Engine Publishing sales figures, June 2010-June 2012

It has always been my intention to be as transparent as Evil Hat and Pelgrane Press when it comes to sharing sales figures and other stuff about what it’s like to be a small-press publisher. The data Fred Hicks (of EH) and Simon Rogers (of PP) share was hugely useful to me when I was deciding whether or not Engine Publishing was a good idea — and, once I’d decided that it was, just as useful when setting my own expectations.

And I started out strong, but I fell behind. The last time I posted sales figures was Q1 2011, over a year ago. Other considerations used up the time I intended to spend on sharing my data, and the further behind I fell the less I wanted to catch up. Yesterday, I caught myself all the way up, built a new spreadsheet and some new graphs and charts to interpret the data, and sliced it a few different ways. Consequently, I now have over two years — 26 months — of sales data to share.

I hope it’s useful to you in some way, especially if you’re considering getting into small-press publishing.

Sales data for Q2 2010 to the end of Q2 2012

I use a month-by-month version of the chart below to track sales, but I’m not sure how useful it would be to anyone else — this is the “bare essentials” version. (The graphs further down are month-by-month.)

“OBS” is OneBookShelf, IE DriveThruRPG and RPGNow. “Direct” is sales on the EP website.

“Other” includes convention print sales, Paizo and e23 PDF sales (for Eureka only), sales on our fulfillment partner’s website, and anything else that falls outside of our mainstays.

The two graphs below present the same data — month-by-month sales by product and sales channel — in two different ways: as stacked columns and as stacked lines. Here are larger, more readable versions: columns, lines.

Next up are the mini-charts I use to slice that data up in a few basic ways.

Last up are the pie charts for all but the first of those mini-charts.

If you have any questions about my data, or about publishing in general, I’ll be happy to field them here or via email, whichever you prefer.