M.T. Black on product pricing

Originally posted by M.T. Black on Facebook: Dungeon Masters Guild Fanclub group (July 11, 2017):

How To Increase Your Sales
Someone recently contacted me, saying they were launching their first product on the DMs Guild. They asked if they should give it away for free, charge a price, or make it PWYW. I've been asked my advice on this a few times lately.

I don't like seeing substantial products released for free. If you make your product free, you will get lots of downloads, but it wont chart and you get no return for your labour. Also, I think you get a lot of "low quality" downloads - people who want to have a look, but aren't likely to use the product because they haven't made an investment in it.

On the other hand, if you put a price on your product, you are unlikely to sell very many if you don't already have an established audience. Last time I checked, about 95% of DMs Guild products sell less than 50 copies.

PWYW may seem like a best of both worlds, but in some ways it's the worst of both worlds. Unless you already have an audience, you will be unlikely to make more than loose change. And in my opinion, you don't get the "good will" that is generated by a truly free product.

I guess the situation looks a bit hopeless for those who are not established. But I have a suggested approach.

First, you need to make sure your product is *good*. That is a whole post in itself, so for now I'll assume you have managed to produce a quality product. I believe you should price your shiny new product at a similar level to similar products in the Guild. That will probably mean from $1.95 to $3.95, but could be more for a larger product.

Now, you need to market your shiny product. A great way to do that is to release a small *free* product to promote your paid product. If you have written an adventure, you could pull out a cool encounter that works standalone, and release that for free, with a big link to your paid product. The free product (perhaps we'll call it a "micro-product") will get many downloads, and some people who like it will click through and check out your paid product.

Other ideas for micro-products are an archetype, a monster, a magic item, a spell, a background, some equipment, a picture, a map, or a pre-generated character. When I was establishing myself last year, for a while I was releasing a free micro-product every week. Each one contained prominent links back to my paid products, and I believe this is the way I was able to build an audience.

There are other ways to promote your product (using Facebook and Twitter, for example), but I will let others talk about those. For those of you without a budget to spend on marketing, I would recommend the micro-product route.