Indie Sales Numbers
drkrash:
Hey, all. I haven't posted here in a long time because, well, I've been working on my game. But I was curious about something I read this week.
I released my "core" book in March. It has been well-reviewed, has found a small but dedicated audience, and has sold exponentially more copies than I budgeted for. So I'm very happy. As an important point to establish at the outset: I understand that if I'm happy, it's all good. Having established that, let me move on to my question.
Some anecdotal wisdom I found here at some point suggested (according to my memory) that 200 sales in the first year for an indie game, and/or 500 sales in a couple-three years, indicated a pretty decent success in the indie RPG market. Based on these numbers, I'm doing pretty well.
But this week, I saw sales figures on Fred Hicks' blog. Dresden Files jumped out at me: almost 7000 sales since its release not that long ago. Now, I understand we're dealing with a well-established designer, a known and loved property, a system that seems to enjoy some sort of darling-status at the moment, and a build-up that was years in the making. I get all that. I'm not expecting sales like this...ever.
But still: there's a big discrepency between 500 in 2 years and 6000 in 6 months.
So my question is: is my anecdotal wisdom totally offbase? Or is it more or less accurate and Dresden is a totally special case? I don't need hard facts - just well-informed impressions will do just fine. Thanks.
Adam Dray:
My (limited, no-special-access) understanding is that Dresden Files RPG is a special case. It's a hot property and Fred and team know what the hell they're doing.
Fred routinely posts sales figures for his other games. They're nowhere near as high. You should also be able to find sales figures for other indie games if you poke around. Ralph just posted lifetime numbers for Universalis. I think Paul Czege has posted figures for My Life with Master etc.
Selling a dozen or two games at GenCon is a really good weekend. Selling 50-100 copies in a year is a smashing success.
Really, though, define success on your own terms and do what it takes to reach your goals. If your idea of success is 6000 sales in six months, then make sure you have a product, market, and plan that will accomplish that.
Mathew E. Reuther:
You need to remember that it's a series of books with a large following that has been made into a TV show on a fairly prominent network. It has a fairly serious market going for it.
If you look at the sales numbers that other people have posted, you'll see that yes, it is indeed a pretty large aberration for those reasons.
So unless you manage to get the rights to something similar (and remember, Jim Butcher and probably his agent is/are making money on every copy sold, so there's a price to be paid for the success) you're unlikely to ever see anything close to that from a product.
I've seen mentions of runs of 50 to a few thousand over the course of years of sales for more "normal" products. I wouldn't go planning any runs of 5000 right off the bat. :)
Ron Edwards:
Hiya,
There's also a distinct difference between sales to distributors vs. sales to end customers. Moving books to distribution is a "sale" in most publishing parlance, without reference to whether anyone actually buys the book as a reader or user.
I'm not writing this to diminish the significance of the Dresden Files sales, but to clarify that a direct copies comparison of 7000 to 500 does not represent what is commercially happening in market terms.
Best, Ron
drkrash:
Thanks, guys. I certainly would like to hear any other anecdotal evidence of what sales numbers you've been experiencing yourselves or that you may have seen elsewhere.
To re-iterate two things I said in my 1st post: I am very happy with my own numbers. I have honestly made more money than I ever imagined I would. So I'm not complaining about my own numbers compared to anyone else. Also, I assumed Dresden was not the norm - which is why I was looking for what indie publishers seemed to be experiencing as some sort of "norm."
I'd even be interested to hear what publishers and would-be publishers realistically hope they will achieve in sales. For my core product, I hoped for about 30 copies sold. When I did that in two weeks, I was pretty happy. It's been quite a few more since then. :)
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