Midnight Dark: The First Month

This is business/money/publishing post, so if you're just here for beta content etc, you can move along.

I thought some patrons would be interested to know what my aspirations were for Midnight Dark when it first dropped, and what my plans were to achieve that aspiration.

Well, my target was $2000 profit - that is, a royalty payment for Midnight Dark in Feb 2024 of $2000 or more. This was a figure I largely plucked out of nowhere, but it was based on a few things: my experience of sales figures from previous releases, combined with the fact that I already had a receptive an interested audience among those who bought and played the original Horizon Wars, plus whatever boost in interest smaller-scale wargaming would glean from the releases of Legions Imperialis and Epic Warpath. So I would call it "educated guesswork". However, another important factor was that I wanted the first month's sales to cover the technical costs of production. Note that this does not include my time and expertise, the cost of the miniatures that feature in the photography, the cost of the camera I used to take the pictures (my phone... it was my phone) or the domestic costs associated with my studio. It just cover the money I had to pay out to other people for the book to exist. This included 1200 Euros to my cover artist and US$500 licensing fees to the interior artist. I also still owe my accountant for last year's tax return.

So, all-in-all, $2000 felt like a reasonable target.

It was also predicated on the assumption that I would dedicate whatever time I could between the day-job and the rest of my life to promoting the book as far and wide as my energy would allow. We're talking a "best effort" push for the release. Again, I consider my time to be "free" even though, economically, it isn't. But it did mean that I excluded all kinds of paid-for advertising in the first month in order to ascertain the impact of organic-only promotion. So you'll have noticed I have been much more active on Facebook recently, on Instagram and on Reddit (although I'm always active on Reddit, because doomscrolling is my other hobby). I left Xitter alone because... well, who wants to have to wash that smell off every day, and, although I am on Threads, I didn't consider it a platform worth focusing time on for this effort.

I even went and updated some of my Pinterest boards for Horizon Wars!

As you'll mostly be aware, I wrote a lot of blog posts on my website to provide content for distribution on social media. I hate repeating myself on social media even though I know repetition is ultimately at the heart of advertising, so I got around that by writing multiple related articles about 6mm sci-fi miniatures manufacturers and how to fit some of their products into Midnight Dark. I also returned to the most Gen X of social media platforms: the forums. Again, I still can't bring myself to use TMP, so I focused on DakkaDakka, The Wargames Website and the Lead Adventure Form (if you are a user on any of these, feel free to follow those links to signal-boost the threads...).

So, with all of that, how did I do?

You may, therefore, be interested to know that my take-home from this month's sales of Midnight Dark were $2013.52. I was looking at not quite meeting the $2000 target until I ever so slightly begged for help on the Discord and Charax remembered that he hadn't actually yet bought the book. Many thanks! :) But this does serve to foreshadow a point I will make shortly about independent game design.

Before that though, it's worth adding that, although that $2013.52 is my take-home, the actual sales of the book were $4057.60, for 188 individual sales. This is especially interesting because it's almost exactly twice my take-home.

Wargame Vault pays me a 75% royalty. So if you buy a PDF, I get 75% of the price you pay. But if you buy a hard copy book. I get 75% of the premium over and above the cost of printing the book (and the book costs about $15 to print, so obviously I get a lot less of the total sale price as a royalty). It's very interesting that the balance of print to PDF copies sold leads to a total take-home of about 50% of revenue. This has been consistent across all of my books, by the way.

Interestingly, also, I sold another 52 products this month other than Midnight Dark. Compare this to the month before when I only sold 34 products, total. Releasing new content is very good for sales across the board. That's a 53% increase is sales by volume, with no other promotions, deals or discounts. Just one new (albeit important) release.

Looking at the leader board for the best sellers, I've been bobbing around 4th or 5th more or less since release, with only a bunch of very serious-looking historical wargaming releases holding the line against my rise to the top. So this month I'm outselling Space Station Zero, Space Weirdos, Reign in Hell and Five Parsecs from Home. In fact, thanks to the Midnight Dark boost, Zero Dark is outselling Five Parsecs.

Whether that can be sustained, of course, is another question. But it gives you some context, when you consider that I only sold 188 copies in my release month - typically the biggest month for sales - how few copies of otherwise high profile products like Five Parsecs and Reign in Hell actually sell month-on-month. Of course, Five Parsecs is also available through retail, so there's no saying what the actual sales might be. But when you see products apparently doing well on WGV, they are often still selling only in double figures. And, as we have seen, often only giving their author/publisher 50% of the revenue in actual income.

Of course, it's a running gag that writing miniatures wargaming rules is no way to make a living.

But let me return to that total sales figure of 188 copies, because it tells us something important: I can almost literally point to every copy sold and identify a specific action that I took to make that sale. Either the purchaser was a patron (and I have spent a long time cultivating my relationship with you guys) or their made that purchase as a specific result of me personally posting a notice, a blog, a forum thread or some other piece of individualised media to encourage the sale. Of those 188, very, very few will have bought the book purely because they saw the product on WGV and thought it looked interesting. Independent miniatures game retail is low volume and relational. Sales are generally driven through a relationship with the author.

Now if you look at some of the big names I mentioned, that isn't always true of those. Frostgrave was the most important driver of sales for Stargrave. Joe has a great reputation as a designer, but he isn't personally driving those sales (except to the extent that he was, actually, Osprey Games's marketing guy when Frostgrave was released). Reign in Hell and Space Station Zero are, of course, from Adam "Uncle Atom" Loper whose main outlet for marketing is his very successful YouTube channel, so it could be argued that most of his fans have a parasocial relationship with him, but it really isn't the primary driver. But if you get right down to it, independent game retail is driven through interpersonal interactions at a very granular level. Whereas mass market games are driven mostly through player-to-player interactions, independent games are driven through designer-to-player interactions. It's extremely difficult to know at what point a game will transition from one to the other, but that transition marks a huge step in a designer's market development. And it's a step I am clearly far from making.

Anyway, I am going to see about £1500 in revenue from Midnight Dark this month.

I paid the cover artist 1200 Euros. I paid the interior artist $500. And I still owe my accountant. So, so far, Midnight Dark has just about covered its costs.

But as some of that money has already been paid, I should have enough left over to buy a little advertising in Miniature Wargaming magazine in March. This provided a big boost in sales when I last tried it, but it wore off quickly over time. So the plan is to go for a quarter-page ad for the first month, then 1/8 page ads for a couple of months, then stop and measure the impact.

Whatever I have left will go, first, on buying some copies of the book for myself - not least to send one to ItalianMoose for his contributions to the photography. The remainder will be for sale on my website for those who'd like signed copies or who don't want to wait 2-3 weeks for WGV's POD arrangements. If there is anything left over, I am planning on buying a Wacom tablet because, much as I love supporting independent artists, I can, in fact, draw and paint quite well and I could save a fortune doing more of the art in my books myself. If I didn't have to pay for art, I could essentially afford to take an extra month off between contracts in which I could focus on content production, videos, and supplements for the published games, not to mention those new games I keep muttering about.

Anyway, I thought all of those numbers would be interesting for you guys. If you have any questions or even suggestions on how to sustain sales and maybe, one day, cross the hump into player-to-player sales do let me know.