Sales figures

As 2009 is now 10 days dead, several companies/individuals have posted sales figures for their products for last year.  I'm sure there are more out there online, but you can read about Evil Hat Productions here and here, Chgowitz here, Steve Jackson games here, and LofFP here.  And there is also the Gamer Lifestyle blog, which posts monthly revenues information.  They are also a nice resource for people, like myself, interested in the rpg existence from the business side.  So all of these posts are gems to me.

(For an interesting read on sales figures and indie game development in another realm, go read here and the follow-on article here.  I think that these blog posts give us (3rd party publishers of rpgs) some interesting things to think about.  The comments that follow them are also quite revealing.)

But as the President of The Fantasy Cartographic (TFC), I feel that I should do the same.  I've not, before now, revealed any sales figures, because I've not had a platform on which to reveal them.  But now that this blog exists, I have no excuse.  With that being said, TFC has been releasing product since November of 2007, which means that I have three years of sales data.  Without further ado:

2007 Sales Figures

   Locales, Volume One:   6

2008 Sales Figures

   Locales, Vol One: 21
   Hand Drawn Maps, Vol One: 28
   Caverns, Tunnels, and Caves (CTC), Vol One: 29
   CTC, Vol Two: 11
   CTC: Battlemaps One: 5
   CTC: Battlemaps Two: 5
   CTC: Battlemaps Three: 5

2009 Sales Figures

   Locales, Vol One: 34
   Hand Drawn Maps, Vol One: 5
   Caverns, Tunnels, and Caves (CTC), Vol One: 11
   CTC, Vol Two: 13
   CTC: Battlemaps One: 5
   CTC: Battlemaps Two: 4
   CTC: Battlemaps Three: 4
   Power Cards: Secrets of Necromancy: 14
   Fantasy Class Preview: Martialist Heroic: 315     (Free download)
   Fantasy Class: Martialist: 17

Any number of a wide range of conclusions can be drawn from reviewing this data.  I'll offer one that comes to mind when I pretend that I am not me while looking them:

"Uh, dude.  Why even bother?  What is the point?"

Which are questions that I have asked myself many times.  But that topic is not the point of this post.  To this point, even with those low sales numbers, TFC has basically paid for my gaming hobby the past few years (I'm a cheap gamer) until just recently.  If nothing else, my rpg activities are self-sustaining.

I think that these figures are instructive for people who are interested in entering the pdf publishing realm, if nothing else.  And that is why I post them.