Using DriveThruRPG: One Month On

Last month I started offering Saga of the Goblin Horde through DriveThruRPG, as a way to build up interest in the setting, and establish a captive audience for my future publications. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what sort of reception it's received after the first month.

I uploaded the main Saga of the Goblin Horde setting book on 3rd November, and it went live on 6th November. I then uploaded Bone of Contention and Worm Food on the 8th, Root of the Problem on the 10th, the Archetypes on the 15th, Cold Spell on the 19th, Hot Water on the 21st, Egg Hunt on the 26th, and Can of Wyrms on the 28th. You can see the download numbers for November here:

It's worth noting Cold Spell was a new One Sheet I hadn't previously released, and I promoted it on Facebook, G+, Twitter, and the Pinnacle forums. The other PDFs had previously been available on my website, and I wasn't sure how many people didn't bother re-downloading them because they already had an earlier version, but from looking at the download figures for Cold Spell, it seems to be fairly comparable with the other One Sheets.

DriveThruRPG promoted the setting book and the archetypes as "Free Product of the Week" in two of their newsletters, and that definitely boosted the downloads for those two products.

The main setting book has 14 ratings (12 five-star and 2 four-star) and 8 written reviews (or 9, if you include the one someone wrote in the discussions section). None of the other products have any ratings or reviews.

In total I've attracted 1768 unique customers in the first month, of whom 1457 have consented to be emailed. I don't know how this compares to anyone else, or how many people are actually interested in the setting (as opposed to just downloading it because it's free), but I feel it's a good start.

Even though I'm not selling anything, I still receive 20 Publisher Promotion Points (PPP) per month, which I'm saving up to promote future products. I regret not signing up for a publisher account earlier; if I'd used DriveThruRPG from the start I'd have earned hundreds of PPP by now!