Announcements - [Cobweb Games] Results for the 3rd Quarter (my first ever sales report!)

Posted by: Sebastian Hickey On: Oct 18th 2010

Hey guys,

I sold 97 books and 32 PDFs last quarter. Whoopee!

There's more figures here.

Posted by: Gregor Hutton On: Oct 20th 2010

Great stuff, Sebastian.

My feeling/experience with retail sales, like the ones you have seen, is that they will re-order. The shops that buy at IPR know they have a market for Indie Games and so they buy a load of books fairly regularly keeping their supplies topped up. If the books don't sell at the far end then sure they won't re-order. But my feeling is that they always do sell (even if somewhat slowly), so you mostly get re-orders. It is difficult to gauge the rate at which they sell, even for good games (How We Came To Live Here by Brennan Taylor was a slow but steady seller at Leisure Games until he got nominated for an ENnie, when it "popped").

The other note is that you earn far less as a publisher from a retail sale. My feeling is that you have to cater for that in your business model, since that's the nature of the beast.