I said last time I'd considered titling that column Revenge of the Firefly, except I wasn’t sure what I'd be avenging. Well, since, this column's about rebuilding Firefly Games after a couple of rocky years, I'll use the title here and avenge, um, poor sales or something.

I talked a lot in the first update about how a few critical errors on my part landed Firefly Games in a world of hurt. The other factor at work, though, was that the entire industry had started to change and, like a lot of folks, I took awhile to catch on.

I'd been playing a new game by the old rules.

Almost everything I had learned about the industry in five years of freelancing, and everything I'd built Firefly Games around, had changed. Traditional print runs, pre-orders, distributor orders in the hundreds or thousands, backstock sales – all kaput.

Not for everyone, but I don't get to run everyone’s company. Just mine.

Now, I didn't get caught completely off-guard. For example, I could see something interesting was going on with PDFs back in 2003 – not that it makes me some kind of seer, since lots of other publishers had figured that out long before I did.

So when it came time in July 2003 to release Invasion of Monster Island, the flying-saucer invader expansion for Monster Island, I made it a PDF-only release. And, to tell the truth, it's the only way I could have released it at the time. At the time, print-on-demand services were still kind of shaky quality-wise, and I knew I'd take a bath with a traditional print run. Small-press sales on a second expansion to a line that requires the first two books to play could never recover the print costs on a run of 1,000+ copies.

Initial sales on Invasion of Monster Island were good, and eventually settled down to the slow but steady range. Between my own experiment and what I heard from others, like Phil Reed of Ronin Arts, I could tell that PDFs had to be a part of any strategy for the future of Firefly Games. And, boy, did I need a new strategy.

After the release of CyborGladiators in early 2004, I spent most of the year digging out and serving as the elected head of the Game Publishers Association. Behind the scenes, I took stock of the changes in Firefly Games and the industry.

In 2005, I rebooted Firefly Games with a new plan of attack involving PDF releases, a new site, and other changes. Some things worked, some didn’t, but overall it got the company off the ropes and, in time, back into fighting trim.

First, I overhauled the Firefly Games site with webmaster Keith Sears. I refocused the site on two priorities – selling games and creating a community with forums, contests, polls, and so forth. We made the online store more prominent with product links on the front page to juice the sales aspect. The community angle sought to keep folks coming back to the site, so we could sell them on new products. We stripped everything that didn’t further those goals from the site, and rebuilt it with a PostNuke framework allowing me to add content directly rather than sending it through Keith for coding – streamlining our work flow in the process.

Now that I had a site fine-tuned as a selling machine, I needed more products to sell. Orders on the Monster Island books in print were steady as new customers found the games, but new releases drive sales – you sell to your existing fanbase, plus the publicity around a new product exposes the product line to new customers.

I decided to focus on PDF releases. First, print products generally have to hit at least 32 pages, but PDF products can be any size, even just a page or two. So I could release lots of small products rather than one or two larger ones. This also would help sales, because your library of titles counts in PDF sales – customers often buy multiple PDFs at a time, so the fewer titles you have, the more money you're leaving on the table. Finally, from a company cashflow perspective, printing new books was going to be tough until the CyborGladiators debts dropped. So PDFs made sense for Firefly Games on a lot of levels, both for new releases and conversions of our print products.

I knew I needed more exposure than I could get with an online store and a small company listing on RPG Now. So I cut a deal with Phil at Ronin Arts, one of the top PDF outfits in the industry, to handle my electronic distribution. Not only does this ensure plenty of exposure for Firefly Games products, it also means Phil handled placing them on other venues, such as e23, Drive-Through RPG, and Paizo.com, saving me all kinds of time setting up accounts, uploading new PDFs, and so forth.

This goes back to one of the guiding principles of Firefly Games, one that I talked about in my first columns back in 2002. As much as possible, I try to find expert people to do expert things, so – rather than doing everything myself, and most of it not very well – I can be an expert at what I’m best at: Creating games and running the company.

I also tried an experiment with an online fan club called High Voltage. Folks bought subscriptions to the club, either on a month-to-month or yearly basis. In return, they got monthly newsletters with bonus game content, promotional items, special sales, and other goodies. The idea was to make the newsletter self-sustaining by offering free High Voltage subscriptions for fan-created content, plus provide the company with something we could offer demo volunteers, contest winners, and booth monkeys that didn't involve giving away what we’re supposed to be selling – our games. The point of the subscription price wasn't so much to make money from High Voltage, but to put a value on it so that when I gave it away, it seemed like something worthwhile.

We put the new strategy to work in January 2005, unveiling the new site and High Voltage, with the first new PDF release in February. So, how did things work out?

Let's start with the bad. High Voltage didn't work out so well, although I still think it's a sound idea – just not for Firefly Games. Subscriptions never rose much above about 20 at any given time, which wasn't so much a sales problem – I never intended High Voltage to be a moneymaker, remember – as an efficiency one. Creating the monthly newsletters and other goodies took a lot of time for a tiny fragment of our fanbase, because I never did get the fan submissions I'd anticipated. Additionally, I didn't get a demo team off the ground and, as our focus shifted from dwindling distribution sales to direct orders, decided not to expend further energy on it, so the benefit of giving away High Voltage subscriptions to those volunteers never materialized. The contests I ran on the site didn't attract much interest from fans, either, negating the usefulness of handing subscriptions out as prizes. As a result, in January 2006, I canceled High Voltage and refunded all the remaining subscriptions. For a company of our size, it just wasn't a good use of time and money.

That's what didn't work. Here's what did.

The rebuilt site worked exactly as I'd hoped, streamlining our internal workflow, channeling visitors to the online store, and keeping folks coming back with new content. Initially, I stuck to a regular schedule of weekly updates, but over time that became difficult to sustain so in 2006 I dropped back to periodic updates when I had news to report, ramping up when I had new products to promote.

Speaking of new releases, I focused on the Monster Island line with a series of products detailing cities around the world for giant-monster mayhem, kicking off with the old monster-movie standbys of Tokyo and New York City. Most sold well on their own, but more importantly each new release refueled interest in the game and brought in new customers who bought the earlier books, too. Some fans, however, did feel the new products diluted the product line, particularly since, as PDFs, they had less artwork and lower production values than our print products.

The alliance with Ronin Arts has worked out amazingly well. Our new releases go up on the various venues sometimes even before we can get them up on our own site, and Phil's always willing to offer advice on pricing or beat a troublesome file into shape. The sales through Ronin Arts on RPG Now and other sites are a steady source of income that cover a lot of the month-to-month expenses of Firefly Games these days.

Between the new products, backlist sales, and the sales through Ronin Arts, we finished paying off our debts, began covering routine expenses from monthly cash flow, and started putting aside some cash for bigger projects.

Over the past 18 months, I've done some more fine-tuning. Along with dropping High Voltage, I revisited our convention strategy and took advantage of advances in printing technology.

For GenCon 2005, I gave the print-on-demand route a try for Invincible, a new CyborGladiators sourcebook, and Invasion of Monster Island. Back when I started Firefly Games in 2002, a few companies were using POD, but I felt the quality was still a little shaky. By 2005, other publishers were reporting much better results. Since traditional print runs on either product were out of the question, POD seemed like the way to go to have at least some new product – or new-to-print, anyway – at the show. I'd gone to GenCon 2005 without any new products, and it had been a pretty dismal show sales-wise.

The books came out from Rapid POD quite well in terms of quality, and printing a limited quantity of each turned out to be a smart move. Invasion sold well at GenCon, Invincible less so, but I hadn't spent all that much on either print run.

In 2006, I tried a new approach to local conventions altogether. In the past, I’d purchased booths in the exhibit halls at DunDraCon and KublaCon when I could attend. But with no new product in print, this often produced few sales. Plus, with most of my help living out of state, I usually ended up running the booths by myself, which makes for some long days. In 2006, the Game Publishers Association began offering showcase booths at some regional shows, allowing participating companies to pay a fee to have products displayed and sold. The company receives 100 percent of the sales, minus credit card processing fees. So I put my products in the GPA showcase at DunDraCon, KublaCon, and a new show, ConQuest Sacramento, and spent my time running demos full-time in open gaming or, in a couple of cases, at scheduled events.

This worked out fabulously well. Not only did I cut costs by not buying a full booth, or being required to stay at the hotel for the whole show to run it, but my sales actually rose because I could spend all day promoting my products with full-on demo games. I also gradually upgraded my demos over the course of the year, putting on a more interesting and enjoyable experience, which also paid off in the end.

So Firefly Games had clawed its way back from the brink. We had new product coming out, solid month-to-month sales, strong partnerships, and an enthusiastic fanbase again. We'd taken some chances on new ideas, and while some hadn't worked out, others had paid off and become part of our standard operating procedures.

Now it was time to put everything I'd learned and all the changes I’d made to a real test. Faery's Tale, the game I'd founded Firefly Games back in 2002 to publish, was finally ready for release. And I was finally in a position to give it the launch it deserved.

But that's another column. See you in two weeks.