July 2014 Sales Report


In the spirit of transparency, I release my print-on-demand card game sales numbers every month. When I started out releasing games this way, I didn't have any metric against which I could compare my performance. So here's how July went...

It was bananas.

First, some background: When I was just starting out, the advice from DriveThruCards told me to price my games at whatever price I wanted, but to imply that it was marked down a couple bucks from some arbitrarily higher price. I thought "that's silly, surely customers are wise to that old trick by now." For a long time I resisted that tactic, just setting all of my games at a flat price.

However, the success of my tiny Origins-timed promotion and my new early bird discount contributed to quite a recovery from a weak second quarter. Given that performance, I thought it would be worth a shot to participate in the Christmas in July event. I was skeptical that it would help, but I thought I'd at least make up some banners and promote the event for my own products. If this event didn't work, I didn't want it to be for my lack of effort.

Twitter ad for Christmas in July sale

Wow, am I eating humble pie today. I don't know why I was so reluctant to heed the pricing advice all those months ago. I'm pleased to say July was the best month's performance of the year. Huge spikes in overall sales, gross income, and net earnings all around.

Highlights
  • Monsoon Market is the first product to outsell Koi Pond in its first full month.
  • Despite only being available two days, Light Rail out-performed almost every other product's opening month.
  • Overall sales volume was double June's, and June was already the peak of the year.
Let's take a look at the charts.
Volume of Sales (Ignore that May spike. It was a bulk order of promo cards.)

Gross Sales Income
Earnings
And here are the raw numbers, sales growth or decline noted in green or red beside each listing.

7-2014
5x Bird Bucks +0
38x Koi Pond: A Coy Card Game +18
27x Koi Pond: Four Walls (Promo Card 2) +18
28x Koi Pond: Four Winds (Promo Card 1) +9
24x Koi Pond: Moon Temple +23
23x Light Rail (new!)
58x Monsoon Market +40
13x Nine Lives Card Game +0
9x Penny Farthing Catapult -4
14x Regime +1
27x Suspense: the Card Game +18 
8x Ten Pen +0


284 Total Sold (Over double last month!)
$2,073.50 Gross Sales
$485.79 Earnings

Grand Totals for 2014 (to date)
1223 Products Sold
$5,895.98 Gross Sales
$1,803.13 Earnings

Now, I've been through enough recessions to keep my excitement in check. Basically these last two months compensate for second quarter's sluggish numbers. So while I'm optimistic about the future, I know better than to expect this kind of meteoric growth forever. There will be ups and downs to come, but I'm glad my long-term plan seems to be working. See you next month!

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