[AP News] 2012-08-28 News from the Front: State of the Avalanche (plus new stuff)

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(I subscribe to these, but I know a lot of people don't, or just don't get them regularly. Figure it might be worth reposting them here as they arrive for discussion, or at least for posterity.)

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2012: State of the Avalanche

About 14 months ago, I wrote a “State of the Avalanche” piece for this newsletter. So much has happened since then, I sort of lost track of the time in between. Most importantly, Avalanche Press is still here, and putting out games again.

Over those 14 months, we’ve been following The Plan: first, clear up shipping. Next, bring out-of-print items that can easily be brought back into stock, back into stock. And then, bring out new stuff. While doing those things, no new hires (or replacement hires). When payroll dominates everything, it ultimately destroys everything: Stuff doesn’t get published. Cash flow slows. Payroll gets even harder to meet.

At the core of The Plan is the switch to a print-on-demand model. The “print run” is a thing of the past, and that has profound effects. It’s the biggest reason we’re producing games again and doing so on a reasonably regular basis. Laser-cut playing pieces are a big part of that, along with the new sleeved black boxes. It will eventually greatly relieve our storage needs, and has already caused us to cut way back on discount sales: there’s no need to trim inventory that we don’t carry. If something sells well, we make more of it. If it doesn’t sell as fast as we’d like, we cut back on making them. The deep discount sales of the past will become much more rare in the future and focus on the older games that pre-date the print-on-demand model; we’ll do one for Labor Day so be ready for it.

So far, the strategy is keeping us in the game and letting new products flow out the door. There are some trade-offs, not all of which have been popular: our hand-holding ability is very limited. We don’t have anyone dedicated to answering the phone and e-mail, and aren’t likely to change that. We no longer take phone orders, to keep shipping streamlined (no hand-inputting of order/shipping info). When someone gets sick, there’s no one to cover for them and everything stops or slows. Given the way things were going, we can live with that.

We do have some outstanding series developers at work now, and you’ve seen a lot of their work over the past year. Jim Stear, John Stafford and long-time designer Mike Perryman have kept the pipeline full of great stuff. Their creative participation has completely changed the atmosphere here – making games is exciting again.

Oh yeah, we moved last August, too. All told, it was much less disruptive than our previous move, though a year later we’re still trying to locate a few items (like 1940 countersheet 1). Our new location is a tremendous improvement, starting with a landlady who’s much nicer, kinda cute, and actually has the word “maintenance” in her vocabulary. That last is pretty important – the back wall fell off our previous location shortly before we moved out. No warning. Just gave a loud creaking noise and crashed to the ground. Unlike the previous spot, this one is climate controlled (no small thing in an Alabama summer) so we can work all day – no more coming in at 5 a.m. to ship until the heat tops 110F under the tin roof by about 10 a.m.

When the year began, we had 16 items on the list of long-promised stuff. Since then we’ve released four of them (Frontier Battles, Panzer Lehr, Kursk South Flank, The Kaiser’s Navy). I’d like to release at least four more before the end of the year; I’m not sure if we can but it’s a target to reach for. Shipping the old pre-ordered games takes us a long time, and that irritates those waiting for the game. South Flank shipping is constrained by the supply of laser-cut counters, but even with more of those we’d only be a little faster: there are only so many we can assemble and ship per week (labor would be the next limit to kick in; cash flow would also show up not long after that). We’ll be shipping them through the end of summer. The game has sold about what we expected, but it has been more expensive to make and to ship than anticipated, which means it hasn’t added as much to cash flow as we’d hoped.

That may not mean anything to our future plans: we’d been planning to tackle a completely new boxed game as our next such project anyway (either 1967: Sword of Israel or Lawrence of Arabia). The next pre-ordered boxed game we’ll put out, Remember the Maine, has far fewer old pre-orders than South Flank and they’re almost all in the current database (most South Flank orders have to be extracted from our old one, which is time-consuming and almost physically painful)..

Shipping new (as in, never offered before, no outstanding pre-orders) games is well within our ability. I’ve read statements from other publishers claiming that some huge percentage of their sales take place in the first 30 days or whatever after release, and that’s probably true depending on how you’re measuring that. If you’re throwing in all your pre-orders as first-day sales, then sure, it’s a huge percentage. But rarely do all those orders come in at once; those “first 30 days” may represent a couple of years of pre-sales. We don’t do pre-orders any more so we only have to handle what comes in today plus Gold Club early orders.

That’s worth repeating: no more pre-orders. If some third party claims that you can pre-order through them and “help the game get published!” please understand that we do not see a dime of that until they buy their copies from us after the game’s released and shipped. It does nothing to “help the game get published” and actually makes it more difficult for us.

The next phase of The Plan should also help a lot: improved sales and marketing. I don’t think we’ve ever truly lived up to our potential on this front. We made some good steps toward solid marketing but usually followed through poorly or not at all. Small-to-nonexistent marketing budgets had something to do with that, but only a little – we made poor use of available low- or no-cost means.

Daily Content is more or less back to running fresh content every weekday, though keeping it up to date is very difficult with so much else going on. We definitely need to recruit more authors. We’ve revised the Gold Club to match our actual abilities, so we can deliver on all the goodies. Our catalog desperately needs updating. There’s a lot to be done.

The state of the Avalanche as of August 2012: we’re not yet where we need to be. There are a lot of promises to deliver and debts to pay. But we’re a whole lot closer to getting there.

- Mike Bennighof

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