Hello friends,
We sold a staggering 502 Preorders in 12 Hours! We allocated 500 books for the preorders, figuring that would be plenty to get us through the month. But we were not expecting this kind of response. So thank you, y’all!
However, at this rate, we’re going to sell through our entire print run before the month is out. And while we love you, we can’t afford to sell this entire run for $15. We’re not making enough per copy to stay in business at that rate!
What should we do? I can shut down the preorder and say sorree to everyone who waits to open that email tomorrow. But I said the preorder would be up for a month. Or I could maybe offer another tranche of books for $25 a piece. The issue there is that I said the preorder copies would be one price, and now I’d be changing that price.
What’s the lesser of two weevils here? What would you do in our shoes?
-Luke
I would send a new E-Mail, with the whole ‘We love you all and are amazed at the demand, but we can’t afford to bankrupt ourselves’ and then offer at $25.
More expensive than first advertised Preorders > No Preorders.
First…this place is nice. Glad to see the ol’ haunt up and running again.
I say, sorry folks, ya missed it. No one expected a response like this. You planned to have it available and they flew off the shelf. You did a good thing offering 500 at that price. That’s life sometime…
I say this as one of the folks that didn’t make it in time.
Changing the price is better than no pre-sale at all, but maybe see if you can’t throw in a lagniappe to soften the blow? A bookplate, a signature, or something.
I am super disappointed I missed the pre-order. I saw the email at work and was pumped to get to the end of the day when I’d have time to place the order… only to find that I couldn’t anymore.
I’m still going to buy it. If it’s available at $25, well, I’ll try to jump in on that one and hope I get to it before that is all sold out. If I have to go full price, well, $35 is still a helluva great price for this game.
I am very curious about the changes - and would probably buy it at any price. However I want to know about shipping and supply. The Potential Disaster That Is Shipping worries me a lot: the timing already is sadness for those of us in the Antipodes, shipping in these times is like injury atop insult.
Man. Now I feel guilty for having jumped on it so fast, I thought I was being helpful by jumpstarting Demand. Happy to have you cancel my order and I’ll grab one at full price when it’s available.
Well, this is disappointing as I waited until after I was done with work and my RPG session tonight to log in and get my preorder done, but I’ll probably still buy my third copy of BWG at $25. We’ll see what happens.
I’m good with paying an extra 10 bucks, I’m sad I missed the announcement it was in my spam. I was tipped off to the email by a friend and by that time it was too late.
I think the only thing you can do is be as transparent as possible about the issue. I’ll agree with others that offering any pre-order discount is better than none if there is demand, even if it were $5.00. I think the main take-away is never underestimate the power of a better-than-net-cost discount.
I know as a cheapskate I would prefer the cheap books as the international shipping is hell on my wallet. I understand from a business perspective why you would limit it to 500 copies but you did say for the whole month. For the whole lesser of evils I would say it would be keeping your word.
I really don’t think it is a reasonable idea for Burning Wheel to go out of business over a single mistake, either of omitting the detail in the original e-mail or in underestimating demand (which probably is entirely outside anything they could model from previous sales). I’m all for keeping your word whenever possible, but it wouldn’t be better for fans to get a steep discount now and no more Burning Wheel thereafter.
