October Sales Report

Suspense Card Samples

As the year winds down and 2014 approaches, I'll post more regular end-of-month sales reports since I plan to release new product every four weeks or so. (You saw the previous big giant year-to-date sales report, yeah?) This month's new product was Suspense: the Card Game, a spooky product befitting the season, I thought. So how'd October turn out?

10-2013 (to Date)
18x Koi Pond: A Coy Card Game
10x Koi Pond: Four Walls (Promo Card 2)
10x Koi Pond: Four Winds (Promo Card 1)
15x Suspense: the Card Game
$371.07 Retail
$121.60 Royalties

Grand Totals To Date
407 Products Sold
$2,701.22 Retail (I did my math wrong here, sorry, it's $2204.03)
$587.13 Royalties Earned* ($488.05)

Product Performance
Koi Pond sales are down to their August/Gen Con levels, which is to be expected. Koi Pond's second-month sales were the highest ever, so I hope Suspense will follow the same performance pattern. Meanwhile, the two Koi Pond promo cards continue to sell as pairs, which might indicate I should bundle these when they're finally done.

Royalty Spike?
The royalties for this month might look like an unusual spike in an end of year bar graph. Indeed sales were good, but also the price for premium card stock dropped in the last two weeks of the month. I hadn't lowered the price of my products, so that meant I got a few cents more profit margin for each product.

Publicity/Marketing
I'm realizing the downside of POD for reviews is that it's almost as expensive to send a review copy as it is to just buy a copy myself. In traditional publishing, your cost per unit is much smaller so you can more easily eat the cost in hopes of raising the profile for your game. Not so with POD, where costs are flat rates all the way through. So that being the case, I need to supplement with publicity that I can still control and afford like podcast interviews, continued blog coverage, and maaaaybe some BGG advertising.

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