I wish Aegen wasn’t flooding that category with what appears to be extracts from the main books.
If any fanzines or other higher value works are being created, it’s hard to find them.
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They'll fall off the "hottest" pretty soon as more stuff emerges, I think.
Yes, although we had to reach a critical mass to get an Ars magica category created.
I hope to contribute my own work shortly.
Mythic Venice has gone out to the backers of the Definitive Edition and, odd thing: people have been buying copies. It's only about USD45 but its an interesting bump.. Also, in the distribution email I mentioned "Ars Magica Monsters :Volume One" and it's sold USD 120 since. Those numbers are after Drivethru's take, by the way.
So, there's one datum for the idea that regular publications give some boosts to your older material.
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That doesn’t surprise me. Fiction authors find that people buy and like one book, then dive into the back catalog.
I know I’ve done the same for RPG supplements. One good quality item makes me much more likely to buy others from that author/company. It’s no guarantee, but I find that people who generate high quality work tend to do so pretty consistently.
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Just to put my own two cents out there.
My Secrets of the Order has had 41 sales since it was published, and had earned me some $28 in earnings. Luckily, since I did the entire product myself, except for time, it didn't incur any other costs.
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So I thought that I would share my numbers, they are better than I would have expected.
It has been a week since my Narva scenario went live, and it has been bought 93 times, of which 25 were by paying customers. Gross sales were 112.33$ for a net earning (post Drivethrucut) of 73.01$.
Now since it clocks just under 10k words that is not a lot per word, but more than i honestly expected to make. I have two more adventures in the pipeline which are close to being publishable and I mostly need to sort out the cover art before I put it online, and more works that are not in a finished state.
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A bit more data. Be aware these are back of the napkin calculations.
My author costs for Mythic Europe Magazine Issue One were, swapped into USD at today's rates USD692. Note for those of you scaling your own projects some authors refused to accept payment and I wrote two of the articles.
I've priced it at USD6. .With Drivethru's revenue split, that's $3.90 pre-tax income per sale. As a rough rule of thumb, income tax and transaction fees would be would be about 30%. in my case, so that brings it down to USD2.73.per sale. Technically higher on itch or Patreon, but Drivethru is where most of my previous two books did their work.
So, break even is 254 sales. That's quite high given the size of our community and that its not a product with the sort of clear hook of "Venice? Monsters? Give me a buck even if you don't play ArM".
That's to see if its the sort of product that can stand alone, in terms of a second issue. Here we see a bit of the thinking on my release timing though.
This year I know I will owe a lump sum of income tax on the money bought in by the Atlas payment, Magonomia royalties, Drivethru sales and the difference between my Games From Folktales subscriptions and my hosting costs. I'm not sure how large it is exactly, but its big enough that I can't call renumerated hobby on it. It is assessed on June 30 and due October 31 because I'm Australian and that's when we do these things.
It's probably three hundred dollars American at a very loose guess.
If I structure my writing business correctly some of the the cost for the authors of MEM1 comes out of that lump, because the tax is on profits or drawings, not on turnover. It doesn't make MEM2 more likely, it doesn't pull the break even of this one product down. It does, however let me move some of the money I'd be paying as income tax on my writing to an expense. This gives me a cushion for for if MEM1 flops. Roughly speaking, I don't lose actual money on it if I sell 143 copies because of that one-off presence of income from earlier writing.
There is a complicated question as to how I apportion the money coming in from the podcast patreon, because I gave MEM1 to all paid subscribers. So, you could think of that as 34 prepaid subscriptions. If I get to 109 sales, I feel I can say I've come out even on this one product. I know that's not actually how the math works (I'm essentially increasing the material to the subscribers without upping the price) but I feel that's acceptable because I can't be bothered running a proper subscription service.
220 sales (on top of the GFF subscribers) is where I can say "Well, that all worked out splendidly and it's worth doing this again at that price." as opposed to "I should go and write another book" or "I should get a team together to write (Specific Thing With Good Hook)."
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Oh, btw, current sales: itch 10, Drivethru 3, Patreon Shop 1. Drivethru came live later than the others, though.
By way of comparison:
Ars Magica Monsters Volume 1:
Drivethru 350*, Itch 3. Patreon: NFS Note that Drivethru calls free downloads on pay what you want files "sales." The gross income on that's USD362.
Mythic Venice:
Drivethru: roughly 650. The ArM5DE distribution makes one of the months an odd number and I've removed that month and added in an average of the others. It has the same problem that a free download is a $0 sale. Gross sales USD308, but a whole heap of people received it as part of ArM5DE.
Itch 13
Patreon 13
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Does DriveThru charge a percentage of the 'Suggested price' on pay-what-you-want items, or do they charge a percentage of the actual sale price? If someone paid US $15 for it, what would be your take?
It's a percentage of actual sale. 35% I believe, 30 if exclusive. So, my take on USD 15 would be USD9. 75.
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As a comparison... patreon takes 8%. Itch seems to be pay what you want kind of deal.
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For pretty much everything I publish, I price to pay off at around a hundred copies. Take the word count, multiply it by my desired rate of US$0.10 a word (low, but an OK ballpark), divide by 0.65 to allow for DriveThru's cut, divide it by a hundred, and find the nearest round number for the price. Price-expectations in a market limit this, so for A malady of madness I ended up aiming for 150 (its big, so that seems justifiable). Its not there yet, but it'll earn out over time I think.
(I also track hours, and work out an effective pre-tax hourly rate for products, and compare it to a local benchmark for writing; most things pay off in hourly rate at around US$0.05 a word, so that seems OK).
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So I went in with zero expectations with my Narva adventure, which is why I went with PWYW and just what seems like a fair amount for a one-evening adventure. As of right now there have been 121 "sales" for just shy of 100 USD (post cut), with avout 75% of the "sales" being free and 19 sales at roughly asking price or more. Since there have not been any further sales in a week, I will assume that this is the size of the market.
I am however not even close to 0.05€ /word.
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Mandi-Lynn does a straight comparison of five print on demand publishers. Note this doesn't include Drivethru's print service.
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I've just noticed I have Copper Bestseller tags on Drivethru for Mythic Venice and Ars Magica Monsters: Volume 1.
The sale levels on badges are here: https://help.drivethrupartners.com/hc/en-us/articles/12780761951255-Bestseller-Metals-and-How-to-Earn-Badges
Basically, Copper is "You sold 51 copies for at least 20 cents")
Sales update for MEM#1: 27 sales on Drivethru, 20* sales on itch, 4 sales on Patreon, 36 paid subscribers.)
- It's actually less, but itch subscribers pay an average of USD7.50, so I've divided it down into $6 portions for comparability.
So, 51 sales. 109 is break even with the tax loss write-off, 220 sales is "Has paid for itself".
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So I'm not sure whether I'm the only one that did this, but I subscribed to your blog betting you would prefer to get subscription money than selling the product since that can go into the next version too.
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Yes, subscription is great: the Patreon cut is less.
We are on day 4 of Serenissima Obscura which offers the Ars Magica Guide for Serenissima Obscura as an add-on.
We have already funded and this is also due to the immense support of the ArM community. So far, we have sold 320 digital copies and of the main book and almost half of these we bought by the Ars Magica fans.
Sure... it would be nice to motivate even more backers of the DE to support us, to actually break even. (A 400 pages full colour book with two supplements and other add-ons cost far more than our funding goal.) But I won't complain.
The Ars Magica community rocks!
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