Q1 2011 Eureka sales figures
The first quarter of 2011 included our first distributor orders for retail sales of Eureka, which I’ve been crossing my thumbs about for months, as well as the crossing of a huge milestone for this book.
As always, I share these figures because I find it useful when other publishers share theirs — and doubly so when I was first starting up Engine Publishing. I hope they’re useful to you!
Eureka Sales
Lifetime (through Q1 2011): 1,107
Q4 total: 279
Direct print + PDF: 16
Direct PDF: 26
DriveThru PDF: 56
Paizo Print: 1
Paizo PDF: 3
Retail Print: 166
DriveThru $14.95: 7
e23 PDF: 4
Studio 2 PDF: 0
…and in not-so-useful chart form:
Observations for this quarter:
1,000 unit milestone crossed! We crossed my fourth (and, I thought, most optimistic) milestone for Eureka sales in this quarter: over 1,000 units sold. That’s small potatoes for a larger publisher, but gigantic potatoes for a small-press publisher like us. Many thanks to everyone who has bought, and continues to buy, Eureka!
Strong initial distributor/retailer orders. We also had our first distributor orders for retail sales in this quarter, after several delays, and I’m thrilled with the results. Given that “Engine who?” is an entirely reasonable response at this stage in our development, selling 166 copies to retailers is huge. I hope those folks see their Eureka stock sell briskly, reorder, and consider ordering our upcoming second book. My thanks to the distributors and retailers who ordered Eureka!
Sales are slowing down. Excluding preorders, lifetime sales for Eureka by quarter have been 382, 317, and 279, which means they’re slowing down. At this point, my guess would be that most Gnome Stew readers (a large portion of our initial customer base) who want a copy have one, and ditto for most DriveThruRPG/RPGNow! customers as well. Take out retail sales from this quarter (as they were largely not present in previous quarters, with just a handful of one-off sales), and the difference is even starker: 113 copies sold this quarter. My understanding is that most RPG books will see their biggest sales numbers in the first few months of availability, and that certainly seems to be true for Eureka.
Eureka needs new exposure. One downside to our (thus far) cycle of developing one book a year (Eureka in 2010, Masks in 2011) is that there’s no string of new releases pushing old releases back into the spotlight. I’m hoping to see a boost Eureka sales when we release Masks, and we’ve got a significant advertising expenditure for Eureka coming up in the next several weeks. I backed off advertising almost entirely during Q1, largely because I was so busy working on Masks, but it may be worth running multiple smaller campaigns in Q2. We shall see!
That seems like a doom-and-gloom note to end this on, but I don’t feel doom-and-gloom-y about Eureka sales — quite the opposite. All of my expectations for Eureka have been exceeded, and three quarters of strong sales have made for a fantastic experience. We’ll see what Q2 2011 — Eureka’s fourth quarter of sales, giving us a full year of data to look at — brings!
