Selling on DMs Guild: A Retrospective on The Gray Merchant of Asphodel

A few other things to provide additional context for my experience:

• I’m not a professional writer and I have a full-time job as an engineer.
• I started playing D&D in 2017. I began considering writing for D&D when I participated in Ashley Warren’s RPG Writer Workshop in 2019 and Gray Merchant is my first completed and published TTRPG product.
• I co-run a YouTube review channel called The Gallant Goblin that we launched in 2018.
• We didn’t know anyone in the TTRPG industry when we started, and apart from a few wonderful friends we made at D&D Live 2019, almost everyone we know or work with in this space, we met virtually. Some we met through virtual games, others found us through our channel (big thank you to the folks at Minisgallery especially!), and we also reached out to many after seeing their work.

Publishing on Dungeon Masters Guild

Dungeon Masters Guild (DMs Guild) is a website with an official license from Wizards of the Coast (WotC) that makes it the only place you can sell works using Dungeons & Dragons intellectual property (IP) that isn’t covered in the Open-Gaming License (OGL). If that sounds like gibberish to you, click here to see the comparison table Wizards provides showing what you can and can’t do with each. The short version is that anything using D&D settings, including the Forgotten Realms, or just about anything outside the Dungeon Master’s Guide, Player’s Handbook, and Monster Manual, can only be sold on DMs Guild.

Some other stuff to know about DMs Guild:

• Anyone can publish on there. You just create an account and start uploading titles. It couldn’t be easier to get your work in front of people.
• Authors set the price. Apart from occasional site-wide sales, you have full control over your product’s pricing, and there’s an option to opt out of the sales if you don’t want anyone else messing with your price.
• By default you get 50% of your sales. The other 50% goes to Wizards of the Coast and OneBookShelf, which runs the DMs Guild marketplace. You can further split your 50% among collaborators if you worked with others to produce the product. There have been rare promotional periods when DMs Guild pays out more than 50%, but that’s at DMs Guild’s discretion. You can also designate your product to have 0% go to you and 95% of its proceeds go to charity, with the remaining going toward OneBookShelf’s operational costs.
• DMs Guild only allows you to publish fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons content, and the content must be either setting-agnostic or in a published 5e setting (as of the writing of this blog, that means Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Ravenloft, Ravnica, and Theros). You CAN’T publish your own homebrew setting.
• Additional information can be found by clicking here to see their author FAQ.

Show Me the Money!

Enough preamble, you say? OK, here we break down how much the project has made and how much it cost.

So first, how did The Gray Merchant perform? Here’s a rough timeline:

• June 1, 2020: Published. This was the digital release date of Mythic Odysseys of Theros, the first time D&D went to the Magic: The Gathering plane of Theros, and therefore the earliest date any Theros product could go live on DMs Guild.
• June 1, 2020: First bestseller milestone achieved in under 24 hours: 51 sales for a Copper medal.
• June 2, 2020: Second bestseller milestone achieved in under 48 hours: 101 sales for a Silver medal.
• June 8, 2020: Third bestseller milestone achieved in 1 week: 251 sales for an Electrum medal.
• July 21, 2020: Fourth bestseller milestone achieved right before Mythic Odysseys of Theros released in hardcover format, delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic: 501 sales for a Gold medal.

For the first week, a very prominent 25% discount link was placed at the top of the product page, cutting the price to $7.45. It got clicked 78 times, but DMs Guild metrics apparently track clicks and not sales, meaning at MOST 78 copies were sold at that price. There were a further ~40 click-throughs from the discount link on our YouTube video promoting it (same discounted price, different link for tracking purposes), but it was pretty clear not all of those converted to sales either.

In summary, LESS THAN 25% of the ~250 sales Gray Merchant got in the first week was at the discounted price. Over three-quarters of customers paid full price for it despite a discount being prominently advertised. That was really surprising to me.

That also means Gray Merchant made me over $1,000 in its first week. As you may have realized, though, the graphic I posted at the start shows Gray Merchant has made me over $4,000 in the three and a half months since it was published, meaning week 1 was under 25% of its total sales to date. Note that Gray Merchant is still pretty consistently selling 1-5 copies a day, hovering around #30 on the bestseller chart. You’ll hear a lot of writers say DMs Guild has a long tail and this is exactly what they mean. DMs Guild titles continue to sell long after their release, and I’ll expand on that in the Lessons Learned section further down.

Costs

But how much did it cost to produce? Well… that answer is a tad complicated, but let’s first look at actual money out-of-pocket. If the numbers are a bit shell-shocking, please jump to the “Could it have been made cheaper?” section further down:

• Cover art: $450. This was a fully custom commission by Victor Tan and the price was for a commercial license to use in Gray Merchant and corresponding advertising. All other rights stayed with Victor. There are obviously other artists who charge less for custom commercial art, and price varies by complexity (number of characters, number of background elements, level of detail and shading, etc.), but full-time artists contracted by folks like Wizards of the Coast can charge much more, $2,000-$5,000 per piece or maybe even more. Never try to negotiate an artist’s rates down. Many artists already struggle to get by, and even those doing it as a side-hustle still deserve to be compensated for their time and skill. You can ask artists if they’re open to other payment options, like a royalty percentage, but otherwise respect their pricing. If you’re not sure about an author’s rates, query politely and share your budget, but don’t expect them to come down to your budget if they say that doesn’t work for them. Above all, be nice, and that’s not just because it’s the right thing to do—this is a small community and word gets around.
• Advertising: $100 in Facebook and Twitter ads.
• Application: Photoshop: $21/month
• Application: ZBrush: $750. I actually waited for a sale to get this, which is why the price is lower than its store price. Now the full price of this and the other items below probably shouldn’t be fully associated with Gray Merchant because I plan to use them for other projects and they’re tools that’ll be essentially evergreen, but I did buy them to do this project.
• Application: Substance Painter: $150. I actually got this slightly cheaper during a holiday sale on Steam but that’s what it’s generally priced at.
• Application: Affinity Publisher: $50 for a perpetual license for a nice layout application with a modern interface. Way better deal than Adobe’s stupid subscription-only InDesign.
• Miscellaneous Costs: $450 for a 1 month trial of Penji (see “Penji” section below).

So total sunk cost at the start of the project for everything I used was about $2,000 but the applications will last me FOREVER and the 1 month trial of Penji got me ~20 art assets that were used across a range of things, only 1 of which was used for Gray Merchant. Therefore, I went into the project treating $1,000 as my break-even point and was thrilled I made that back in the first week. And obviously, the project has made much more than the total cost at this point, which gives me more wiggle room for future projects.

It’s also noteworthy that I didn’t have to pay my editor, who was my partner, Theo. Properly paying an independent editor would be at least a 10% royalty split or, for a product of Gray Merchant’s length, at least another $1,000-$2,000 if they’re editing your rules and mechanics and not just proofreading for typos. Note that I fully support getting an independent editor, especially if you don’t have a forever-DM partner-in-crime, but this is why a lot of projects go by royalty-share for collaborators.

If I didn’t have a good day job, paying all this upfront would be extremely daunting even if I was confident I could make the money back, and a project selling above Silver or Electrum is never a sure thing. But more on whether all of the costs were necessary in a bit…

HOLD ON. WHAT ABOUT PAYING MYSELF?

This is where so many TTRPG creators short-change themselves. Our labor isn’t free. Let’s use my more generous break-even point of $1,000 as a benchmark and say I’ve made $3,000 profit on Gray Merchant so far.

Gray Merchant is about 25,000 words long. A lot of TTRPG projects pay by word. That means I’ve earned 12 cents a word to date. Wow, that’s actually really good for this project. Anything over 10 cents a word is generally considered decent, keeping in mind again that this industry is horribly low-paying and needs to get way above that rate to be properly compensating its writers. But reality is reality and a solo side-hustle project yielding rates like that is great.

But WAIT, I also did the layout and art, which took over a month of my free time, totaling probably around 180 hours of work. Writing and revising took a similar amount of time so double that if you want to go by hourly rates. I sank an additional 40-some hours into generating supporting assets (the magic item handouts and print-friendly options) and probably at least 20 hours into marketing. Divide $3,000 by 420 (that number wasn’t on purpose, I swear) and it comes out to $7.15/hour of work, which is below even the United States’ abysmal minimum wage.

Now I’m obviously not trying to discourage anyone with these numbers, nor am I complaining about them. Gray Merchant has FAR outperformed my expectations, and I went into it knowing that. But if you’re wondering about project economics, these are all factors you have to consider.

Could it have been made cheaper?

The answer is complicated but essentially yes. You’ll notice that most of the cost went into applications to produce art assets.

Art

The VAST majority of the art in Gray Merchant were made using royalty-free images from Pixabay that were then modified in Adobe Photoshop. I’d consider that $21/month Photoshop subscription 100% essential, but it’s the only paid application I’d say was necessary and I will say that for all I gripe about Adobe’s subscription program, I do appreciate that it offers a low barrier to entry. I just wish they offered a perpetual license OPTION.

A number of key pieces of art used 3D assets though. I’m essentially self-taught for both Photoshop and 3D art, making use of free tutorials on the Internet. It’s time-consuming but it’s possible.

For 3D, I mainly use Blender, which is open-source and free. There are a large number of royalty-free commercial-use models on sites like Turbosquid, which I also used extensively.

So why did I dump $1,000 into ZBrush and Substance Painter? Let me point out that they are NOT NEEDED. If you’re skilled in Blender, there is very little you can do in ZBrush and Substance Painter that you can’t accomplish in Blender, but it DOES take more TIME. And for an amateur like me, it takes a prohibitive amount of time. ZBrush lets you adjust 3D models like you’re sculpting in clay, while Substance Painter lets you paint textures onto 3D models like you’re using a spray can. They’re much more intuitive than 3D modeling and UV unwrapping. But it can be done, and if I’d really wanted to save the money, I also could’ve managed it with only a somewhat worse-looking result. Here’s what the Gray Merchant mask used heavily in my advertising looked like as raw polygons in just Blender:

And this is what it looked like after being refined in ZBrush and painted in Substance Painter:

You can tell from the wireframe that it was a lot uglier than the refined version, but I could’ve done a bit more cleanup in Blender, put some free textures.com gold texturing on it, done some clean-up in Photoshop, and gotten a reasonable result.

It’s worth noting that, ironically, the art asset I was most proud of never touched ZBrush. Meet the anvilwrought raptor, modeled entirely in Blender over the course of 4 days:

Layout

I also didn’t need to buy Affinity Publisher. Scribus is an open-source and free layout tool that can do basically everything you need, but as you might expect from open-source tools, it’s not the easiest or most intuitive to use. For a beginner who was trying to learn all sorts of other skillsets for this project already, spending $50 for Affinity Publisher to get an interface similar to Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Word—programs I already understood—was a life-saver. Having since gotten Adobe InDesign, I still prefer Affinity Publisher to InDesign. InDesign is more powerful, but its learning curve and usability is awful so far.

Penji

Oh Penji… this is something I discovered partway through Gray Merchant and it changed my life. If you want to try Penji, you can use our affiliate coupon code of 27HIIFRTA1261503 at checkout or click this link to get 15% off your first-month trial. If you sign up with them, you can also get your own affiliate link, and you get a monthly discount on your own subscription each month someone else is signed up using your code.

But what is Penji? Penji is a subscription graphic design firm. You can cancel anytime, and you pay month-by-month. They have several pricing tiers. At the lowest, you only get graphic design services where they’ll throw together all sorts of graphics for you using either your provided art assets or royalty-free assets. Starting at the tier above that, though, they’ll also do custom illustrations for you. You submit projects and their designers (mostly offshore in the Philippines but some in the States and other countries as well) return you a draft or a full product overnight. From everything I can tell, the company tries to give back to the communities it’s in—I spent a couple weeks before signing up for the trial trying to make sure everything seemed ethical and found no red flags. Once you get the art back, you can then accept the project and move on or request revisions, but you’ll typically see one update every 24 hours.

I’ll do a separate post at some point highlighting everything Penji can do, but I do think they’re AMAZING and worth every cent and I’m having a little bit of heartburn talking about them here because I feel like I’m giving away a secret weapon. They typically turn around full custom illustrations for us in two days and they’re friendly and largely deliver things to spec with minimal handholding. This was one situation where something that sounded too good to be true actually was real.

That said, Penji is not a replacement for commissioning artists. While a monthly price of $450 is steep, being able to get 10-20 designs from them makes the per design price lower than anything you can get through custom commissions, and they transfer full ownership rights to you. However, the art you get is generally low complexity due to how quickly they turn them around, and they’re limited in the styles they can deliver, so unless the designers you get paired with happen to gel with your aesthetic perfectly, you may feel a bit constrained.

I personally consider Penji to fall between using royalty-free/public domain art and commissioning custom pieces from artists. It fills a need for cheap, custom art, but it won’t replace someone with exactly the style you want or with whom you can build a long-term collaborative relationship.

For Gray Merchant, the only piece of art they contributed was the footer graphic, which was giving me endless headaches. Their designer provided two options:

I picked the first one but asked for an extra line along the bottom to close it off, resulting in the version you see in the final product.

Summary

I could’ve made The Gray Merchant spending under $200 if I’d used the Gray Merchant mask on a starry field background as the cover, or for around $600 with Victor’s custom cover. Some of the art in the book would’ve looked a bit worse, but there would’ve been few other differences.

However, it would’ve required a lot more time. Probably another 50-100 hours of work learning and practicing the skills I’d need to do what I quickly accomplished with the applications I bought.

I also benefited from coming into this project with over 10 years of hobby experience dabbling in 3D modeling, Photoshop, video editing, and fiction writing that enabled me to pick up new skills specifically for TTRPG books faster than if starting from scratch. I did learn those skills for free online, in my personal time, but it’s still time and experience.

However, I plan to stick with TTRPGs for a long time, so in a way, Gray Merchant was my way of investing in future projects. I bought a lot of these applications because I have plans to make more heavy use of them in the future, and all the profits from Gray Merchant are actually going toward paying writing collaborators 10 cents a word (in addition to royalty share) for a future project that I’ll be announcing next year.

Lessons Learned

OK, so what hard-won opinions do I have to impart? These are, of course, my personal opinions, but if you’ve read this far, hopefully you can make a reasonable judgment as to whether I’m worth listening to or not:

1) Tie Your Product to Existing Brands

You’re paying Wizards of the Coast for the right to use their content, and it’s no trivial amount. If your content is something that could fall under the OGL, you’d be getting paid 70% of your price on DriveThruRPG rather than 50% on DMs Guild. 20% is a LOT. WotC has gotten $1,600 in royalties from Gray Merchant. If your product isn’t leveraging proprietary WotC content to the point of feeling like abuse (this might be a good time for me to highlight my next project, Kill Bhaal), you should ask if you actually want to use DMs Guild. You can also make liberal use of pop culture as long as you’re only inspired by or parodying it—you don’t want to get sued, but otherwise it’s great for that extra bit of recognition and attention from casual browsers. This is also why the Gray Merchant cover is a riff on the hydra battle on the official book covers, telling a story of what happens after it’s slain.

Would Gray Merchant have sold 900 copies so far on DTRPG? No. In fact, it 100% couldn’t exist on there because it is STEEPED in Magic: The Gathering content, and that’s the point. I specifically picked The Gray Merchant because it’s a famous card that has an almost cult following in the community. The character even has his own nickname, “Gary,” and just about any Magic player will recognize the name immediately. How many copies did my supplement sell based on that name recognition? I don’t know for sure, but I’m willing to bet the number is greater than zero. In a low-volume environment like DMs Guild, every sale counts.

But I didn’t just pander by throwing his name and appearance on the cover. The entire product revolves around him. He’s a character with unique mechanics that touch every single item in the book. Not only does it make the product stand out, it’s a great marketing hook and you better believe I shouted about it every chance I got.

The magic items are also tied to the lore of Theros. There’s references to every god in the Theros pantheon, as well as numerous famous cards and characters from the setting. Most of the items in the book adapt cards from the Theros releases, and the art is based on art from those cards. If I were a Guild Adept with rights to use the original Magic art, you’d better believe I’d have gone even deeper and used every single art piece I could get my hands on. As it is, I use hyperlinks to point people to every card that inspired an item in the book, because those little details tie the product together while being relatively low effort.

Timing helps too. I nearly killed myself getting Gray Merchant ready to launch the same day as Mythic Odysseys of Theros. I started working on it in late March for a June 1 release and the anxiety messed up my sleep schedule so badly I still haven’t recovered. But I got ~250 sales the week Theros launched digitally and roughly another 150-200 the week the physical book released. Random interesting note: even though the WotC release dates were Tuesdays, my book sold the most copies on the Sundays of those weeks, comprising roughly 30% of all the sales that week.

It’s worth noting that getting the exact timing down isn’t super critical due to the long tail. In fact, for new settings, a lot of people spend the first few days going over the book, and many don’t start games until a few weeks later. But again, every sale counts, so getting out there and on the bestseller charts matters.

2) Build Your Own Brand

DMs Guild provides terrible customer analytics tools, and they also don’t allow you to put your branding on the book covers or other places that would actually help you significantly. And while DMs Guild does get a decent amount of organic traffic, you can’t count on that to get very far.

So you have to build your own brand. The #1 advice I hear from folks like Satine Phoenix and Ashley Warren (which I didn’t take for way too long, by the way, don’t be like Procrastinator Grady) is to build a mailing list. Mailchimp is an easy way to get started, and perhaps you’d be kind enough to join my mailing list to get discounts and news on future products:

https://mailchi.mp/a119431bc6d8/gallant-goblin-sign-up

Why a mailing list? Because it gives you a reliable way of contacting people who are already interested in your content. Social media is not reliable. Twitter algorithms, for example, are notorious for burying content posts and seem to favor posts without URL links over those with links, which hurts when you’re trying to LINK PEOPLE TO YOUR PRODUCT. That said, having social media followers does help and shouldn’t be neglected. As a general rule, be on as many platforms as possible, but if you find them overwhelming, pick the two you’re most comfortable with and focus on those.

Personally, I despise Twitter, though I understand a lot of people have made it work. Twitter is the only platform where we consistently LOSE followers over time for no apparent reason. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube followers have all proven to be much more sticky, and both Instagram and YouTube tend to grow organically by themselves as long as you keep posting content. Facebook is in a weird middle ground where you’re not going to pick up organic followers easily but people who like your page also rarely unfollow you.

And that’s why I dropped $100 advertising Gray Merchant, primarily using Facebook. When people react to your Facebook posts, you’re given the option to invite them to like and follow your page. DO IT. Now I hate the idea of telling people to give money to Mark Zuckerberg, but the truth is that if you’re going to drop money on advertising, Facebook is the only platform where the advertising not only helps sell your product but works as an investment in retaining customers by getting them to follow your page and see your future posts.

But all in all, the mailing list is the most reliable. Yes, the emails can end up in spam, but it’s much more of a guarantee that your newsletter subscribers will see your email than any other platform.

I’m pretty certain that the biggest reason Gray Merchant sold as well as it did, considering it was my first release, is because we had an existing platform with our YouTube channel, which was around 5,000 subscribers when Gray Merchant launched (we’re approaching 10k now! Perhaps you’d like to check us out? Yes, always be advertising…). I posted a video promoting Gray Merchant which is still getting views and comments today, and we consistently pushed it in every video we made about Theros. You don’t have to have a YouTube channel, but you do need a place to gather fans and for fans to find you. That can be social media, or Twitch, or a Discord channel, or a Patreon, or a website—anything that makes sense to you. But you should have SOMETHING that you dedicate time to building up, preferably on a daily basis, in addition to the creative work you’re doing.

The last thing that matters is that you keep publishing. I discussed previously that products have long tails, but they get even longer when you publish another book because people who may not have seen your first product may see the new one, and if they like it, they’ll check out other things you’ve written. Just because something didn’t make a splash immediately doesn’t mean they can’t be a huge bestseller down the road.

3) Art Matters

While I’m sure bringing on more collaborators could’ve made Gray Merchant look even better, I feel fairly confident in saying that it looks pretty good, and I have zero doubt that its aesthetic appeal played a part in getting people to buy. Having a professional look that resembles the trade dress (branded visual appearance) of existing D&D books also makes people inherently trust the product more and be more willing to buy it.

Now obviously, don’t bust your budget or go into debt getting amazing art, but when possible, strategic investments in art, particularly for your cover, will likely help.

4) DMs Guild Bestseller Lists Matter

DMs Guild gets organic traffic, but people tend to be either searching for something specific or looking at the bestseller lists. It therefore stands to reason that the higher your placement, the better. Here’s a few things to know:

Don’t upload your content early. DMs Guild starts calculating your new and bestseller status based on the date you create your product listing. If you upload it a week ahead of time to get everything nice and ready and scheduled to launch, you’re screwed. You won’t show up on the “New” banner when it launches, because DMs Guild thinks it’s a week old. You’ll face an uphill slog climbing the bestseller list, because DMs Guild thinks you went a week without selling a copy.

Now that last statement I can’t confirm without insider info, but I’m 80% confident it’s true based on watching how other products placed on the list based on their time to medal. Gray Merchant never made it above #13 when other products of the same price and sales rates, released within a few weeks of it, easily cracked the top 10, and the most likely reason is that DMs Guild thinks I released it days before June 1.

So if you really need to test a product page, go ahead and do that. Just never publish it and create a new listing when you’re ready to launch. Hopefully this gets fixed one day.

Decide what list you want to target. There are two big bestseller lists on DMs Guild at the time of this post: “Most Popular” and “Most Popular under $5.” Their ranks are determined DIFFERENTLY. The Most Popular list is calculated by SALES GROSS. A $30 book that sells 1 copy is going to rank higher than a $1 book that sells 25 copies in the same timeframe if released at the same time. But the Most Popular under $5 is based on UNITS SOLD, so a $1 book that sells 40 copies will rank higher than a $4 book that sells 39 copies. Again, this is based on months of observation, not insider knowledge of the algorithms, but I’m willing to bet money that those are the primary drivers for the rankings.

Now, you should always price products to make the most money for yourself, so don’t shortchange yourself if your product is under $5 to chase those extra sales. For more information on pricing, you can click here to check out a great blog post by OneBookShelf. But pricing higher than you might think you’re worth because you have imposter syndrome is especially important if your product is OVER $5; you actually have a better chance of doing well on the bestseller list if your product is more expensive, and this is especially true if you have a bunch of doting relatives who’ll buy your stuff sight unseen (Hi mom!).

Based on the linked OBS post, my personal opinion is that a price within a $5 price range doesn’t drastically affect sales, and definitely not when it’s within a $2.50 range. So if you’re debating whether to price your book $5 or $6, consider bumping it up to $7.49 or even $9.95. If you think your book is worth $12.95, bump it up to $14.95.

A higher price also helps because you can run better sales or make your bundle discounts look better. If you’ve already priced yourself low, you have no room for promotions. Now I have a lot of opinions about the ethics of various marketing strategies, but I fully believe that 99% of writers in our community are underpricing themselves as is, so I have no qualms recommending this strategy in this particular case.

5) Support the Community

Creating is HARD. A lot of folks are just doing what they love and hoping they can one day have a slightly better life from doing what they love. Let’s be kind to each other, support each, and lift each other up. My experiences in the TTRPG community have been overwhelmingly positive, but it never hurts to remind ourselves that there’s a person on the other side of the screen who wants many of the same things we do. By working together, we can grow the industry and lift everyone up TOGETHER. Economics and finance isn’t a zero-sum game where one person’s success costs another theirs. It’s super easy to feel jealous or feel like you’re falling behind, but I’ve found that a lot of times, just speaking up and asking for help will result in a ton of people offering you a hand, so do it and pay it forward when you can.

On that note, I’ve realized this blog has run WAY longer than I planned. Feel free to hit me up using the Gallant Goblin social media links below if you have any questions or feedback. Otherwise, trust me, you’ll be hearing a lot more from me soon as we have a ton of projects headed your way.

Grady Wang is one-half of the creative team at The Gallant Goblin, a review and news site covering all manner of tabletop role playing content and accessories. In addition to our website, you can find us at:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/gallantgoblin

YouTube: https://youtube.com/thegallantgoblin

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thegallantgoblin

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thegallantgoblin/

Redbubble: https://www.redbubble.com/people/gallantgoblin/explore