Showing posts with label Doctor Esker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Doctor Esker. Show all posts

Friday, June 21, 2019

Great review from G33K-HQ!

I got a terrific review from G33K-HQ for Doctor Esker's Notebook. Here's a link to the review:

G33K-HQ Review

Sounds like they had a great time with it. WARNING: There's a little bit of a spoiler for the first puzzle in their pictures.

Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Doctor Esker's Notebook project financial update

I've been doing a series of posts about the financial end of my game project, and I haven't posted an update for a while. I'm nearly to the break-even point, which is great! I'm at $-194 by my calculation, with revenues of $3,454 offsetting expenses of $3,649.

I have sold 386 games and sent out 35 as promo or reviewer copies. I have 134 in stock at Amazon, and another 525 or so at home (uh, I mean in my warehouse 😀 ). I make about $9 per game depending on the sales channel, and I am not incurring too many new expenses at this point - the major expenses were printing and development, and I don't have many ongoing costs (other than the cut Amazon and PayPal take from each sale). So, I could make up to about $4,000-$4,500 on this if I just sell out the print run and don't do anything else.

Sales have taken a little bit of a hit over summer. I'm at about two sales a day, where from February to April I was at more like three a day. I hope that's just seasonal and not a trend. Nearly all sales now are through Amazon.

Here's the info in graph form. First, expenses and revenues by category:

The picture above shows revenues (above zero, climbing) and expenses (below zero, mostly flat). Time progresses along the bottom, but not evenly - initially I was updating every day or two, but now I'm updating less frequently.

Next, net revenue (income minus expenses): 



On this one, the time axis is properly scaled. I'm almost back to zero, as you can see.

Of course, I'm not including the time I've put into this project. My hourly wage is something like negative fifty cents an hour. So, this isn't (yet) a good way to make a living, put food on the table, or pay for health insurance. It's not even a good investment relative to a good solid mutual fund, although it will be if I sell out the print run by the end of the year, which looks likely if sales pick up a little around the holidays.

Anyway, looking good. I should hit break even sometime later this month.

Friday, April 12, 2019

A business milestone - $2K

This past week I crossed $2,000 in revenue for Dr. Esker's Notebook. The last bit of that came from a distribution deal in Canada with a game store, who bought forty copies at a steep discount and arranged for a U.S. cargo forwarder who I could send the games to, which saved a lot on shipping and complexity for me. I am very grateful for that.

I haven't tried to get into game stores directly other than this effort, and I think that might be a cool avenue to pursue, particularly if I do another print run. Here is the updated revenue and expense chart and net revenue track. I've had pretty healthy sales on Amazon for the past week (around 2-5 per day), so that's helped too.  I've gone from being $3500 in the hole after printing to $1650 in the hole now, about two months later, so that's good progress.

Saturday, March 23, 2019

Facebook video for Dr. Esker - SPOILERS!

It looks like they've got Dr. Esker's Notebook available in their board game room at the Connect Games Escape Room in Fredericksburg, VA, which is totally cool. They posted a video about this to Facebook at the link below, but be careful - there are spoilers for one of the puzzles in the video if you look too closely.

James' Games Video (on Facebook)

Saturday, March 16, 2019

Weird Ebay reseller

This is weird. Somebody is selling two "new" copies of my game on Ebay, for $6 over new list price. They can't really be new, because the only new copies are in my basement and in the Amazon warehouse. Only two people have bought more than one copy at a time, and they're not ebay marketers - I know them personally. I also know where all the single copies that exist got sent to. So, a puzzle.

I'm not sure if they have used or promotional copies somehow, or if they're planning on fulfilling through Amazon or through me (although neither Amazon nor me offers two day shipping, which the Ebay seller promises). I guess it's possible they bought from Amazon and are repackaging, trying to make an extra $6 from markup. Or maybe it's that they're some kind of game store upselling trade-ins. Their other items for sale are all board games. If so, it would be hard for them to have gotten two copies already, and they wouldn't be new.

Obviously this doesn't really compete with me, because they are selling above my price, but it's weird. If people want to sell the game in game stores, I'm totally happy offering a discount for distribution.




Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Amazon early reviewer program

I signed up for Amazon's Early Reviewer program for Doctor Esker's Notebook, and I just got my first review through it. For $60, Amazon will offer buyers of the game a $3 Amazon gift card to purchasers who review my product until they give out five cards for five reviews. I don't have any input or control over the content of the reviews or who Amazon decides to ask. So, a pretty good deal for Amazon - they get $60 in exchange for giving out $15 in gift cards, which are only good on Amazon anyway.

Despite the benefit to Amazon and the cost, it has value for me too. I signed up for this before I had any reviews, because I thought it would help if there were early reviews on Amazon for a product few people had likely heard of, especially if the reviews came from verified customers. In the interim, four reviews have appeared there from other folks. So, at the end of this program, if five people take the gift card bait from Amazon, I'll at least have nine reviews.

This seems like a good idea, especially given all the controversy Amazon has faced with regard to review-stuffing scams. In this case, the reviews have bought the game from Amazon and should be providing authentic reviews, so they're just being compensated for sharing their opinion, whatever it is.

For more info on the program, see here.


Esker business update

For those of you following the business side of my indie game publishing project with Doctor Esker's Notebook, here's an update. I'm up to 115 total sales with revenues of $1,108, set against costs of $3,530, for a current (but shrinking) loss of $2,422.

The bulk of the costs is the development process and the print run, but I continue to have additional costs with marketing and promotion. If I sell out the entire rest of print run, I probably have another $8,800 in potential revenue, which (barring massive future marketing expenses) would make the project profitable. That assumes my time is worthless - if we paid me even a minimum-wage hourly rate for my work on the project, I'm deep underwater. Given that this is a so far a passion project, I'm fine with my time being counted as free.

Here are the numbers is in graph form:

The time axis advances to the right here, showing increasing revenue compared to mostly fixed costs, but the time isn't linear - it's just whenever I do an update.

For this one, time is linear - this is the history of the project starting with the print run at the end of last year, with additional costs added to revenues as time progresses to the right.

Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Monday, March 11, 2019

Cubist podcast appearance

I had the great pleasure to be on The Cubist podcast with host Bill Corey, talking about puzzle game design and lots of other topics. Give it a listen!


Thursday, February 28, 2019

Doctor Esker's Notebook mentioned on The Cubist

Eric from The Cubist Podcast (Episode #103) reviewed Doctor Esker's Notebook - very cool. His comments on the game run from about the two minute mark to about four minutes.


Dr. Esker's Notebook sales and revenue update

I'm nearing the end of my fourth week of Dr. Esker sales. After an initial bunch of sales to friends and acquaintances, I'm starting to see a shift to a slower but steady set of sales to people I don't know, with 78 total sales in 26 days, averaging a couple a day now. My sales have shifted almost entirely to Amazon and away from my site, so I think most folks are discovering the game either via Amazon or on other sites and then buying from Amazon. It's hard to tell exactly how that happens.

My ad campaigns have not borne much (or any) fruit, which I mostly expected. I have no apparent sales from either Facebook ads (suspended now after hitting $50) or from Google search ads (nearing $50 and suspension). I can track sales from Google via their analytics, and I also know nothing much is happening from those because I haven't sold a game through my website in two weeks. It is possible the ads led people to an Amazon purchase, but that's about the only way it could have been worth it, and even then I'd have had to sell 11 or more that way to cover the cost of the two ad campaigns. I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

I have had a positive review from Boardgamecapital.com, and a positive tweet and email feedback from The Opinionated Gamers, with a review hopefully coming soon. There are three positive reviews on Amazon, two from purchasers and one from a person who got a free copy in advance, none solicited. So, I've got a small but growing number of uniformly positive reviews, which is good. I still have seven or so copies out for review to various reviewers and influencers.

Here are the finances thus far. I'm still in the hole by a lot, but I'm gradually making headway. Here's revenues vs. expenses over time (note the dates aren't evenly spaced - just whenever I do an update):

And here is the bottom line (expense minus revenue), with a regular time axis this time. Starting to cut the corner off that block of losses, but still a ways to go until profitability.



Monday, February 18, 2019

Sunday, February 17, 2019

Sources of orders

I've been selling Doctor Esker's Notebook for a couple of weeks now. I've paid for a little advertising on Facebook and Google, but most of my customer traffic has been via Facebook, where I've posted general announcements on my feed and also posted to my very active college class page (Harvard-Radcliffe 1991). So far, the HR91 folks have come through in a very big way and represent nearly half of my sales. Here's the distribution, classified by segments of my life:

Those folks who have no connection to me, the purple wedge representing ten orders, are the group that needs to grow if I'm going to expand sales very much. I only have so many affinity groups that I can go to personally. The question is how best to reach outside those groups to people who would just take a chance on the game without a personal connection to me.

I would imagine this is what most boardgame Kickstarter campaigns look like, at least in the early stages, so even though I've already printed, this is probably parallel in terms of audience.

Saturday, February 16, 2019

Woohoo!

This is cool...


Fixing errors

Here's what fixing a printing error looks like. This is four cases of 11 games each laid out with the eleven cards I needed to replace in each box next to them. This set took me about an hour and fifteen minutes. I did 12 cases total today (132 games) for a total of about four hours work. The hardest task is cutting the shrinkwrap carefully on each box, although opening each box and finding and replacing the badly printed cards takes some time too. I elected not to invest the time or money in re-shrinkwrapping. No complaints so far, but I imagine if I sold in game stores I might need to rewrap them.




I really wish I didn't face this problem, but it's not insurmountable. In about four hours work today, I fixed about 12% of my print run. I have 79% of the print run (860 games) left to fix, so another 27 or so hours of boring labor to get them all done.