The Cottage is Changing For Me

 I was doing my mid-month sales check the other day and noticed no major changes. The money brought in was what was expected between new releases, with a nice emphasis on older works by myself and Peryton, which always means having made them just that much more meaningful. That is on top of making profit from them. Then I went outside to do some yard work and lumberjacking, I BOUGHT A CHAINSAW. Coming back inside to catch up on my blogging, hey it's my journal I checked my blog views for the last few weeks. I was floored. It was almost eight times greater than it normally is. While I usually get about one to two thousand hits, I was sitting there looking at nine thousand, almost ten, hits. AND boy was I disappointed.

Back in my small little world of a couple thousand hits, I had worked out a metric that seemed to work for the seventeen years this blog has been going on. Every eight hundred hits, I would sell between two to six products. That is excluding the sales spikes that come with new releases. Here I was looking at eight thousand hits over two days and couple thousand following over the rest of that week. Sales had remained normal so to say that I was underwhelmed would be an understatement. Despite increased coverage, I was still selling my usual products, not the new sexier products to people that are most likely digging up my work and then the more obscure stuff from 2000-2009 in support of products made in the 70s and 80s.

I have been living a much more professional RPG writer life than I ever have. Dealing with other designers and business managers. Heck folks, PeryPubbers has this new line of Monsters! Monsters! products by a T&T new-but-true-blood. I am wheeling and dealing with folks in the BX/OSR movement meaning more developments there soon. Getting contributing authors and artists is easier than ever. Likewise the Flying Buffalo Brand is being bought by some big business name meaning there will be some action going on there in a few months to a year. So with the disappointing indicator that more does not mean more, at least immediately, I started looking deeper into things.

While I figure that the OSR exposure is a more of a social endeavor because of incapability between my 2d6 system and their d20 matrix, I would've thought that the game collectors among them would've picked up something. But that is because I disbelieve as many of them claiming to be broke and often not having two nickels to rub together. I mean dudes, the tabletop RPG hobby is a small print industry. Meanwhile FBI, that's Flying Buffalo Incorporated and I have a few works involving the company, was bought out by what is essentially asset managers of the RPG field. It's pretty clear the new company is about selling back inventory and paying portions to the people holding interests in boxes of merchandise moldering somewhere-- like when slum lords get "bought out" by a group of slum lords really to be incorporated into their collective residual income scheme but removed from the day-to-day management of that property. That situation is not meant to expand market but to improve capital from existing hard property. So in short, if you're not caught up in the marketing of Strahd the D&D vampire, now available for the fourth time since the 80s, there is not a lot of money going around.

Maybe next month I'll see some boost in sales, but I am not counting on it. Perhaps I'll branch out into products that seem to be expanding, like 5th Edition or the OSR badly named title of the week or Chaosium-compatible horror works. Probably not. This is a hobby to me. I like my particular game systems.