Eureka preorder sales figures

During the preorder period for Eureka: 501 Adventure Plots to Inspire Game Masters, 6/28-7/22, we sold 129 print + PDF bundles at $34.95. I tracked sales by day; I’m not sure if I’ll be that granular going forward, but it was interesting to see how things unfolded.

Here’s how things went:

This being Engine Publishing’s first book, I didn’t know what to expect. I did expect a drop-off after the first few days, but not one this steep over such a short period (two days) — but on the flipside, I also expected days with zero sales, and there were none of those. The little spikes don’t correspond to any obvious events I can think of, like the release of a positive review, although in retrospect a spike on the final day makes sense.

The thing that surprised me most overall was how steady sales were: two or three a day for most of the preorder period, which I think is awesome. Here are the numbers day-by-day:

I’ve had four milestones in mind for Eureka from the outset:

1. Pay back the small loan we took out to cover costs
2. Break even (financially, not considering time and sweat equity)
3. Sell 500 books (10% of Gnome Stew‘s daily readership)
4. Sell 1,000 books in our first year

We hit #1 and #2, which is fantastic — just doing that makes me feel good.

With 129 sales to date, my gut says we’re well on our way to #3; opening PDF sales and getting Eureka into game stores should help. Eureka is a Gnome Stew project and the Stew’s readership is a core audience for this book (it’s system-neutral, like the Stew, Stew readers know the authors through the blog, and that’s where we’ve done most of our marketing to date), which is why #3’s 500-book milestone is connected to Gnome Stew in my head.

#4 is the big kahuna. While this isn’t an indie product in the usual sense, the approach the design team took in producing and releasing it is decidedly indie in many respects (creator-funded and -owned, small-press, grassroots marketing, etc.), and selling 1,000 books in a year is a significant milestone for an indie product — so that’s why I pegged Eureka to it. I believe we’ll reach that milestone as well.

But in the meantime? I’ve got a stack of 300 heavy-duty mailers sitting behind me, and books on the way — next up is fulfilling all of those preorders!