Brent P. Newhall's Blog
Role-playing – May 2009

10 May 09 – Six Months of Tabletop RPG Sales

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About six months ago, I started publishing tabletop RPG PDFs under the name Brent P. Newhall's Musaeum of Fantastic Wonders, starting with the short adventure War in the Deep in November 2008 and continuing with the sandbox setting The City of Talon in March 2009. I publish through DriveThruRPG, which takes a percentage of each PDF sale. The PDFs themselves are unrestricted.

I've always been a bit frustrated at the lack of real numbers about publishing PDFs online. How much money do these things make?

Here's how much I've actually made. Each PDF sells for US$5.00; I get $3.25 of that.

Sales

ProductNumber of SalesGross EarningsNet Earnings
War in the Deep14$65.00$45.25
The City of Talon17$75.00$48.75
TOTAL31$140.00$91.00

Month-by-month for War in the Deep, which was first published in November 2008:

MonthNumber of SalesGross EarningsNet Earnings
November 20084$15.00$9.75
December 20085$25.00$16.25
January 20094$20.00$13.00
February 20090$0.00$0.00
March 20091$5.00$3.25
April 20090$0.00$0.00
TOTAL14$65.00$45.25

Month-by-month for The City of Talon, which was first published in March 2009:

MonthNumber of SalesGross EarningsNet Earnings
March 200911$45.00$29.25
April 20096$30.00$19.50
TOTAL17$75.00$48.75

Web Traffic

Total hits for War in the Deep on DriveThruRPG: 3,737.

Unique pageviews for War in the Deep on the Musaeum:

SourcePageviews
ENWorld.org32
Direct10
Google searches7
RPGBloggers.com4
Others10
TOTAL63

The keywords used to find War in the Deep: "heroic tier adventure", "printable d&d counters", "rpg adventure plots", "rpg adventure writing", and "rpg for commercial use"

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Total hits for The City of Talon on DriveThruRPG: 1,734.

Unique pageviews for The City of Talon on the Musaeum:

SourcePageviews
Google searches29
RPGBloggers.com14
Facebook11
Direct access8
Others24
TOTAL86

The keywords used to find The City of Talon: "crimes of talon", "brentnewhall", and "role play blogs".

Advertising

None.

Marketing

I described each project here on my blog in a couple of different blog posts. I'm a member of the RPG Bloggers Network, so those posts showed up there.

Analysis

Making just shy of US$100 with no advertising budget is no mean feat. On the other hand, considering the dozens of hours I put into these PDFs, I couldn't exactly make a livable wage off this yet.

The biggest surprise is the 32 pageviews from ENWorld, a huge D&D-oriented site. Upon further investigation, I discovered that ENWorld has a wiki page of 4E 3rd Party Publishers, and somebody kindly added my Musaeum and War in the Deep there. In writing this entry, I added the City of Talon to that page, so hopefully that'll drive some traffic to it.

I find it interesting that the RPG Bloggers network was much more interested in Talon than War in the Deep. This confirms my suspicion that GMs need higher-level creative resources more than they need pre-generated adventures. Note that Talon's made almost as much in 2 months as War in the Deep made in 4 months. However, Talon required far more time to create than War in the Deep did.

Plans

I plan to focus on settings. I'll continue work on my abandoned underground city setting and my floating city in the sky setting. I plan to publish both in the next six months.

However, given the relatively low time investment in writing an adventure, I'll probably publish one more adventure within the next six months. It seems worth it, especially if the adventure's fun to build.

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