Brazer Bulletin — What’s With All the Short PDFs?
Good day everyone. As a publisher the one thing I hear over and over again that customers want is print book, yet more and more PDF books come to market and never become a print book. If you’ve ever wondered why that is, this post is going to attempt to answer that for you.
Short answer: it’s quicker and easier. Generally speaking, PDFs produce less revenue than print books, but they generate it much more quickly. Lets say you write a 10 page product that is compatible with some major game system (Pathfinder, D&D 4E, Traveller, Swords and Wizardry, etc). You put it up on DriveThruRPG for $2 and it sells 10 copies in its first month. You just earned yourself $26. That’s not a lot of money, even by RPG publishing standards. The easiest way to turn that into more money is to release more products. Release one 10 page PDF product every week and you’ve turned that into $104 in a single month. Now that’s looking a little better.
Compare that to print for a second. You just generated 40 pages of content. Do eight more pages and you have enough for a print book. How much does a print run cost? If you’re working with the distributors, you should be printing 200-300 copies. That would cost anywhere from $400-$700, depending on the specifics you’re going for. While you can fund this out of your own pocket, a smarter idea would be to use the PDF sales to generate the cost to print. This keeps your company from running a debt like many game companies have done in the past.
Lets go back to those 10 page products a second. So you’ve got $104 from four products. Second month, you might see 3-5 sales each. That’s going to generate around $20 for the second month. That’s going to take a long time to get up to that $400 minimum for a print run. So you release more 10 page products. Say one of those products in your second month sells 25 copies while the other sell 10. That’s a good indicator that you should make more products along the line of that one. So for month 2 you just generated $131, for a grand total of $235.
You’re seeing where this is going right? Two months and we’re just over half way to the cost of a print run. So after four months you have enough for one print run of one book. While it could take as little as a few days to print your book, it could be as long as a month if the printer is backed up (yes, this has happened to me).
After you’ve pulled all your hair out from wondering when the print book is going to finally leave the printer and invested everything you’ve made into a print run, the book hits the distributor at the end of month five. How long does it take for that money to get back to you? You’re not going to get much, if anything for the first month. It takes time for the book to get its way through the distributor, to the store, the book to be sold at the store, and for the money to flow in the reverse order. Three months is not unreasonable. So after a total of eight months, you get the money back from the distributors for a total of $900-1000, if the book sells out.
That sounds pretty nice, but compare that with your PDF sales. If all you do is 10 of each of your four new products every month and never sell any of the old, you come out to $832. Not bad for a lot less work. Also you get to keep that money over time instead of waiting a total of eight months for it to come in. And 10 copies is a rather low figure. A runaway successful PDF will sell 100 copies. All you need is just one PDF in that 8 months to be a runaway success and your total for that 8 months is the same as a print book.
Mind you, these numbers are for a new company. After you’ve been around for a year or two, you start to develop more of a fan base. As long as you treat those fans with respect and produce what they are looking for, that $104 per month will get larger and larger. You won’t get rich off PDF sales, but you will get a decent second income.
Dale McCoy is President of Jon Brazer Enterprises. Download your copy of the Book of Beasts: Wandering Monsters today. Available at RPGNow and Paizo.com
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April 1st, 2011 7:44 AM
I’ve spent sometime reading what the freelancers on Dumpshock write, and they say the same thing. It’s relly a great way for the smaller third party groups to get a foot in grow, but I worry that it may lead to the big names churning out quickie .PDFs. Catalyst seems to be tossing up quite a few new PDFs, but they’re varying widely in quality, significantly less consistent than many third party Pathfinder PDFs I’ve read. I know I’m comparing across systems, but seeing this from the first party developer has me worried that it might become the business model for other big names, like Wizards. Combined with the subscription only 4e updates and errata I’m not liking how they’re handling D&D, especially as someone who’s a big fan of dead trees. Also, it feels kinda like having the parents crash a college party. Yeah, they could be there, but they don’t really belong there. I guess whaat I’m saying is that I don’t want RPGs to become stacks of PDFs. They’re a great add on to a core game, but major releases should come with a pile of pages option. I don’t want to have to DM from my computer for everything.