We're releasing Rosette LARP on a variety of marketplaces:
- DriveThruRPG as an ebook and paperback
- Itch.io as an ebook
- Amazon as an ebook and paperback
But why those stores?
We've never released a full roleplaying sourcebook before, although "Awaiting the End" (a one-page, single-session tabletop RPG) is freely available/pay what you want. In our research a few years ago for how to print the tabletop versions of Rosette, we looked at a wide variety of ways to do print on demand that would keep our costs low and determined the break-even costs with each service.
Melissa made a ginormous spreadsheet, of course.
The Chosen Ones
In the end, the discoverability and marketability in a particular store is crucial, especially for indie RPGs, which already don't sell particularly well. DriveThroughRPG immediately rises to the top of that list.
We like and want to support itch.io, even though we can only do an electronic format there. It has a wonderfully low barrier to entry and we're interested in growing our presence there. It's a great, DRM-free alternative to Steam for video games, so we encourage you to follow us there and check out our existing games if you haven't already.
Amazon is, perhaps, the most experimental of our publishing locations, surprisingly. LARP sourcebooks are quite the niche market, but it certainly can't hurt to be on the largest marketplace for books in general, especially given its good cross-sell algorithms.
Other Stores
So why not other online stores (Smashwords, etc.)? We've found with Ossuary that while it sounds nice to be available on every possible store, it may have had a diffusion effect on sales that has prevented us from actually getting paid by stores with minimums. (This is hard to prove—perhaps those people wouldn't have bought Ossuary at all.) No other stores stand out as great markets for us.
Naturally, we'll use what we learn from publishing Rosette LARP to inform how we publish the three Rosette tabletop books.
Publication Status
Rosette LARP will be coming out this summer! It's in final edits now, then we'll begin typesetting. You now know very well where we'll be publishing it: DriveThruRPG, itch.io, and Amazon.
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