NEW PUBLISHER BUSINESS PLAN
guildofblades:
>>Our plan was to go to distributors before printing, with a PDF or prototype. How that goes will largely determine where we head from there. For advertising we were going to take spots out in magazines like Kobold Quarterly, and do some internet campaigns.. Its about 75 dollars for a small ad. I haven't fully investigated our marketing strategy yet, since right now I am focusing on learning the more boring aspects of running my own business. As I said,we are in the early stages. If we need to lower the numbers we print, we will do so. But our goal isn't to be a indie publisher. It is to achieve steady growth and become a name in the industry. We understand that is a lofty goal, and are fine falling down in the process.<<
Hi Seamus,
Looks like you have recieved some good advice so far, so I have just a bit more to add.
1) Print Run Size:
You can't possibly make a realistic decision with regards to how much to print until you have established a reasonably detailed business plan in how you will sell them. I understand your desire to utilize the 3 tier distribution system and to sell through the distributors. I can see how judging your print run size around some assumptions of how that business relationship might work might make sense, but you have a few bridges to cross before you can assume much at all. The first thing you need to realize is just because you wish to do business with the distributors is that many of them (or all of them) might not want to do business with you as a start up.
If you want a realistic chance of being picked up by the key distributors you will need to wow them. Get some quality POD copies of your book printed in advance to use in making presentations to them. Get a face to face presentation to pitch your company and product to them. And don't rely on how "cool" the product is to win those accounts. Come prepared with a very detailed marketing plan that you plan to impement if they pick up your book. They are going to want to see how you will be helping to push sales through to retailers and how you will generate grass root interest among consumers.
If you do get picked up by various distributors, work with them to get your product through the pre order process. Speak with their buyers about that process and its timeline. Base your print run size around their pre orders. If they hand in pre orders, collectively, of say 600 to 700 units, then sure, a 1000 to 1500 print run makes perfect sense. If, however, they turn in pre orders of 150 units (a much more common number of RPG start ups and small press) then obviously 1500 books is going to be a bit too much inventory to carry at the start. You'll want more like 300 to 500 books.
If you fail to get the distributors on board, unless you get some other major sales channel open, then yeah, maybe 100 to 200 books is the right number to start. Product to fill mail orders and to do convention sales.
2) Hitting the Ground Running.
Unless you have just released the next Pokemon or you are entering the frey with 5-10 products designs already to print and are backed by several hundred grand, this just NEVER happens. Expect to enter the game at a very slow crawl. That being said, you CAN start small and build that into something larger. How well prepared and how well you work at it may decide if it takes you a couple years to grow into a self supporting company or if it takes a bit longer (about7-8 years for us). But if you stay determined and keep pursuing growth opportunities you can start small and grow into a mid sized company (you'll never be a "large" company without some kind of massively successful break out hit).
Starting small is a perfectly valid strategy and fairly prudent if you don't have a really darn good plan for starting "big" and the resources to actually implement it.
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.guildofblades.com/retailgroup.php
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com
Eero Tuovinen:
It's all good, Seamus. Who knows, I might just have the wrong sort of experience to advice you - my own goals lie more in honing my skills as an artist than growing my business, so I naturally approach the issue of reaching the audience more from a skills-based point of view than a money-spending one.
My own take on the growth thing is that an inexperienced publisher with an untested game will benefit immeasurably from a modest starting point: by printing up a 100 or 200 books and selling them directly to customer you'll make good money, have plenty of new and necessary work introduced to you, get to vet your website for reals, get to make final changes to your product if the first 100 copies prove somehow deficient, get to encounter the customers and the reviews/reactions to your product, familiarize yourself with the convention scene, learn about soft advertising techniques, build contacts towards other publishers, fans, retailers and distributors and do a dozen other things that you haven't done before. On the other hand, you will lose nothing by doing this, except perhaps a little time: if your game really is of a caliber where it'd be realistic to print up a thousand books for distribution, then you should be able to sell 100 directly to customers during one month around the convention season.
But generally speaking, the approach I discuss here is in many ways what I see as an ideal growth plan, exactly because of the warm-up issue I mentioned upthread: it takes time more than anything else to make a place for yourself in the collective minds of the hobbyists - time and good or at least relevant product. Hard advertising like magazine adverts or web campaigns produce much better results on a softened audience that has some reason to be interested in your product already: WotC gets good return on advertising new Magic expansions not because everybody would, but because the brand is extremely well known and the product is directed at people already committed to it; thus the advertisement acts to transmit information and activate an existing fan-base. A similar advertising campaign will be much less efficient for an unknown name simply because people are trained in ignoring the advertisement flow in their everyday lives. It's just bad return on investment to pay for eyeballs if you're unknown to the audience; you could be paying the same money for appropriate start-up publicity, such as review copies for reviewers and industry people. Or heck, pay yourself to sit at a computer and connect with people, start a blog or write an introductory mini-supplement to pust in the Internet. You've already made name for yourself among potential customers by hanging out here.
As to how this reflects on retailers... I don't deny that being on the shelves of the retailer is an attractive proposition and even useful for the most unknown publisher, but the product needs to fit very well for that sort of thing to be worthwhile: it needs to look right and be priced right to catch the eye and make for that impulse buy, or at least present itself in a positive and intriguing light when the potential customer browses it at the store. My personal impression is that game store presence has lost importance steadily for the last ten years: today you're at the store next to hundreds of not thousands of other products, while the majority of the shelf-space and retailer attention is committed to large brand products. In that environment your game needs to be something truly special to get more than the passing glance from a customer; to get significant shelf-space and retailer attention you need to publish not a product, but a product line. It's inherently rigged to favour the big, established publisher. For these reasons I am not opposed to retailer presence, but I don't consider it integral to a growth strategy in its early days, either. I'd be much more interested in it after I'd saturated the consciousness of the Internet-going hobby populace.
Also, listen to Ryan: not only is he in the exact place you're looking to grow into, with the experience to match, but he's also saying what I tried to say much more concisely. There is no reason to make any sort of decisions on large print runs before talking it through with the distributors you plan to attract.
(And Ryan, do write somewhere about how your business is doing. I enjoy reading your saga.)
Seamus:
Quote from: guildofblades on April 03, 2009, 09:38:12 AM
>>Our plan was to go to distributors before printing, with a PDF or prototype. How that goes will largely determine where we head from there. For advertising we were going to take spots out in magazines like Kobold Quarterly, and do some internet campaigns.. Its about 75 dollars for a small ad. I haven't fully investigated our marketing strategy yet, since right now I am focusing on learning the more boring aspects of running my own business. As I said,we are in the early stages. If we need to lower the numbers we print, we will do so. But our goal isn't to be a indie publisher. It is to achieve steady growth and become a name in the industry. We understand that is a lofty goal, and are fine falling down in the process.<<
Hi Seamus,
Looks like you have recieved some good advice so far, so I have just a bit more to add.
1) Print Run Size:
You can't possibly make a realistic decision with regards to how much to print until you have established a reasonably detailed business plan in how you will sell them. I understand your desire to utilize the 3 tier distribution system and to sell through the distributors. I can see how judging your print run size around some assumptions of how that business relationship might work might make sense, but you have a few bridges to cross before you can assume much at all. The first thing you need to realize is just because you wish to do business with the distributors is that many of them (or all of them) might not want to do business with you as a start up.
If you want a realistic chance of being picked up by the key distributors you will need to wow them. Get some quality POD copies of your book printed in advance to use in making presentations to them. Get a face to face presentation to pitch your company and product to them. And don't rely on how "cool" the product is to win those accounts. Come prepared with a very detailed marketing plan that you plan to impement if they pick up your book. They are going to want to see how you will be helping to push sales through to retailers and how you will generate grass root interest among consumers.
If you do get picked up by various distributors, work with them to get your product through the pre order process. Speak with their buyers about that process and its timeline. Base your print run size around their pre orders. If they hand in pre orders, collectively, of say 600 to 700 units, then sure, a 1000 to 1500 print run makes perfect sense. If, however, they turn in pre orders of 150 units (a much more common number of RPG start ups and small press) then obviously 1500 books is going to be a bit too much inventory to carry at the start. You'll want more like 300 to 500 books.
If you fail to get the distributors on board, unless you get some other major sales channel open, then yeah, maybe 100 to 200 books is the right number to start. Product to fill mail orders and to do convention sales.
2) Hitting the Ground Running.
Unless you have just released the next Pokemon or you are entering the frey with 5-10 products designs already to print and are backed by several hundred grand, this just NEVER happens. Expect to enter the game at a very slow crawl. That being said, you CAN start small and build that into something larger. How well prepared and how well you work at it may decide if it takes you a couple years to grow into a self supporting company or if it takes a bit longer (about7-8 years for us). But if you stay determined and keep pursuing growth opportunities you can start small and grow into a mid sized company (you'll never be a "large" company without some kind of massively successful break out hit).
Starting small is a perfectly valid strategy and fairly prudent if you don't have a really darn good plan for starting "big" and the resources to actually implement it.
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.guildofblades.com/retailgroup.php
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com
Ryan, thanks for the great advice. The more I talk with distributors and the more I do research, the more it seems how things pan out on that end, is what will ultimately determine our first print run. I have also been hearing about consolidators like Impressions...what should I look out for on this front?
greyorm:
Quote from: Seamus on April 03, 2009, 06:50:45 AM
But if my assumptions are wrong, I want them challenged (and though I may appear resistant-- what I have heard hear has seriously made me rethink my strategy---I am just one of those people who likes to question everything until I know its the right way to go, so I needed to throw out the other advice I heard. Basically I am looking for specific reasons.
Awesome. This is a great and commendable attitude.
Quote
The 1000-1500 number comes from other forums with publishing pages I have visited, my days working as an editor where my bosses always said that was a good number for a small publisher, from books on small publishing, and the I am Mongoose Book. Granted the first three may have no application to the role playing industry, and the last needs to be taken with a grain of salt. For what it is worth, I am definitely leaning toward starting smaller.
Ok, good to know. And I think you're right about starting smaller, but Ryan and Eero have, at this point, said everything I was going to say, and said it better than I would have (listen to those guys, they're both very smart and know what they're talking about). I will, though, add one note to Eero's statement: yep, in the US, printed books have been considered a taxable asset since the mid-70's, making unsold books a liability for your business until you have them pulped (ie: yes, in the US you pay money to the government for any books you print and can't sell).
Yes, it's also a terrible law that has had very negative effects on the robustness and diversity of the market over the last thirty years, but it is what it is until we can convince the necessary persons to repeal it. Regardless, just another factor to consider in your initial print runs until you discover what the market will support for your product.
Seamus:
Quote from: greyorm on April 03, 2009, 11:45:10 PM
Quote from: Seamus on April 03, 2009, 06:50:45 AM
But if my assumptions are wrong, I want them challenged (and though I may appear resistant-- what I have heard hear has seriously made me rethink my strategy---I am just one of those people who likes to question everything until I know its the right way to go, so I needed to throw out the other advice I heard. Basically I am looking for specific reasons.
Awesome. This is a great and commendable attitude.
Quote
The 1000-1500 number comes from other forums with publishing pages I have visited, my days working as an editor where my bosses always said that was a good number for a small publisher, from books on small publishing, and the I am Mongoose Book. Granted the first three may have no application to the role playing industry, and the last needs to be taken with a grain of salt. For what it is worth, I am definitely leaning toward starting smaller.
Ok, good to know. And I think you're right about starting smaller, but Ryan and Eero have, at this point, said everything I was going to say, and said it better than I would have (listen to those guys, they're both very smart and know what they're talking about). I will, though, add one note to Eero's statement: yep, in the US, printed books have been considered a taxable asset since the mid-70's, making unsold books a liability for your business until you have them pulped (ie: yes, in the US you pay money to the government for any books you print and can't sell).
Yes, it's also a terrible law that has had very negative effects on the robustness and diversity of the market over the last thirty years, but it is what it is until we can convince the necessary persons to repeal it. Regardless, just another factor to consider in your initial print runs until you discover what the market will support for your product.
After researching it and hearing what people hear have to say; I think starting out smaller is a good idea. Primarily so I can learn the trade, and know how to handle large volume if that ever happens. Its pretty clear to me, we have a lot to learn on the business end, so both sitting on thousands of books or having to move them are equally daunting. That said, I still wouldn't mind trying to work with smaller distributors if that will help get our name out there.
Lets say I do a smaller printing and rely mainly on direct sales: how do I market my book to a wider audience? Is it possible to get good sales numbers selling directly? Would hooking up with a couple of smaller distributors be of any use? Also, any recommendations for digital or POD?
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