Happy New Year to all!
I thought I would mark the changing of the calendars by giving you a peek behind the curtain here at Dungeon Age enterprises. I’m going to present some of my sales data, both to thank you all for your support over the years, and also in the hopes that it is helpful to other independent publishers.
As a note, I have never personally run a kickstarter or used any other sales or marketing tools. I just publish my PDFs on DriveThruRPG and make a few announcements on the blog or social media, and then move on to write the next thing. The numbers I am about to present are purely my own sales on DriveThruRPG, and don’t include other efforts (like my projects with the very excellent Merry Mushmen).
Number Time!
So let’s start with some Big Picture numbers:
- I started publishing in October 2018, so I’ve been doing this for 74 months.
- I have published about 25 adventures and games. (I say “about” because I’ve done some separate adventures that I later combined into one, and I have translations too. This is why some of the numbers in this post may not add up exactly.)
- I have personally sold just over 7,500 items on DTRPG.
DTRPG has a “metal” award system. Copper products have sold 50+ copies. Silver are 100+. Electrum are 250+. Gold products are 500+ . Platinum are 1,000+. Currently, Dungeon Age has:
- Copper: 1
- Silver: 9
- Electrum: 14
- Gold: 1
- Platinum (and higher): None
We all like charts, rights? So I made a chart of some of the sales volumes of the more successful Dungeon Age adventures:
So here we can see a bunch of interesting things.
- The Big Head. A “successful” adventure makes its highest sales numbers in the first 3 months or so. This is when I make announcements and hope to get reviews. This tends to be between 25 and 100 sales per month. My biggest launch was The Obsidian Keep (all the way back in 2020) with 130 sales in the first month. Nothing else has come close!
- The Long Tail. After those first 3 months, sales number plummet and cruise along at an average of about 4 sales per month. (Yep, just 4. Each!)
- Reviews. A good review can be powerful. Notice that Witches of Frostwyck doesn’t get a sales spike until it gets a review 18 months after it was published.
- The Others. This chart only shows 8 titles. I tried putting all 25 of my titles on one chart, and it was just an ugly blob. But also, many of those don’t have a Big Head, they’re all Long Tail.
- Birthday Sale. Last year, for about 24 hours, I marked my 45th birthday by dropping the price of every adventure to $0.45. It was a big success!
Lessons Learned
Well, my experiences have mostly confirmed things I already knew from back when I used to published novels.
- The Big Head / Long Tail dynamic is very real. Expect sales to drop, not rise.
- Publicity (marketing, advertising, reviews) is very powerful. The market is huge and it is hard for people to discover you. I am very bad at publicity, but also, I don’t want to spend time online talking about myself, so I’m fine with this.
- It’s probably better to have a bigger number of small products than a smaller number of big products. Probably.*
*A small product costs less, so a new customer is taking a smaller risk by buying it. If they like it, they’ll probably come back for more. Also, having lots of different products makes it easier to offer people different things. I have fairy tale forests, and desert pyramids, and space vampires. With a wider selection, it becomes more likely that I’ll be able to catch everyone’s eye with something. Also, I can make more small products in a year than big ones, so it seems like a more efficient use of my time and energy.
Let me know if you have any specific questions that I might be able to answer about how this business works. I’m no expert, but I’ve been around for a good while now…
