself and three games (the latest of which came out four months ago) which are all already available in Germany. I've spent more money on advertising this time (Boardgame News with their excellent English-language Spiel preview and SpielBox which is apparently the place to go for German-language Essen information), and signed up for a couple of deals with other people too (I'm in the Spiel fuer Spiel magazine again and I'm doing a deal with the Spielerei German-language magazine which will hopefully lead a few more people to my stand. Plus I'm doing the 'free 2 player expansion with every Sumeria sale' deal too.

How much will any of these factors affect my sales at the show? With so little information to go on I have no idea. The show will have cost me a lot more this year, hopefully that will pay off, but I can't be sure until next week, when I get home and work it all out.

Last year I sold 140 copies of It's Alive! to punters and another 96 or so to shops and distributors before finally getting rid of the remaining stock to a couple of big distributors. Those big distributors are unlikely to take any stock from me this time, but I'm hoping to get some orders from the smaller European distributors and betters sales to punters, due to the advertising and deals.

I'm taking a full pallet of Sumeria (504 copies), plus 192 It's Alive! and 96 Carpe Astra. My limited experience as a paid salesman back in my late teens seemed to focus entirely on targets. So I feel I should set myself some. I'm thinking 50 Sumeria, 5 Carpe Astra and 10 It's Alive! sales to punters per day. Is that achievable? I have no idea. Only one way to find out.

Wish me luck...

Newsletters

Newsletters, when done right, are what Seth Godin calls permission marketing:

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

I've asked everyone on my mailing list for their permission to send them a newsletter every quarter, and in every case they have signed up, saying they want to receive this information.

I offer people who meet me at conventions the chance to sign up and I offer people who email me the chance to sign up. Only those that want to get the emails. It's not spam.

In the newsletter, I always list the conventions I'll be attending over the next few months, how each of my games are doing and any information about new games in the pipeline. After Tuesday's discussion about a sale, I decided to offer the sale only to those people on my mailing list.

Pros

Only offering the sale prices to those people on my mailing list is a way of giving them something back for giving me permission to send them marketing information. It says that I appreciate their permission.

Although I am undercutting some retailers with my sale prices, it's a limited time offer, to a select group of people, so it shouldn't annoy my distributors and retailers.

Cons

Because it's going out to a limited number of people, lots of whom will already own my games, it won't boost my sales that much.

Because it's only mentioned to people on my mailing list, although it is a reward for being on my mailing list, it doesn't act as an incentive to join my mailing list as those people who aren't on it will never hear about it.

It's led to a few sales so far, not sure how many more to expect.

September Could Be Slow

I'm expecting September sales to be fairly low, since I've no new games coming out, and I hope lots of people will be waiting to buy from me at Essen next month (and get the Sumeria 2-player expansion free with a purchase of Sumeria!).

So far, every month's sales this year has been better (sometimes a lot better) than the corresponding month last year. So far so good. But in fairness, last year I had a few hand-made copies of It's Alive! in April and May, then nothing until September when the professional re-print of It's Alive! arrived.

Last year's September was at the time my best month ever, more than twice the turnover than the previous June (which was the best I'd had so far). Of course it didn't keep the record long as October was when I went to Essen for the first time, and last October's sales were nearly five times September's, which remains my current record.

The It's Alive! re-print will have been out one year on Friday. Last September's figures were the result of the pre-orders and the initial stocking orders for It's Alive! With no corresponding new game launch this year I'm going to struggle to match last year's September figures this year. I've been considering doing a September sale to try to boost sales this month.

To make it worthwhile, the sale price has to be low enough to entice people to buy from me (not a local internet retailer), while still making me some money after I've paid the shipping and VAT. I figure I've got three options: free shipping, discounted games with full price shipping and discounted total (shipping and games). I'll consider these against example UK and US online pricing (I've used Games Lore and Board and Bits respectively as examples). I've used Carpe Astra as the example (it's in the middle of my game price range) and the middle price for Boards and Bits shipping ($8.50). Note that both online retailers offer discounted (or free) shipping if you place a large order, so me considering a purchase of just Carpe Astra is a little disingenuous.

Free shipping. My price for Carpe Astra: £22 (approx $36.30). Games Lore Price: £20.20. Boards and Bits price: $34.10. Makes the game more affordable for US customers (but still more expensive than buying from an online retailer in the US), and doesn't help UK customers at all (they can get it cheaper from a UK online store, or from a shop). I'd make a decent amount money on a UK sale (£22 - £3.14 shipping = 18.86 which is £16.40 ex VAT), less on a US sale (£22 - £8.30 shipping = £13.70 which is £11.91 ex VAT).

Discounted games, full price shipping. If I did 30% off: My UK price: £15.60 + £3.14 shipping = £18.74, My US price: £15.60 + £8.30 = £23.90 (approx $39.50 - almost full retail price!). Helps the UK customer, but doesn't help the US customer at all (since the shipping is not discounted and very expensive). I'd make a reasonably amount of money each sale (£13.56 ex VAT).

Discounted total. Say 40% off the total game and shipping price: My UK price: £25.14 * .6 = £15.08, my US price: £30.30 * .6 = £18.18 (approx $30). This would be a great deal for the UK customer, and a reasonable deal for the US customer. My ex Vat pricing would be £10.38 for a UK sale (more than a distributor sale, less than a shop sale), £8.59 for a US sale (in the same range).

So, I wonder. Would this work? Would I sell any copies as a result? Would I look desperate? If I decide to do it, then I can advertise it in my quarterly newsletter which is due soon, and on BoardGameGeek and Boardgame News.

Building Momentum

We moved into our new house last Thursday. Thursday, Friday and the weekend were spent moving and trying to sort stuff out, Monday I was at the old house, cleaning and waiting in for three orders to be collected by the couriers.

The first was an initial stocking order for my first Canadian distributor - yeay! They were one of three new distributors who have contacted me since I ran the competition on BoardGameGeek. The second (a new US distributor) has placed an order which I'm going to ship on Friday (I've had to wait until I can go to York to get more It's Alive! stock - I've sold through the pile I was keeping at home) and the third has only recently enquired.

The second order shipping on Monday was a re-stock from one of my UK distributors. This was really gratifying, since they'd ordered less of Sumeria than they had initially ordered of It's Alive! and Carpe Astra, and three weeks later they had to ask for some more :-) I was expecting their sales to be slower since several of the larger UK shops had bought from me directly at or since the Expo, but this doesn't seem to have affected their sales much at all.

Yet another US distributor has also enquired in the last couple of weeks. This third new distributor is even better since a Danish/Norwegian distributor I've been talking to for months told me a while back that if I dealt with PHD they would buy my games from them, rather than me directly. So, if PHD also sign up, that will be two new distributors for the price of one :-). I don't know whether they will bite yet, but so far so good.

On top of all that I spoke to another distributor today on the phone. He's going to start soliciting my games. Hopefully this will lead to them picking them up, but it was effortless to get him to consider it.

I'm feeling pretty positive at the moment. The new house is lovely, and has a nice big office that I can store things in much more tidily than I could at either of our previous places. Feedback on Sumeria has been pretty good so far and June's sales will be my second-best ever (out-stripping January, the previous holder of that title, but not a patch on last October and Essen :-) ).

The only fly in the ointment is that most of my European distributors have yet to place a Sumeria order, so European availability is pretty patchy.

It's interesting to see how my mood varies. Entrepreneurship requires boundless enthusiasm and optimism. I try, but a dry spell like Feb-May gets me down, but a good month like June and I'm straight back up again :-)

Finding My (Gaming) Feet

It's always hard when you move to a new area. You don't know anyone or where anything is. It takes a while to find your feet and get settled in.

Gaming is helping me get to know some people down here this time. When I moved to York I knew there was a board games club there, but it took me best part of a year to actually make it to Beyond Monopoly! through which I made several good friends and managed to organise a playtesting group. This time I'm going to be more organised.

In advance of our move, I asked around on BoardGameGeek for information about the area and got introduced to a few people that way. Yesterday I had one of them round for an afternoon of gaming :-). Matt and I played two games of Race for the Galaxy, two games of Dominion and my first game of Le Havre - Uwe Rosenberg's follow-up to the extremely popular Agricola.

I'm hoping to join another local group on Tuesday and then make it along to Matt's games club on Thursday. Games are a great medium for making new friends :-)

Today's main order of business is sales. I've got to wait in for the courier to collect the first order from my new German distributor, so I figure I might as well chase up all my contacts in distributors that haven't yet ordered as well as a few who's orders I'm waiting on.

Back Online

We moved down South last Monday/Tuesday. Since then I've had no internet access. I've been making trips into Bedford (about eight miles away) when I can, to use the free wifi in the Bedford Creative Arts Gallery. But the company has been effectively on hold for nine days.

I've tried to keep things going: I've collected some stock from my warehouse, shipped an order of Carpe Astra to Germany, I've been investigating shipping costs for a large order to a new US distributor and I've been getting manufacturing and art quotes for Sumeria. But without regular internet access I've felt very cut off.

Now I'm back online all the time, I'm trying to close a few orders that I've been waiting on for a while and sort a few other things out that I've been waiting on.

Jack's back!

Ding! Ding! Change Ends.

It's all change at Reiver Towers. The games to the other UK distributor were collected yesterday, so our bedroom feels palatial all of a sudden, now the space has been freed up. I heard back from the US distributor last night, the pallet deal may have fallen through, though they are interested in collecting some stock at Essen. I'm going to ring them later to see if I can save it, if nothing else it's one less pallet to ship down South.

Down South? Why would I be shipping my pallets to the South I hear you ask? The Wife has just got a job down there, so we'll be moving towards the end of this year, beginning of next. I'll need to arrange a new warehouse down there and then ship my games to it. The more I can sell before then (and hence the less I have to ship) the better.

I'm starting to feel on top of my Essen preparations. I've got a few things left to do, but nothing too onerous. The German lessons have suffered, but at least things will be under control at the fair (I hope!).