We are so thrilled to announce an extra-special initiative for our partnership with One Tree Planted for Earth Month!
During the month of April, we will be donating 100% of our profits to One Tree Planted! We love how straightforward their reforestation project is—one dollar plants one tree.
We decided with our parent project for this site of Grove Guardian Press that we wanted giving to play an integral role in our work. So many people in the D&D community are incredibly generous, and we wanted a way to give back to something we believe in as well.
We started the press as a way to empower and encourage storytellers and to promote narratives that encourage engagement with the world around us, especially our connections with one another and our impact on the environment. With that mission in mind, partnering with an organization that’s working to save the planet made perfect sense!
Enter One Tree Planted!
We chose One Tree Planted for several reasons, one of which being that they’re willing to work with small organizations (like us!).
We have really big dreams of publishing full duet campaigns, an environmental apocalypse campaign, and a novel series based on our duet game. I hope that you find those plans as exciting as we do!
In order to announce what we will be able to donate based on our numbers thus far, I wanted to spend a moment walking through our DMsGuild sales to date.
DMsGuild Sales Report
Right now, our adventures are available on DMsGuild as Pay What You Want titles, though we would love to have your support for us and our blog by purchasing the adventures.
I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here and tell you what our sales numbers have been so far on DMsGuild. James Introcaso did this on his WorldBuilder Blog, and that report was really helpful for us, so we will do the same here.
I’m not sure how much the D&D community at large knows about how DMsGuild sales work, so let me explain briefly before I walk you through the numbers. Creators on DMsGuild get half of whatever they make, so that’s why you’ll see the 50% difference between gross and royalties.
I’m also going to show the paid purchases first and then the total number of downloads. Our best month by far was February, when First Blush* was listed on the DMsGuild newsletter just before Valentine’s Day. There was also a lot of discussion in the community at that time around the value of RPGs and trying to raise awareness for people paying and supporting creators, writers, and designers. (If you missed it, let me direct you to James Introcaso again with his wonderful post, “We Need to Change the Way We Think of RPG Products”)
In January, we noticed that around 10% of the people downloading our adventures were paying for them. You receive credit for a paid sale with as little as a penny on it, which helps out the creators in terms of their rankings on the site and earning metals. Several of you have been so generous toward us though, and have gone above what we asked for in paying for the adventures, which I think will be obvious in the numbers below.
As one specific example, I think one person paid $10 for First Blush, which was so unexpected and generous that it made me cry tears of gratitude, and my eyes still well up when I think about it. Thank you, whoever you are, from the bottom of my heart. That genuinely meant so much to me.
In February the percentages looked more like 12-13% of people purchasing titles, which, again, I think was a combination of people talking about paying creators and us being listed in the newsletter (which was awesome!).
We saw a distinct drop in those numbers in March, more like 5% of people, or 1 in 20, purchasing our titles, which was the opposite direction from what I had expected, especially as Second Glance* was so much longer and more involved than our first adventure.
The Actual Numbers
January-March 2019 (paid only)
January-March 2019 (free and paid downloads)
A few takeaways from the report:
- First Blush and Cupid’s Sparrow are both tracking above 10% for paid downloads. This is mostly coming from February; Second Glance wasn’t available until March
- Our duet adventures, First Blush and Second Glance, are both tracking above our asking price for downloads while Cupid’s Sparrow is not. We ask for $2 for the adventures from which we would receive $1 and DMsGuild would receive $1.
Prior to April, we have earned enough to plant 51 trees with OneTreePlanted! (10% of sales; $1 plants 1 tree)
Creators have to wait 60 days to withdraw funds from DMsGuild, so we have been waiting until the end of this month to withdraw our earnings from January and February so we can make our first official donation to One Tree Planted.
And now the numbers for this month, of which 100% of profits will go to One Tree Planted:
April 2019 (paid only)
April 2019 (free and paid downloads)
To build on the takeaways from the last reports, April is running closer to the 10% mark than what we saw in March, but the asking price per download is doing much worse. As you can see from the report, none of the adventures have reached the $2 average sale (or $1 average profit) that we request.
But, the good news! Again, we’ll be donating 100% of our profits to OneTreePlanted, so that’s 21 trees in April so far!
To round out our recap, I have put all the numbers for each month together, paid downloads first and then all downloads.
January-April 2019 (paid)
We’re getting close with Second Glance and Cupid’s Sparrow to a silver metal, which we reach at 101 downloads, so that’s exciting! First Blush would qualify for gold at 501.
Final takeaways looking at all the numbers together, organized in order of release:
- First Blush has averaged 10.85% paid downloads and $1.01 per sale (only counting paid sales)
- Cupid’s Sparrow has averaged 10.73% paid downloads and $0.87 per sale
- Second Glance has averaged 7.62% paid downloads and $1.08 per sale
I know that some of you reading this are the thoughtful, generous people who have paid to download our adventures thus far, sometimes more than asking. Thank you so so much.
I don’t know how to tell you what that means to us. I have always dreamed of being a writer, and finding this medium and incredible community has made that an even better reality than I could have ever imagined. We’re getting quite close to 50 posts here where we get to share about duet play, which has meant so much to us in both our relationship and our individual lives. Your presence and encouragement mean the world to us!
In the next week or so, we’ll be launching a really exciting new phase of our work where, for those who wish to, you’ll be able to work with us more closely, and we’ll be offering help with your homebrew worlds and duet campaigns!
We’re also hard at work on Third Time’s the Charm, our final title in the Crystalline Curse duet adventure trilogy. It will be released sometime this month!
As a final note, we do have an account with Ko-Fi if you’d like a different way to support us. Anything we earn there this month will also go, 100%, to One Tree Planted!
*We receive a small commission—at no cost to you—when you follow the affiliate links from our site to DMsGuild and make a purchase. As we are being really forthcoming about our earnings, we have made 15 cents total from the affiliate links to DMsGuild so far.
If you like what you’re reading, please consider supporting the blog by purchasing our adventures and supplements in our shop or sponsoring us on Patreon. We appreciate you so much! Thank you for joining us on this adventure! – Beth and Jonathan
We’d love to hear your thoughts and questions!