To help others, you have to help yourself first
The Gamer Lifestyle program is all about helping others craft a better life for themselves. We hope to help many gamers and entrepreneurs to create a reliable revenue stream from their hobby. Someone pointed out that it’s difficult for anyone to know how seriously they can take our advice on making money from RPGs, since there’s now way to know how well we’re doing ourselves.
So I decided to share my DungeonMastering.com earnings every month, starting in June 2009.
Here are the guidelines I established to offer you meaningful numbers without having to bore you with too much accounting:
- I only log revenue that is deposited in my Paypal or bank account. If I sell a third party product, the payment is often delayed 15 to 60 days. Until then, it only helps to do projections, not pay the bills!
- DungeonMastering.com costs me $450 / month in outsourcing, web hosting, advertising, and other fees like aweber, e-junkie, paypal, D&DI – yes, that’s a business expense! – etc. (yep, that’s less expenses than July – I’m keeping that story for next month though)
August 09 earnings:
- Dungeon Mastering Tools memberships revenue: $199.75
- Advertising revenue: $56.76
- Affiliate revenue: $112.28
- Book sales: $254.80
- Total: $623.59
Phasing out the advertising
I have been moving away from advertising since April and I am happy to say that my revenue is no longer tied to the advertising budget of other companies. I am not 95% depending on my own advertising and my own products. It feels great.
Fall 09 projections
Now that I completed my business model change – now that I have my own customer base and my own products to sell – my income projections will be more reliable. I have 2 books scheduled to be published in October, and at least one more in November. I would be very surprised if revenue doesn’t increase every month until Christmas.
The DM tools were also revamped to feature a digital DM screen. We had lots of new subscribers but 1st month is free so no new paying subscribers for September. We’ll see if our product quality and retention system are effective enough to keep everyone on board for more than a few months at a time.
If you build it they will come… No!
This is a piece of advice for all of the aspiring writers out there: writing a book doesn’t mean you’ll be making any sales. Most best-selling authors piggyback the marketing and distribution of large publishing companies. For independent e-publishers like us the key is to have repeated offers of increasing value. Write one book. Sell it. Write a second book. Sell it, cross-promote it, bundle it. And keep going. This means that you need a short production cycle. Can you publish a book every month, or at least every two months? If the answer is no chances are that you are either writing too slow or writing the wrong book.