🤑🤑 Money and Collaboration - Pricing 🤑🤑
🤑🤑 Money and Collaboration - Pricing 🤑🤑
Project Managing for TTRPGs
TL;DR: I give an overview of my experience deciding where to publish and pricing my work. I include pricing resources, thoughts on alternative pricing like “pay what you want” and a bit about making sales goals.
This is part of a series on Project Managing for TTRPGs. Stay up to date by subscribing:
Last week I gave a pep talk about why I think folks should charge (or charge more) for their work. This week, I’m covering my experience setting prices on some of my early work. I also share the resources I found useful when learning how to think about pricing.
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Where Are You publishing?
I touched on this in my How to Pick a Collaborative Project post: where you publish matters. It affects reach, the percentage of royalties you get, and how much control you have over your creative work. Here are three publishing options I’ve used (the royalties are accurate as of February 2023):
DMsGuild: A marketplace for 3rd party D&D content
Pros: You can use Wizards of the Coast Intellectual Property (such as the Radiant Citadel, Ebberon, The Forgotten Realms, etc). In fact, this is the only way you can legally write work using Wizards IP and sell it. From my experience with selling Radiant Citadel content, folks definitely do buy DMsGuild content, even if you’re not a well-known author. You also get access to stock art, which are scans of images from old D&D sourcebooks (though the quality of this art varies and you can’t modify it beyond cropping).
Cons: They take 50% of your revenue and you can’t easily know or message customers who bought your products. They also get exclusive access to your content (you cannot sell it elsewhere).
DriveThruRPG: A marketplace for TTRPG content
Pros: You can choose between an exclusive or a non-exclusive status for your product (explained in full detail here). If you choose non-exclusive, you keep 65% of your royalties (exclusive is 70%) and can sell on other sites. I found it was worth it to publish here as well as itch.io, under non-exclusive. You can email your customers.
itch.io: A marketplace with a focus on independent video games as well as a strong indie TTRPG community
Pros: You choose how much of the revenue to keep (including up to 100%). The website is nice, the analytics are easy to work with. You can email your customers.
Cons: It looks like revenue splitting amongst collaborators is not supported (as of 3/23)
These are the three platforms I have experience with. I am excited to dive into crowdfunding; this honestly seems like one route to making some non-trivial income and this is definitely a route you can and should consider:
Here are some informative resources about determining where to publish:
Selling on DMs Guild: A Retrospective on The Gray Merchant of Asphodel: This is a must-read for anyone planning to sell on DMsGuild.
How to “Make It” in the D&D and RPG Industry - Where to Sell: I linked to the specific timecode where Mike Shea (aka Sly Flourish), talks about the pros and cons of different platforms. He makes a good case for only selling on DMsGuild if you need to use their IP. The entire video is a good watch!
Pricing Research
There are a number of blog posts out there about how to price your work. Here are the ones I found the most helpful (many are DMsGuild/DriveThruRPG specific):
DMs Guild Pricing Snapshot – July 2020: This noted the use of $X.95
What is an Adventure Worth?: This is an old (2016) article on adventure pricing.
Pricing Experiments: Not DMsGuild specific - a general introduction to different experiments and trends seen in pricing.
My ultimate takeaways from there were:
Sell for X.95: Graphs show there’s something magical about that .95 (and .99)
Pad your price a little higher: There’s a bunch of data out there that sales do work and having a higher price gives you room to have a sale. Also, folks tend to undervalue and underprice their work.
(DMSGuild Specific) Under $5 vs. Over: A Retrospective on The Gray Merchant of Asphodel has an awesome bit about which DMsGuild bestseller list to go for and how they calculate states (it’s #4 on the takeaways). If you sell for above $5 you’re put in direct competition with professional publishers to get on the front page of the website (which matters for discoverability and sales).
Pricing Examples
Jukebox: For Jukebox, I picked my price based on the Ribbon Drive PDF, a similarly “sized” story game (both in length and rules complexity), which uses a simple layout without custom artwork. I decided to sell on both itch.io and DriveThruRPG (and I point folks toward itch.io because I keep more of the revenue).
Encounters: For Encounters in the Radiant Citadel, I looked for similar encounter bundles. I found these and this one, which put us between $2.99-$7.99. I knew we were publishing on DMsGuild and decided it was wise to target the “Most Popular DMsGuild Titles Under $5” list. There’s data around X.95 selling a bit better, so I ended at $4.95.
Pay What You Want
“Pay what you want” (PWYW) is an option on many of the TTRPG marketplaces. I personally stayed clear of PWYW for the following reason: It feels like I’m saying to the customer “I don’t know how much this is worth, what do you think?” 🤷. Ultimately it puts work, effort, and friction on the customer to figure out how much you should get compensated. From what I’ve read and heard from other creators, PWYW generates very little actual money. This bolded line from What is an Adventure Worth? stood out to me: “$1.03 on 184 sales!” for a PWYW product.
I’d ask yourself why you want to charge “Pay what you want”:
Picking a price is hard and uncomfortable: I agree! Putting dollar signs on our labors of love can feel awkward and icky. But for all the reasons why I think you should charge money (and the fact that PWYW puts the burden of pricing on the customer), set a price. You know more than your customers because:
You made the product and know what’s in it.
You can take extra time to research and decide on a proper price, as opposed to customers who are just trying to get on with their day.
Setting a price is even more important if you’re working with collaborators and need to communicate clearly what they can monetarily expect from the project.
I want to let customers read my work before they buy it: If a person downloads your work for free using PWYW, then they need to remember to come back to actually buy it. Instead of having them navigate all the way through checkout, download the product, and forget to pay, I suggest investing in a good product page with comprehensive previews and samples of what’s in the book. DMsGuild and DriveThruRPG allow you to show previews of your book easily. In fact, Journeys Beyond the Radiant Citadel shares the entire book (water-marked) in their Full-size Preview. I like this better than PWYW, because it allows someone to read the entire work, but still nudges them to actually pay for the product if they are going to use it.
I want to offer a sliding scale: I really like sliding scales (different costs depending on income and wealth) and community copies (copies that are free or discounted specifically for folks struggling financially). I think a better way to do this than PWYW, is the method used by the current (as of this writing) top seller in the Under $5 category on DMsGuild: Manual of Gainful Exercise: D&D Subclass Workouts. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you’ll see the following:
Here’s why I like this community copies strategy more than PWYW:
It allows the creator to confidently set a price for what the product is worth (versus suggested prices which feel more ignorable).
It provides room to explain who the community copies and discounts are for.
It is, in fact, a sliding scale, with 50%-100% off.
I’ve seen plenty of creators on itch.io also provide community copies; here’s a forum post that gives step-by-step details about how to do something similar with itch.io.
I want to use PWYW as part of a larger sales strategy! There are some cases where one might use PWYW; there’s evidence (including Evil Hat’s business model for Fate Core) that PWYW can entice customers to buy your other offerings. But generally, these folks have a bunch of experience on their platforms and a catalog of products to link to (and if that’s you, great!).
Setting Expectations, Making Goals
The reality is that you should sell your work and you’re unlikely to make much money off of your early products. The first part of Sly Flourish’s How to “Make It” in the D&D and RPG Industry touches on what “Making It” means. Fun fact: Sly Flourish, a titan in the 3rd party TTRPG scene, has not quit his day job (at least as of 2021). And this mirrors a lot of what I know about many talented folks making awesome TTRPG products. 90% of DMsGuild products make less than 250 sales. When advertising for “Encounters”, I joked with a friend that “this is the hardest I’ve ever worked for $50”.
All of that said, I still 100% made monetary and sales goals, even though the money was comparatively small. My monetary goals for Encounters were:
Work with 5-10 collaborators to write an encounter collection and sell it on DMsGuild for 4.95
Sell 51 copies in 3 months (a copper medal)
If you’re planning on leading a project, you should take some time to think about your monetary goals. You need to be ready to communicate those to potential collaborators.
Show Me the Money
As of 3/7, about 4 months after Encounters in the Radiant Citadel went on sale, it’s sold 257 copies. The net revenue is $1,229.80, half of which goes to DMsGuild, and the other half which was split amongst creators. As an Electrum best-seller, Encounters is in the top 90th percentile of products on DMsGuild.
Pricing Lessons Learned
What to keep doing: For a DMsGuild product sold by new creators, I am thrilled with how well Encounters did. For DMsGuild I really like the $4.95 price point (which is why I chose the same price point for Out of Luck). We were able to get and stay as the number one product in the “Most Popular DMsGuild Titles Under $5” for a few days and I have analytics showing that sales came from the front page. This also led to inclusion in the DMsGuild newsletter and a review video.
What to change: Ultimately what makes a product sell and how much money you make as a creator is determined by a lot more than just price. But focusing only on pricing, the things I’m most excited about doing differently are moving to crowd-funding (which will involve writing products using only the D&D SRD) and experimenting with sales and giveaways.
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I hope this post has provided resources and transparency for new authors. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to comment:
If you’re getting something out of this series and want to support me financially 💰💰💰, the most meaningful way would be to buy a copy of my work (Out of Luck, Encounters in the Radiant Citadel, or Jukebox).
Next up I’ll be chatting about different ways to split money amongst collaborators, plus a Google Sheets template for Royalty Split Projection and Freelancing Fee calculation!
Over and Out,
- 🫙 👁️ 👁️