Q4 2011 Quarterly Report

You thought I had forgotten about this stuff, didn't you? Well, I didn't.

 Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road

Sales Channel/Product Type	October	November	December	Quarter Total	YTD	Last Year	Grand Total
Lulu/Print	1	-	1	2	18	19	68
Lulu/PDF	-	-	-	-	2	4	6
Lulu/EPUB	-	-	1	1	4	-	4
Lulu/Total	1	-	2	3	24	23	78
CreateSpace/Print	-	3	4	7	8	-	8
One Book Shelf/PDF	3	22	3	28	54	21	104
One Book Shelf/Print	-	-	-	-	2	-	2
One Book Shelf/Bundle	-	4	-	4	9		9
One Book Shelf/Total	3	26	3	32	65	21	115
Paizo/PDF	-	-	-	-	2	3	5
Your Games Now/PDF	-	-	-	-	-	-	1
Totals	4	29	9	42	99	47	207

 Adventures in Oz Characters Pack

Sales Channel/Product Type	October	November	December	Quarter Sales	YTD Sales
OBS/PDF	-	1	1	2	22
OBS/Bundle	3	6	-	9	13
OBS/Total	3	7	1	11	35
Paizo/PDF	-	-	-	-	1
Totals	3	7	1	11	36

The big thing to notice on this chart is that huge jump in sales over at OneBookShelf during November. This was due to their first Teach Your Kids to Game Week that was held that month. That jump in sales was nearly equivalent to the initial sales rush I experienced over at OBS in September '10. (I'm sure you can imagine how upset I was that AiO was not picked for inclusion in 2012.)

CreateSpace also started generating numbers this quarter. All those Christmas shoppers on Amazon, I'm sure (I saw a similar bump this year, too). Now I just need to work on a way to get onto more people's Christmas lists.

This also gives us our annual totals for this year. 99 total sales for the year, mostly from OBS. 36 copies of the Characters Pack were sold, but only 23 people paid for it specifically. Some of the bundle purchases may have been motivated by the Characters Pack, but I don't quite know how to tease that information out of my raw data.

The Obligatory End of the Year Post

Well, it's time to say goodbye to 2012 and hello 2013.

2012 was a decent year for sales. 77 copies across all formats. It may not sound like much, but it means that I'm still a contender. I don't plan on leaving the ring anytime soon, either.

I made my final payment to my last artist in January of this year. Which means that most of the money I've brought in from sales this year has been pure profit (Though see below for what I'll be doing with that profit.)

The blog was an interesting beast over 2012 as well. My most popular post from the year 2012 was Another Year, Another DunDraCon, my annual DunDraCon convention post. Mostly for the pics of the guy who brought his lobotomizer to show off. The post that got the most visits this year was actually from back in 2010. That's when I revealed that the girl in the chainmail bikini that I had photographed at that year's DunDraCon was in fact none other than Chainmail Girl.

The one post that is somehow remarkably popular even though I wish it wasn't is this one. I'm not sorry I wrote it as I think that my point was a valid one. But given that Mr. Skarka is a polarizing figure in the gaming industry, that post is just one more bit of ammunition for the inevitable mudslinging (mostly because of the shock value of the post title). I was especially chagrined to discover that this guy was the guy to do it.

Resolutions for the new year? Sure, I've got a few.

Get my house in order:  I'm not going to bore you with personal problems or stories from my day job, but a number of things have stepped up over the last year or so to really cramp my style. That needs to come first before I'm able to make too many other plans.

Get into stores: I'm sure you all know that this has been a goal of mine for a while. I've had a plan to do it for the last year, but I've just been waiting for the money. Well, the money has been accumulating slowly and steadily over the last year or so. By February, I should have enough to make a serious attempt at getting it done. Still a few i's to dot and t's to cross, but everything seems to be coming together.

Get back to writing: Partly related to that "Get my house in order thing". I may have been updating the blog pretty regularly, but I haven't made any real progress on projects beyond the blog. I tried to do a novel for NaNoWriMo this year and managed only 300 or so words. I need to better than that if I'm going to manage any of the other things I want to do.


Happy New Year and have an Ozzy 2013!

Ow! Stop Hitting Me With That Axe!

Everyone seems to love categories and labels. And the RPG hobby is no exception. One of the labels getting some discussion over at the Barking Alien blog is "Story game." Detractors of this type of game claim that they are simply railroaded stories that are passed down from designer to GM to player.

As the designer of one of these "story games" (links over on the right), I must disagree. AiO is not simply about recreating the adventures of Dorothy & Company word for word. It incorporates the broad themes of the stories, friendship and exploration, but anything you do with the rules and setting I've provided is up to you. (One of my Facebook fans even ran an adventure called "Beavis and Butthead Do Oz.")

One of the things that I think is going on is that many players out there are trained to view violence as the primary solution to many gaming situations. Since RPGs grew out of wargames and drew inspiration from adventure fiction, this is actually kind of understandable. Even in games and genres where "I hit it with my axe" is not the preferred solution as it is in D&D, these gamers will not complain as long as it remains a valid solution.

Many story games, however, take differing approaches to combat or put the focus on other areas of gameplay. This often means that "I hit it with my axe" becomes a sub-optimal solution or maybe even a bad solution to the scenario. So players are not really being railroaded by story games, but may be feeling restricted when that favored option is taken away from them.

 AiO is actually a good example of this. Although hitting things with your axe (or other Deadly Weapon) does have an effect on an opponent, it will not kill them. Once a foe is defeated, you still have to figure out what to do with them afterwards.

Because this idea is so pervasive, I worry that my game's potential success is ultimately limited. I have a friend who is a self-admitted hack & slash gamer who will sometimes ask me "Now when are you going to design something that people will actually play?"

What do you think, guys? How important is combat in the games you play? Could you deal with a game in which "I hit it with my axe"  was the wrong course of action more often than not? Are you playing a game like that right now? Are you playing AiO?

Merry Christmas!

Just a little post to wish all of you a merry Christmas. I do have some more numbers I could be putting up, but who wants a boring dose of reality on this of all days?

Even if today isn't Christmas for you, I hope you have a blessed day today.

Q3 2011 Quarterly Report

 Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road

Sales Channel/Product Type	July	August	September	Quarter Total	YTD	Last Year	Grand Total
Lulu/Print	1	-	1	2	16	12	66
Lulu/PDF	-	-	-	-	2	-	6
Lulu/EPUB	2	1	-	3	3	-	3
Lulu/Total	3	1	1	5	21	12	75
CreateSpace/Print	1	-	-	1	1	-	1
One Book Shelf/PDF	4	6	6	16	26	29	76
One Book Shelf/Print	-	-	1	1	2	-	2
One Book Shelf/Bundle	-	2	2	4	5		5
One Book Shelf/Total	4	8	9	21	33	29	83
Paizo/PDF	-	-	-	-	2	-	5
Your Games Now/PDF	-	-	-	-	-	1	1
Totals	8	9	10	27	57	42	165

 Adventures in Oz Characters Pack

Sales Channel/Product Type	July	August	September	Quarter Sales	YTD Sales
OBS/PDF	-	4	-	4	20
OBS/Bundle	-	1	3	4	4
OBS/Total	-	5	3	8	24
Paizo/PDF	-	-	-	-	1
Totals	-	5	3	8	25

In terms of big news for this quarter, I logged my first sale from CreateSpace. Since CreateSpace is an Amazon company, that meant a free listing on Amazon.com. Although I could never manage to get my original files accepted back in 2010, I thought the file surgery that made my participation in the OBS Now In Print! program possible might be what I needed at CreateSpace as well. I guessed right and very quickly got things set up over there.

 

Also, this quarter marks the transition from PDF to EPUB over at Lulu. Since they were discontinuing their multimedia category (which is where I had stuck my PDF), they offered me a free conversion to EPUB and also went ahead and made it available on the iBookstore and the Nook.

Now that we have the opportunity to look back in time somewhat, it seems that nothing quite lives up to that first rush. Sales at Lulu and OBS dropped by about 50% over the same quarter last year. Once we get 2 years on, we'll see if that 50% reduction holds over time.

Down in the Characters Pack chart, I have added a new line labeled "Bundle." This is for copies that are distributed as part of the Corebook and Characters Pack Bundle. The price of the bundle is the same as the corebook by itself, so customers are basically getting the Characters Pack for free in these cases. Since they were effectively giveaways, it would be tempting to simply write them off. But looking at the bundle sales compared to the individual sales of either product can be illuminating. (The corebook part of the bundle is included in the OBS/PDF total of the main chart.)

Teach Your Kids To Game Week Strikes Back!

Just like the Empire!

That's right folks! DriveThruRPG is once again having a Teach Your Kids to Game Week. If you've been looking for the right game to introduce your kids (or maybe even someone else's) to the joys of gaming, they've cooked up a nice little list of options.

But wait! Where's AiO? Not to worry. It's got a nice stable home over here on their Family Gaming page! Apparently the list of games for TYKTGW was so long that they had to do some prioritizing.

Mischief managed.

Q2 2011 Quarterly Report

 Adventures in Oz: Fantasy Roleplaying Beyond the Yellow Brick Road

Sales Channel/Product Type	April	May	June	Quarter Total	YTD	Last Year	Grand Total
Lulu/Print	2	5	-	7	14	19	64
Lulu/PDF	-	2	-	2	2	-	6
Lulu/Total	2	7	-	9	16	19	70
One Book Shelf/PDF	1	-	2	3	10	-	60
One Book Shelf/Print	1	-	-	1	1	-	1
One Book Shelf/Bundle	1	-	-	1	1	-	1
One Book Shelf/Total	3	-	2	5	12	-	62
Paizo/PDF	-	1	-	1	2	-	5
Your Games Now/PDF	-	-	-	-	-	-	1
Totals	5	8	2	15	30	19	138

 Adventures in Oz Characters Pack

Sales Channel/Product Type	April	May	June	Quarter Sales	YTD Sales
OBS/PDF	-	8	8	16	16
Paizo/PDF	-	1	-	1	1
Totals	-	9	8	17	17

This is where things start to get interesting. It's been my first full year as a publisher of an actual product. You can see that I've added an extra column to the chart so that I can look at how the quarterly totals compare to last year. And as we see, even though I was selling books in all three months of this quarter, I didn't sell as much as the month and a half that I had last year. But then again, last year did include that initial release rush.

Speaking of initial releases, this quarter also saw the release of the Adventures in Oz Characters Pack. Although it went to all of the places I sold PDFs, only 2 outlets got any kind of performance. I was actually surprised that one of them was Paizo.

The print edition of AiO actually became available at the OneBookShelf sites (DrivethruRPG and RPGNow) in the last week of March, but didn't get any nibbles until April. You may recall that I had some rather interesting trials in getting to an acceptable POD release from OBS.