It seems Colin Le Sueur (Runecairn, We Deal In Lead) has created a bit of a trend among the indie TTRPG designers of sharing our UKGE costs, profits, and experiences. It’s a helpful thing to do as it lets other people get an idea of where they could improve their setup, let’s them compare their costs, and gives an idea of how everyone else is doing. Some folks will use it to decide what types of games they’re making next. I’ve already seen some people talk about how popular solo games have been at their stalls and how they’ll be pivoting to that for next year.
We’re already ahead of the curve ;)
What this isn’t, is a way to compare yourself to others. Comparison is the thief of joy and while one creator might be moving hundreds of games, that doesn’t mean that you’re not doing well.
Finally, before we get into the numbers, I am an extremely disorganised person. The numbers will be as correct as I can get them but this newsletter is going to take me a few hours to do as I’ll have to go and find everything XD I say this because you might be like me and feel a little pang of imposter syndrome when you look at other creator’s blog posts that look like they’re business wizards with all their facts and figures neatly laid out. Know that as I start writing this, I can only remember the vague total we made.
So let’s get into it!
The Drive
UKGE is hosted in the Birmingham NEC. We live in Paisley. On a good day, that’s a 5 hour drive but unfortunately its the M6 so there is never a good day. We left at 9:30am and arrived at 6pm with only one stop. As is tradition.
Thankfully - sort of - we only have a little Kia Rio so we can get there on a single tank of petrol which costs about £55. Emotionally though it’s a fortune and every year I vow to buy some sort of air-conditioned Mad Max war-rig in order to plow through the endless traffic jams.
Thankfully most of my games are zines so we can still fit everything into the back of our little car. Though we will need something bigger next year as we’re making even more games and bigger games too.
We arrived at 7pm after Shanice bravely fought through three traffic jams and had to abandon our stall setup because we were ravenous with hunger and delirious with thirst. Did I mention we don’t have air-con in our car? Or a radio?! Haha, good times.
The Stall
In all my ambition, I had originally ordered a ⭐ Premium ⭐ stall but ended up not getting it because they’d all been snatched up by November. Thankfully we got put in a relatively decent seeming spot next to the entrance of the newly created Hall 4.
In the end we ended up with a 3x3m stall which sort of feels like a waste as we need width rather than depth. Thankfully we were able to make a sort of stock room and staff room behind our banner.
The Stall cost us £702 and our furniture cost £34 (and wasn’t delivered to our stall so we only had 1 chair between 3 people and I had to carry both those tables the length of Halls 3 and 3a. Thank BrOdin I’ve been doing farmer’s carries in the gym!
Costs
Stand Costs (3x3m): £736
Travel: £110 (Roughly)
Accomodation: £666. Spooky number. We stay at the Hilton next to the NEC because I like knowing there’s nothing stopping me from getting to the convention each day. This year’s big hurdle was a train strike on the sunday morning which caused a lot of stress for exhibitors staying in the city centre.
Meals: £240 (roughly). There were 2 of us on Thursday and Friday and 3 of us for Saturday and Sunday. The food options around the NEC are pretty expensive so dinner is about £60 per day. Thankfully the Hilton does a buffet breakfast so I tend to eat most of the food I’ll need for the day at once and then sort of roll to the stall.
Promotion: Our new 3x2m banner cost a whopping £491 - it would have been more but I was able to find a coupon for £100 off :D.
We also made catalogues this year as we’ve now got so many different games on the stall that it’s hard to pitch them succinctly. We printed 500 catalogues for £167 (incl. shipping).Total Expenses: £2410
Sales
Like a cooking blog, this is the bit you’re probably looking for and which SEO demands that I bury under paragraph upon paragraph of needless waffle.
In total we made £5,300 which means we made a profit of £2890
Our best seller was still Apothecaria with 38 copies sold (£565)
For Small Creatures Such As We sold 34 copies (£1,012)
Apothecaria: Dragon’s Lair, the newest expansion, came third with 26 copies sold (£311)
FSCSAW: Guide To Fauna sold 21 copies (£311) and outsold FSCSAW: War by 1 copy (£296)
Interestingly, FSCSAW: Love and Lust only sold 14 copies (£164) which we half expected as people seemed embarrased about picking up a book with lust in the title.
Golf Quest, our dexterity based comedy RPG continues to sell really well at conventions when people are able to get their hands on it. We sold 9 (£135) which is great considering we haven’t sold any online this year.
Analysis
Usually we do best on the Saturday, quite well on the Friday, and tend to make about half as much on the Sunday. This year Friday and Saturday were only £5 apart. I’m not sure what caused the spike on Friday.
It’s hard to tell if the train strike on the Sunday morning caused such a drastic drop in sales but it is definitely a bigger difference this year than last year.
UKGE seems to have changed things up a bit from my perspective as the aisles seemed wide enough that I never felt like I was trapped in the crowd. It was possible to actually stop and look at things without getting jostled and apart from a bad patch on Saturday, the AC seemed to be managing quite well this year. At least for where we were.
Our catalogue gambit seemed to pay off as we had a lot of customers come to the stall after getting a catalogue and reading it during their lunch or at their hotel. Hopefully we’ll see some web sales from people who got a catalogue too. Fingers crossed.
Thoughts
We put a lot of effort into making our stall look good this year and it seems to have paid off. Our new big banner looks amazing and certainly seemed to be drawing people in and helping fans recognise the stall. In previous years we’ve had a lot of people say “we didn’t realise you were here!” or “we didn’t know this was your stall!” hence the need for a big banner.
The catalogues were an expense but it seemed like a decent cost. With 24 games/books on the stall, having a catalogue that explained everything really helped people browse and saved our throats the pain of doing a dozen pitches to every customer. Having our stand number on the front hopefully helped people remember where we were but it was hard to know for sure. If you got one, let me know what you thought!
Having a third person on the stall really helped as it meant each of us could take longer breaks and actually go explore the convention. For once I was able to go around for a few hours and talk to people. Sadly I didn’t get to see everyone despite doing my best to try and methodically comb through each hall. If I missed you this year, I’m sorry!
This year was also the first year I’ve been part of a panel at UKGE. I did the “Humour in RPGS” panel on the saturday morning and the less said about that the better.
Haul
Flabbergasted: Mystified is an expansion to Flabbergasted, a comedic 1920s themed roleplaying game by The Wanderer’s Tome.
The Last Caravan is an RPG about travelling across North America in the wake of an alien invasion and subsequent super winter.
Space Gits is a wargame about drunken orcs where you don’t have direct control over your minis.
The Coven of Midnight is a dark fantasy academia solo rpg about rival witches in a magic school who maybe kiss?
Berserkr and Ronin are Mork Borg hacks that are all about Norse and Japanese mythology inspired worlds.
The Field Guide To Floral Dragons is a 5E bestiary about dragons that evolved from flowers. The art was so beautiful and the idea so charming that I picked it up despite never playing 5E.
Castles In The Air is a “coming of age RPG about who we are and who we become”. You start as children and grow up year by year as you play.
All Falls Down Sorroborough is an english jubensha about surviving a plane crash. I’ve been so excited to try one of these that I actually bought two chinese jubensha games with the intention of translating them but then I realised I wouldn’t be able to play them if I did that so I’m really excited for this one.
Page Turners is a collection of 1 on 1 RPGs with a huge selection inside.
Tale: The role-playing game by Game Forlag looks to be a fantasy RPG that was given to me as a gift as the creator had really enjoyed Apothecaria. And he didn’t want to take too many copies of his sizeable book back through Norwegian customs which is very understandable XD
I also picked up a lot of cool stuff from Art of Arklin which you’ll get to see once my costume is complete ;)
Thanks for sharing in such detail!
This was really interesting! Thank you for sharing your breakdown and thoughts.