About six months ago, I started publishing tabletop RPG PDFs under the name Brent P. Newhall’s Musaeum of Fantastic Wonders, starting with the short adventure War in the Deep in November 2008 and continuing with the sandbox setting The City of Talon in March 2009. I publish through DriveThruRPG, which takes a percentage of each PDF sale. The PDFs themselves are unrestricted.
I’ve always been a bit frustrated at the lack of real numbers about publishing PDFs online. How much money do these things make?
Here’s how much I’ve actually made. Each PDF sells for US$5.00; I get $3.25 of that.
Sales
Product | Number of Sales | Gross Earnings | Net Earnings |
War in the Deep | 14 | $65.00 | $45.25 |
The City of Talon | 17 | $75.00 | $48.75 |
TOTAL | 31 | $140.00 | $91.00 |
Month | Number of Sales | Gross Earnings | Net Earnings |
November 2008 | 4 | $15.00 | $9.75 |
December 2008 | 5 | $25.00 | $16.25 |
January 2009 | 4 | $20.00 | $13.00 |
February 2009 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
March 2009 | 1 | $5.00 | $3.25 |
April 2009 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
TOTAL | 14 | $65.00 | $45.25 |
Month | Number of Sales | Gross Earnings | Net Earnings |
March 2009 | 11 | $45.00 | $29.25 |
April 2009 | 6 | $30.00 | $19.50 |
TOTAL | 17 | $75.00 | $48.75 |
Web Traffic
Total hits for War in the Deep on DriveThruRPG: 3,737.
Unique pageviews for War in the Deep on the Musaeum:
Source | Pageviews |
ENWorld.org | 32 |
Direct | 10 |
Google searches | 7 |
RPGBloggers.com | 4 |
Others | 10 |
TOTAL | 63 |
The keywords used to find War in the Deep: “heroic tier adventure”, “printable d&d counters”, “rpg adventure plots”, “rpg adventure writing”, and “rpg for commercial use”
Total hits for The City of Talon on DriveThruRPG: 1,734.
Unique pageviews for The City of Talon on the Musaeum:
Source | Pageviews |
Google searches | 29 |
RPGBloggers.com | 14 |
11 | |
Direct access | 8 |
Others | 24 |
TOTAL | 86 |
The keywords used to find The City of Talon: “crimes of talon”, “brentnewhall”, and “role play blogs”.
Advertising
None.
Marketing
I described each project here on my blog in a couple of different blog posts. I’m a member of the RPG Bloggers Network, so those posts showed up there.
Analysis
Making just shy of US$100 with no advertising budget is no mean feat. On the other hand, considering the dozens of hours I put into these PDFs, I couldn’t exactly make a livable wage off this yet.
The biggest surprise is the 32 pageviews from ENWorld, a huge D&
I find it interesting that the RPG Bloggers network was much more interested in Talon than War in the Deep. This confirms my suspicion that GMs need
Plans
I plan to focus on settings. I’ll continue work on my abandoned underground city setting and my floating city in the sky setting. I plan to publish both in the next six months.
However, given the relatively low time investment in writing an adventure, I’ll probably publish one more adventure within the next six months. It seems worth it, especially if the adventure’s fun to build.