The Pacific Northwest: First-Year Sales Analysis

[Tegyrius]

The Pacific Northwest released just over a year ago, on 21 Feb 2021. I'd like to thank Marc Miller for allowing me to contribute to the world he and his comrades built for us. Moreover, I'd like to thank everyone who contributed to this book's success. I hope those of you who purchased it feel that it was worth your money and reading time, and I'd love to hear how you're using any of its components in your home campaigns.

This forum occasionally sees discussions about the financial viability of getting into game writing. I went into this project knowing it wasn't going to earn out at my standard word rate for contracted freelance game work, but I viewed it as a subsidized contribution to the community. If I had done the manuscript as a contract project with one of my usual publishers, it would have brought me about three mortgage payments (before taxes). As it is, my earnings to date have been about a quarter of that, which is within my expectations. It's also paid for the InDesign license I needed for the layout, which was my only real expense other than time and the attendant opportunity costs. So it's not like I've lost money, precisely...

(Of course, if I'd been under contract, I wouldn't have been able to work on it on and off for three years. Doing these books on my own time has its advantages too.)

In its first 365 days on the market, Pacific Northwest moved 393 copies. (That's a long walk from the 20,000 copies of my Clanbook: Assamite, Revised Edition that were sold in its first two printings, but this isn't 1999 and today's Twilight: 2000 fan base is a lot smaller than the two-decades-ago World of Darkness fan base.) Here's how that breaks down by month:



Note that the months are months of release, not calendar months, so Month 1 is the book's first month on the market: 21 February 2021 to 20 March 2021.

As you can see, initial interest was very strong but sustained sales were fairly weak. Breaking down the first month a bit more, the first week saw 174 copies sold, rapidly dropping off to 38 copies in the second week, 16 in the third week, and 13 in the fourth week. The majority of initial sales came on the day after Marc released the book and sent the email notice to GDW's DriveThruRPG customer base: 97 copies were sold on 22 February 2021 alone.

The interesting thing to me is the sales blip in Months 9 and 10. I was seeing single-digit monthly sales over the summer, then moved 21 copies in Month 9 and 20 in Month 10. What happened then? Well, that was the period of 21 October 2021 to 20 December 2021. According to DriveThruRPG, the retail PDF bundle of 4th edition released on 21 November, right in the middle of that period. This makes me suspect I got some marketing boost from the pre-release hype, people searching DTRPG for Twilight: 2000 titles, and add-on sales from 4th edition's release. Not being the publisher myself, I don't have any other data on which to base this supposition (and I don't know what the publisher's-eye view looks like), but that's what intuition and the calendar tell me.

Incidentally, if anyone is curious about how DTRPG assigns the metal badges that you see on product pages, here are the thresholds of products sold (source):

• Copper: 51 - 100
• Silver: 101 - 250
• Electrum: 251 - 500
• Gold: 501 - 1,000
• Platinum: 1,001 - 2,500
• Mithral: 2,501 - 5,000
• Adamantine: 5,001+

These include only direct sales, not "free" copies sent to Kickstarter backers. Thus, we can estimate the success of the 4e PDF bundle's direct retail sales (gold as of this post), as well as my old friend Twilight: 2013 (platinum) and the PDF of the v2.2 Big Yellow Book (also platinum).

That's about all the analysis I can tease out of this data set, but I thought it was interesting. With the release of Tara Romaneasca this week - on Pacific Northwest's one-year releaseaversary, no less - I wanted to crunch the numbers. I figured I'd share them in the hope that some of you might find them useful in assessing your own interest in publishing through FFE/GDW.

- C.