Anatomy of our first Eureka sale
We ran our first sale on Eureka for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend, and it worked out well. Having never done a sale before, I wanted to make some notes about the specifics.
Let’s start with the numbers. We sold 69 copies, broken down as follows:
- Print: 18 at $24.95 (29% off, $10), of which 5 were international orders
- PDF: 21 at $11.95 (29% off, $5)
- DriveThru/RPGNow PDF: 30 at $11.95 (29% off, $5)
The sale actually started early on our website, as I sent a news scoop about it to EN World that was posted sooner than I expected (my fault!), so it technically ran from 11/25-11/29. Promotion didn’t start until 11/26, though.
I promoted the sale in six ways, all of which were free: an EN World news item, an article on Gnome Stew, an article here, on the Gnome Stew and Engine Publishing Facebook pages, on the GS, EP, and my personal Twitter feeds, and on DriveThruRPG. Facebook and Twitter each got a mention at the start and towards the end of the sale, and I mentioned DriveThruRPG once on Twitter.
DriveThru ran a Drunken Goblin promotion for Black Friday deals, and over the weekend I used one of their automated tools to send an email mentioning the sale to roughly 180 of their customers who had Eureka in their cart or wishlist (and had opted in to receive publisher emails). That cost me a few Publisher Promotion Points, OBS’ sort of internal currency; PPP are earned as you sell copies of your products.
So what did I learn?
- Sales work! OK, this is fairly basic, but we motivated a lot of people to pick up Eureka who presumably weren’t willing to pay the normal price — exactly what a sale should do! 69 copies is roughly 10% of our overall sales volume over five months, and it rolled in over four days — pretty damned good.
- OBS is powerful. OneBookShelf (DTRPG/RPGN) continues to impress me. I did a lot more promotion of the EP online store, and 42% of our sales still came from OBS. Having the email tool available was also very cool.
- As a means of moving print product, this discount probably wasn’t deep enough. I’d have liked to sell more than 18 print books, though I’m thrilled to have sold those 18. I wanted to keep the print and PDF prices in parity, as they are normally (PDF = 50% of print, give or take), but in retrospect $20 likely would have been a better price point for the print book during the sale.
- Free advertising works. For a small company with one product, this was an exciting sale. While Gnome Stew, Facebook, and Twitter are by no means just promotional channels for EP, when used to promote this sale they worked pretty well. Would it have worked better with paid advertising behind it? I don’t know — that’s a test for our next sale!
Many thanks to everyone who snagged the book during our sale! It was fun to watch sales come in over the weekend, and we nearly hit 700 lifetime sales as a result. Good stuff, and definitely a sales tool that bears further experimentation.