18 Months of RPG Sales

About a year and a half ago, I published two role-playing PDFs, an adventure (War in the Deep) and a sandbox setting (The City of Talon). I’ve posted my earnings-to-date one year ago and six months ago. Here’s what I’ve earned since then:

Sales For The Past Six Months (December 2009-May 2010)

Product	Number of Sales	Gross	Net
War in the Deep	2	$10.00	$6.50
The City of Talon	2	$10.00	$6.50
TOTAL	4	$20.00	$13.00

Sales For The Past Year (May 2009-May 2010)

Product	Number of Sales	Gross	Net
War in the Deep	7	$35.00	$22.75
The City of Talon	7	$35.00	$22.75
TOTAL	14	$70	$45.50

I won’t bother charting the month-to-month sales, as they’ve obviously tailed off even more dramatically than six months ago.

Web Traffic

Total hits for War in the Deep on DriveThruRPG: 8,549

Unique pageviews for War in the Deep on the Musaeum in past six months: 6

Total hits for The City of Talon on DriveThruRPG: 5,389

Unique pageviews for The City of Talon on the Musaeum in past six months: 34

Source	Pageviews
bluedwarf.co.uk	18
Direct	10
ENWorld.org	9
roleplayingtips.com	2
Yahoo	2
Bing	1
TOTAL	34

The keywords used to find Talon: “rpg medieval city maps” (2) and “talon city fantasy” (1)

bluedwarf.co.uk appears to be a text adventure inspired by Red Dwarf. No idea how that links back to Talon; maybe somebody linked to it on their forum?

Advertising

None.

Marketing

I described each project here on my blog in a couple of different blog posts. I’m a member of the RPG Bloggers Network, so those posts showed up there.

Analysis

RPG adventures and settings see big initial sales, then rapidly dwindling sales over time.

Plans

I still want to publish more supplements.  I’ve been horrifically slow at publishing them, though.  I now have another setting and another adventure each at the 80% mark.

So. Need to finish those and get them published.  I’ve added them both to my list of active projects. But a plan without a date is just a dream, so:

• By June 5 — Finish drafts of The Goblins of Winterkeep and The Pyrrean Depths and send out for review.
• By end of June — Receive feedback on Winterkeep and Depths, and start first draft of second adventure.
• By end of July — Incorporate feedback on Winterkeep and Depths, finish polishing them, and publish them.  Finish second draft of second adventure and send out for review.
• By end of August — Receive feedback on second adventure, and start first draft of third adventure.

And so on.  With this schedule, I should be able to publish three supplements a year.