Something kicked off a bunch of direct sales early this morning, so this information will already be slightly out of date by the time I finish typing it, and hopefully (but not expectedly) by a whole lot.

Q3 (August-September)

We first started business with Diaspora on August 7 of 2009. Our expectation was to sell 20-30 copies. I pressed the button at Lulu to start sales at around 11 pm and when I woke up we’d sold some 25 copies. Mission accomplished.

• Resellers: 48
• Direct: 156

Our resellers in this period were Endgame in Oakland, Sphärenmeisters Spiele in Germany, and Leisure Games in the UK. All have since re-ordered. Lulu paid out for Q3 sales in very early December so we can time our cash flow concerns on the expectation that they will continue to pay out around two months after the quarter ends.

Q4 (October-December)

In Q4 we saw an unexpected upsurge in sales in the last half, probably due to increased reviews (we sent out half a dozen or so review copies and got reviews for pretty much every one) and a surge in awareness for the game during the two week period in November where we were unable to deliver product through Lulu. Cloud, silver lining, and so on.

• Resellers: 92
• Direct: 243 244 246 247

In this quarter we broke 500 total sales, which makes us look good for our hope to sell 1000 copies over a year’s publication. We added several resellers: Patriot Games in the UK, Drexoll Games and Craving for a Game locally here in Vancouver (and surrounding bits), and most recently Olympic Cards and Comics in Lacey, Washington.

2009 totals

• Resellers: 140
• Direct: 399 400 402 403

Any discussion of marketing success or failure is substantially speculation, but I have no problem speculating. The thing is, you can’t really do any controlled experimentation, so if you take a marketing chance and suddenly get a lot of sales, you don’t know for sure that it was caused by your chance and you don’t know for sure that sales would have been lower without it — they might have been higher! So, absent any good methodology, we proceeded very conservatively. The early sales came from discussion on RPG.net certainly, as that’s where we were posting playtest AP reports and discussing artwork and so on long before it was even Diaspora. Once the game started getting played, there was substantial enthusiasm here as well, which kept up steady visibility for the game. It was also here that Fred Hicks of Evil Hat chimed in with some embarrassingly kind words that kicked off a string of sales — having one of the guys responsible for Fate proper telling people that this was a good incarnation of the system certainly legitimized us for existing Fate-heads.

Over at Story Games there was also some buzz early on, especially a very nice attaboy from Clinton Nixon. Some discussion there and Judd of Kryos starting some actual play reporting also kept visibility and interest high. It doesn’t hurt that Judd chatted us up at his own blog and that it’s called The Githyanki Diaspora.

At one point there was even a not-unexpected flameout over at The RPGSite and despite the general negativity and aggression over there, I’m pretty sure I saw a spike in sales. I’d love to know if Spirit of the Century saw a surge after the site owner’s panning of the game there because it’s hard to believe it didn’t happen. No such thing as bad publicity and all that.

I think the biggest deal for 2009, though, was accidentally timing our release with the launch of RPG Geek, by the folks who gave us the extremely successful Board Game Geek. This site is a huge boon for amateur publishers because every item in the database is linked to forums, ratings, news, and other tools that it would be a great deal of work to set up for yourself but also that already has a substantial natural audience. Getting involved early meant that we were artificially (and embarassingly) high on the populatrrity charts for a while but this is starting to steady out a bit. Nonetheless, the very high enthusiasm of the smaller number of gamers (and publishers) of smaller independent titles means they get inordinately high ratings, discussion, and other attention at the site. This community is great fun and any publisher stands to benefit greatly from an active presence there.

We went to one small con (V-Con 34). It wasn’t part of a marketing effort — I went as an invited speaker for a couple of panel discussions along with Joe McDonald, author of Ribbon Drive and other games — and we didn’t sell any books there. I expect it was too small to have generated sales and I don’t recall any follow-on surge. Nonetheless, some folks did go to cons, and Leisure Games sold a bunch of copies at Gencon (if I recall correctly) which would have given us a little push. Obviously, with the numbers we’re looking at in amateur publishing, I can’t afford to fly to a foreign country to do marketing at cons, so it’s a boon for us that our resellers are keen. EndGame, for example, really boosted the game and is running sessions of it at their minicon in January. As California has about the same population as all of Canada, that’s pretty cool.

Every blog that talked us up (and I can’t recall them all but I’ll shout out to the obvious ones, Fred Hicks at Deadly Fredly and Rob Donoghue at Some Space to Think) did us some good. Every review did us some good, though in particular C.W. Richeson was an excellent investment as his reviews are well known and he’s prolific enough that they appear in a useful amount of time. It doesn’t hurt that he’s also a swell writer and therefore a pleasure to read.

I’ve forgotten some factors to be sure, but pretty much every Diaspora-related event since August has been a net benefit to sales, again bringing to mind that adage. That’s good to know — it makes criticism sting less and even though all our critics so far have been fair and accurate, it does still sting. So thanks to everyone for a great 2009 for VSCA and Diaspora and a bright 2010 that we are now encouraged enough to bring new products into. Now we know we can do it and we know it’s fun.

–BMurray