Taking Gregors lead in talking openly about sales figures for our games, I've just recently done all the final figuring out for sales of Cold City since its launch at Gen Con Indy in August of 2006. And they work out like this:

Gen Con Indy: 53
Dragonmeet, London: 10
IPR: 107
Local shops: 30
Direct Sales: 41
PDF: 73

Total: 314

Overall, these are very pleasing figures. OK, so getting even more would have been nice, but breaking the 300 mark by the end of the year was great.

So what can we take from this? Sales at Gen Con Indy were much higher than I expected. This was down to some unexpected pre-con publicity and enthusiasm from several areas (the Have Games, Will Travel podcast, etc). Demoing also sells. I don't think we can emphasise this enough. It was shown at Gen Con and at Dragonmeet that short, snappy demos really help give people a feel for the game and allow them to make an informed decision about buying them. And that's great. I'd prefer someone to make an informed decision like that than buy a game, then hate it and be annoyed that they have purchased something they will never use.

Secondly, PDF sales have been good, but not stellar and have really slowed down in late November and the entirety of December. The link up between RPGnow and DTRPG did absolutely nothing for our sales and, anecdotally, it may have adversely affected them.

Finally, direct sales through our website have slowed down a fair bit in November and December. The majority of our sales via this source have been in the UK and Norway, Sweden and Finland. There have been a handful of sales to continetnal Europe (2 each to Germany and France) and a couple to the uS. One point to note is that when we have received orders from the US, I've emailed the customer back to suggest that IPR may be cheaper and quicker for them. In the main, this has gone down very well and has been appreciated. In a couple of case, customers have still chosen to buy direct from us.

Hope all of this is useful and informative.

Cheers
Malcolm