Sitting here in the quiet of the evening after a
surprisingly slow but VERY profitable Free RPG Day, with the sounds of the
extended TableTop episode of Carcassone playing in the background, four things come to mind:
1.
Tried and True Beats New and Novel. The most
popular items among our attendees/customers (just like Free Comic Book Day, we
always have a few people who come in solely for the free item, get it and
vanish again for months. I don’t consider them customers) are recognizable
items that have been around a few years and have support products out there.
Given the lack of any new D&D item (saving their powder for GenCon, I
imagine) and no Star Wars from FFG, our
most popular items were Pathfinder, Castles & Crusades, 13th Age
and Mage. However , Cosmic Patrol and Valiant Universe did not have a lot of
takers, possibly because they were smaller than other books, indicating not as
much value but also because of a lack of familiarity (The Lamentations of the
Flame Princess offering did not get a lot of takers either, but that is likely
due to us keeping it behind the counter. Not putting an adventure marked 18+ on
the cover out where kids might get it).
2.
Cover Design Is Important. When designing a
cover, publishers need to remember that it is likely not going to get displayed
in the way they envisioned it when designing the cover. Case in point Goodman
Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classic offering. It had all the logos at the bottom of
the cover. We racked it and sever other books in a waterfall display, which,
due to the design, covered the bottom of the cover, where all the Goodman logos
had been placed. The logoless cover may have stood out among the others with
logos visible, but, if you only have a few seconds to catch a browser’s
attention, every little bit helps.
3.
Dice Rule. More than any other item, we had
people asking where the Free RPG Day dice from Q Workshop and Chessex were.
Everybody likes dice and every gamer wants more of them. Since we only got a
limited number, we opted (and I heard other stores doing the same)to use the
dice we received as rewards for the gamemasters who spent a very long day
running events from 9 in the morning until after 11 at night and as drawing
prizes. Adding the dice, and the Meeple
dice towers, generated a lot of extra entries and money for the local humane
society.
4.
Make Sure Retailers Can Sell Your Product.
Nothing annoys me more (well maybe fingernails on a chalkboard and episodes of
I Love Lucy) than getting a giveaway for a product that I cannot sell directing
people to a website where customers can purchase PDFs of your games and
supplements. We offered the giveaway to
our customers but removed the page directing them to the website, other
retailers simply trashed the whole thing.
Overall a great day. We had an artist doing sketches for the
Southern Illinois Autism Society, fed our customers pizza and cake and saw
roughly a 30% sales increase and double an average day’s RPG sales. Cannot
complain about that.
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