The Power of Bundles and Large Catalogs

Hello folks! I haven’t written much in here in 2022, it’s been a rather different year if compared to 2020/2021. I’ll briefly summarize my 2022 at the end, since I’ve done breakdowns every year, but the focus of this blog is to shed some light on how efficient a large catalog can be, more specifically because of bundles.

Content Warning: I’ll share some data and financial amounts.

The Hustle

I want to start pointing out that building up a large catalog is NOT an easy task. It’s actually rather hard. The good news is that it’s also NOT impossible. You need find stuff you like doing, and then keep doing it. Time goes by very fast, and when you least expect, you’ll have dozens if not hundreds of products under your belt! I started in Feb 2020 with ZERO products, and I’m now well over 250.

Sadly, a big catalog isn’t enough. There’s another aspect which is CRUCIAL to make this work, and that thing is marketing. And not any kind of marketing, efficient marketing. So don’t think tweeting about your stuff will bring you good results. It generally won’t. I touch on this topic in this blog post about email marketing.

The Combo

Once you have a large catalog and a sizable email list, you can launch the money making machine: bundles. I’ve ran five big sales through bundles so far, and I’ll share some data on each one of these.

2021 Black Friday/Cyber Monday

My first experience with this was a bundle of 12 of my encounter best-sellers. I called it “Ultimater Encounters Bundle”, and it ran for 6 days. The discount was 90% OFF.

Before I mention how it went, yes, I know. It may seem stupid to roll such steep discounts, but bear with me. The numbers will speak for themselves.

The results:

89 bundle sales
Increase in Metal Best-Selling rankings
Total of $ 324 profit made during that time, nearly 400% more than the first week of November

I promoted the bundle on social media and also via email, and back in 2021 Facebook used to actually work (not anymore in 2022), so while FB did pretty well, emails still ooutperformed it.

2021 Map Mega Bunles

During last Christmas, I ran my first Mega Bundle for maps in DTRPG. It was 80 maps, 800 versions, all with Commercial Use, so a total fo $ 20. This was roughly 70 products in that bundle. A pretty sweet deal. I ran this for than 2 weeks, and here’s how it went:

121 bundles sales
Over 7,000 individual sales
Increase in Metal Best-Selling rankings
Total of $ 1,533 profit made during that time, nearly 1400% more than the first two weeks of December

This bundle worked especially well because it appealed to both DMs and creators/publishers. Once again, emails rocked.
Note that in 2021, my audience was around 3,000 emails (2,000 from my own list, 1,000 from DTRPG). Nowadays, it’s double that size.

2022 Halloween

This October, I decided to bundle all my Ravenloft best-sellers and offer them at nearly 90% OFF. It was 10 products for $ 10, yet another great deal. I again promoted on social media and emails, though I haven’t been promoting on FB much due to a change in their policy which rendered my post useless. Here’s how it went:

92 bundle sales
Increase in Metal Best-Selling rankings
Total of $ 477 profit made during that time, 300% more than the first two weeks of October

As you can see, emails once again did the heavy lifting.

2022 Black Friday/Cyber Monday

This time, I bundled all my Forgotten Realms best-sellers, which accounted for 9 products also sold at $ 10. The results:

164 bundle sales
Increase in Metal Best-Selling rankings
Total of $ 488 profit made during that time, nearly 275% more than the first two weeks of November

This time, emails helped me much more! Lots of sales coming from them. They are truly a powerful weapon.

2022 Map Mega Bundle

This one is still running for 6 more days, but the results have been incredible. It’s the same concept as last year, but it’s intead 100 maps, 1000 versions (also with Commercial Use), all this for $ 25. That accounts for nearly 80 to 90 product in the bundle. It’s been running for little over 8 days, and here’s how it’s been going:

141 bundle sales
Over 10,000 individual sales
Increase in Metal Best-Selling rankings
Total of $ 2,261 profit made during that time, nearly 1600% more than the first week of December (by the time I finished the post, which took some time with pauses, the bundle sold nearly $ 200)

This time, my DTRPG list didn’t work so well, for some reason, but Reddit did some work there! Even Twitter helped which is almost a miracle. And this number should increase in the next 6 days.

Conclusion

As you can see, running steep discounts bundles WORKS. If you have a good marketing, it means that a lot of people will see your sale and think: “Not sure I need that now, but I’ll grab it now that it’s obscenely cheap!”

It’s a great strategy but it requries the stuff I mentioned at the beginning (large catalog and efficient marketing).

Besides the money, I love how this catapults my catalog into more Metal rankings. Most of my maps are now Electrum. Some of my Encounter products are nearing Gold or already there, etc. It’s neat.

Lastly, all this drives affiliate sales by a great deal, which also helps adding some considerable more bucks to the final amount. Using only this December as an example, my affiliates sales from 1st to 16th were very low at $ 34, having made me $ 160 from the 17th to the 25th, so that’s a 470% increase in half the time!

CZRPG and 2022, a Summary

In 2022, I decided to take a slightly different approach, which was to take a bit more care of my mental health. The previous two years were very hectic, with over 20 hours on top of 40 hours from my dayjob. I’m now down to roughly 10 hours a week (50 total). Some of the creative process was delegated to other people, so I reduced my profits, but I managed to increase my revenue! I’m not counting the Kickstarter revenue though. Last year, CZRPG’s revenue was around $ 19,220 and this year it’ll reach $ 20,000! Which is cool, considering I haven’t put as much effort myself as before. My focus has been delivering Amazing Encounters & Places, the Patreon, and finishing up Chessenta’s Tyranny (not there yet sadly).

Another nice aspect is what I mentioned earlier: my reach has doubled! I’m now around 6.2k emails considering both lists (3.7k for my own list and 2.5k on DTRPG). I also expanded my reach to other platforms like Fantasy Grounds, Fantasy Grounds Forge, Steam, and Patreon. My DMsGuild revenue has been getting lower and lower, which is somewhat expected considering I’m not releasing there much. I’m anticipating reaching 50,000 sales by the end of the year, which is a nice milestone too.

On the lessons learned side, I faced all kind of challenges with the Kickstarter. Delivering a 300-page book isn’t easy, and if you go for offset printing instead of Print of Demand, it’s even tougher. The cool aspect of it is that all going well, I’ll be able to announce a nice surprise next year related to the Amazing book and CZRPG. Stay tuned!

As for the Patreon, I teamed up with a great cartographer, Jeremy from MimicMaps since I didn’t want to be overwhelmed with writing and mapping. While growing a Patreon can be very tough, it’s a good way to increase the catalog, wwhich opens up for quite some future opportunities.

That’s pretty much about 2022. Like always, feel free to leave any comment 🙂

The Power of Bundles and Large Catalogs

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