After releasing my second adventure on the DMs Guild, Myrkara’s Hoard, I initially saw low sales results. I decided to put it on sale for $0.99, down from regular price of $1.99. I also put my first adventure, Missing in the Olde Marsh on sale as well. I wanted to monitor and document the results of the sale, and share that with the rest of the community.
Myrkara’s Hoard had only been out for 7 days, but any initial sales bump from being on the front page had worn off. Now it was in the long-tail selling cycle, which generally means the hype is over. Missing in the Olde Marsh was my first adventure, and it had not sold one unit in many weeks. Sales were very stagnant on this product, so I wanted to boost attention and hopefully get closer to Copper bestseller.
My strategy would be to drop the price and promote on social media over the course of the sale. Overall I did make more sales and generate extra profits. As well as getting my adventures into the hands of more people.
About the products
I put two products on sale, both adventures. I am new to writing adventures, so I wanted to promote my new product group and help get some traction as an adventure writer. The time frame of the sale was from November 11 to December 1, for a total of 14 days. My goal was to increase my total units, sales, and royalties over the two weeks over the previous 2 weeks. For both adventures, this was not going to be a tall order.
Missing in the Olde Marsh is a Tier 1 adventure. The characters get shipwrecked after being caught in a necromantic storm. They battle some undead and arrive at Marshtown where they are asked to find a missing person. They realize the storm was caused by a necromantic orb and must defend Marshtown against the evil.
Myrkara’s Hoard is a Tier 2 adventure. The characters hear that a half elf acolyte is looking for some adventurers to help plunder a long sealed dragon hoard. They travel through a magic portal in to the secret lair, evade traps and constructs, and eventually fight one of Myrkara’s dragonlich wyrmlings in a treasure room.
Sales Results
For Myrkara’s Hoard, during the sale period I sold 19 units at 0.99 ($18.81 in sales) and generated 50% in royalties ($9.41). Prior to the sale I had sold only 10 copies in the 7 days since I’d released it.
For Missing in the Olde Marsh, I sold only 4 units. It also happened that by chance that my sale coincided with the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales on the DMs Guild. For a few days, both were in effect. I considered changing my sale, but I decided against adjusting the strategy. 3 of the sales of Missing in the Olde Marsh were when both were in effect, dropping the retail down to $0.66 (great for the purchasers!). Royalties were similarly affected, down to just 0.66 total (revenue split with writing partner).
My royalties for the two products are 50% on Myrkara’s Hoard, and 25% on Missing into Olde Marsh, which is split with my writing partner. Total for the two adventures, I made $21.45 in gross sales, netting $10.07 in royalties.
Marketing efforts
The DMs Guild doesn’t let you create sales by yourself, the only time items go on sale is when they are on large scale (or site wide) sales. With these the timing, items, and savings are all determined by One Book Shelf, the marketplace owners.
This means that in order to put an item on sale, I actually had to change the selling price. In order to let my fans (or casual browsers) know that I’d actually dropped the price, I created a cheap graphic to let customers know.
I had created a social media campaign consisting of 10 tweets, 5 for each product. I spaced the tweets out so they ran on different days, and the ideal time was determined by Crowdfire, my social media manager. I used the price drop messaging in my tweets, using the same image that I placed in the product.
I measured each tweet with bit.ly, a link tracker, so I could review how the twitter ads were performing. Myrkara’s Hoard has 7 link clicks, compared to 19 sales. The Myrkara tweets also generated 6 likes and 1 retweet. Missing in the Olde Marsh had 12 link clicks, compared to 4 sales. These tweets generated only one like and one retweet.
Overall impressions for the Myrkara’s Hoard tweets were much higher than Missing in the Olde Marsh. This shows clearly in the sales – shoppers and social media users were more engaged with Myrkara’s Hoard overall.
Thoughts on results
I was very pleased with the sales results for Myrkara’s Hoard. Sales volume doubled – I sold more units and I generated more revenue than the previous week when I launched the product. Sales for this title have also continued, and it is now a Copper seller.
Missing in the Olde Marsh I was not pleased with the results. I expected to sell many more units than 4. Since then the adventure was included in the New Year, New Campaign bundle, and the product is now a Silver bestseller. My writing partner and I are working on a followup that continues the overarching plot of the first adventure.
I wish I had the tools to setup sales on my own products on the DMs Guild like on DriveThruRPG. I hope this will coming in a future site upgrade – I know OneBookShelf has been making some fantastic improvements to the DMs Guild, and I really look forward to seeing what they have coming up next.
For final thoughts, I would continue to use sales like these to promote and market my products. I would also recommend that other writers make use of these techniques DMs Guild, especially on Twitter or other social media platforms. Ultimately I delivered on what I set out to do, which was sell more units and make more money.
Terry Herc 