GW Investor Report- Black Library Sales Down

[caladancid]

https://investor.games-workshop.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019-20-half-year-report.pdf

 

This is being discussed in the news sub forum also, but I figured it was worth reposting here as it seems like BL is the one part of GW declining in sales. All this is of course assuming I am reading the report correctly.

 

It looks like a 7-9 percent drop? That’s my quick math.

[Lord Marshal]

Only so much Bolter Porn you can ingest, I suppose.

[Shinros]

Only so much Bolter Porn you can ingest, I suppose.

Bingo, they need to write better books. We need more books like Dark Harvest and Requiem Infernal. More substance, less bolter porn I rarely ever read Space Marine books now, tired of them overall. 

[Biscuittzz]

I think they really missed a beat in not commissioning a HH style series to run alongside 8th edition starting off with Dark Imperium. Seems like they want the PA and codexes to drive the storyline rather than novels but even then the plot advancements in PA are laughable. They've become so beholden to selling models that they just can't risk making any drastic storyline changes.

[Shinros]

I think they really missed a beat in not commissioning a HH style series to run alongside 8th edition starting off with Dark Imperium. Seems like they want the PA and codexes to drive the storyline rather than novels but even then the plot advancements in PA are laughable. They've become so beholden to selling models that they just can't risk making any drastic storyline changes.

That is also another problem I feel as well, I'm sorry the supplement stories suck. The ONLY time I enjoyed reading a campaign book recently was Vigilus defiance. What they did to Eldar in PA1 was travesty and I am a Slaanesh fan.  

[theSpirea]

I'm not surprised at all. BL marketing is beyond terrible; and not just marketing.

 

• They don't properly announce new titles. Just remember what happened with the Solar War LE: and they did it again just last Saturday with Sons of Selenar LE. Not as many people were angry but there were still plenty of angry rants on forums/FB groups.
• Their Coming Soon section is a joke, there's no need to even comment on that part.
• Black Library website needs an overhaul, desperately. It absolutely doesn't help newcomers to pick a book, doesn't suggest reading order, etc. 
• Majority of the books are not available: unless the book was published recently, only ebooks are available. Lots of people don't read ebooks. Older books are only available as Omnibuses (paperback or ebook). Again, lots of people don't like omnibuses and are often put off by the size of the book.
• BL Instagram - they can't even regularly post news/new releases. 16 year old girl would do a better job
• Warhammer Horror imprint - they've published already quite a few books, however, they again failed to promote it.
• Sales: if you're okay with ebooks, you can get them super cheap via Amazon, etc. Audiobooks people usually get via Audible (and BL gets less % if the don't sell directly)

It all comes down to terrible management.

 

edit: people mentioned Requiem Infernal and Dark Harvest. Writing a good book is not going to help if they don't promote it and don't get the word out. Requiem Infernal hardback took forever to sell out. They need to attract new people to the setting. They are running the business as a supplement to GW/models.

Edited January 15, 2020 by theSpirea

[Lucerne]

Quality control is a real problem with the Siege novels too- so far it's had a lot of the problems of the Heresy, only magnified with the whole thing degenerating into a poorly plotted soap opera.

 

They'd benefit a lot from forward planning for the "main plot points" and assigning them to some of their top talent, with the less adept writers given the "side stories" disconnected from the core novels- this way we avoid the erratic plotlines of the Beast series or the painful slog/soap opera of the Heresy proper.

[cheywood]

Is this reflective of a serious decline or simply a drop compared to the past 12 months?

[Shinros]

I'm not surprised at all. BL marketing is beyond terrible; and not just marketing.

 

• They don't properly announce new titles. Just remember what happened with the Solar War LE: and they did it again just last Saturday with Sons of Selenar LE. Not as many people were angry but there were still plenty of angry rants on forums/FB groups.
• Their Coming Soon section is a joke, there's no need to even comment on that part.
• Black Library website needs an overhaul, desperately. It absolutely doesn't help newcomers to pick a book, doesn't suggest reading order, etc. 
• Majority of the books are not available: unless the book was published recently, only ebooks are available. Lots of people don't read ebooks. Older books are only available as Omnibuses (paperback or ebook). Again, lots of people don't like omnibuses and are often put off by the size of the book.
• BL Instagram - they can't even regularly post news/new releases. 16 year old girl would do a better job
• Warhammer Horror imprint - they've published already quite a few books, however, they again failed to promote it.
• Sales: if you're okay with ebooks, you can get them super cheap via Amazon, etc. Audiobooks people usually get via Audible (and BL gets less % if the don't sell directly)

It all comes down to terrible management.

 

edit: people mentioned Requiem Infernal and Dark Harvest. Writing a good book is not going to help if they don't promote it and don't get the word out. Requiem Infernal hardback took forever to sell out. They need to attract new people to the setting. They are running the business as a supplement to GW/models.

That's another thing as well. It's a TRAVESTY that they don't advertise properly, just Imagine if Dark Harvest and Requiem Infernal was given a proper advertising push? Or any of the Dark Coil novels? 

 

There is a reason why the most popular Black Library series is Eisenhorn and Gaunts Ghosts. They REALLY need to advertise their heavy hitting books, people who have no idea about 40k or AOS adore both Dark Harvest and Reqiuem, fans who read it love it as well. 

Edited January 16, 2020 by Shinros

[b1soul]

Yeah, I'd say poor marketing absolutely shoots BL in the foot

 

Why no proper coming soon section...what the actual fudge???

 

Why no strongly advertised BL series to accompany 8th edition? Instead they just did this through Gathering Storm, jumped the timeline to Dark Imperium, then backtracked to early Indomitus. It's a mess.

[Shinros]

Yeah, I'd say poor marketing absolutely shoots BL in the foot

 

Why no proper coming soon section...what the actual fudge???

 

Why no strongly advertised BL series to accompany 8th edition? Instead they just did this through Gathering Storm, jumped the timeline to Dark Imperium, then backtracked to early Indomitus. It's a mess.

Yeah the coming soon section just makes me inwardly sigh and I actually thought for 8th they were going to push forward, past Dark Imperium or on the outset start an Indomitus crusade series. 

[Marshal Rohr]

I don’t understand how a ‘Coming Soon’ section would really help with Sales. I don’t know anything about the publishing industry though.

[Commander Dawnstar]

Obviously I can't speak to how much this would actually help their bottom line, but it sure would be nice to have some new xenos-centric books so that portion of the audience actually has something to go to the Black Library for beyond the occasional short story.

 

As far as I can tell the last full novel with xenos protagonists was Rise of the Ynnari: Wild Rider, and that was released in November 2018.

[DarkChaplain]

It's a combination of poor marketing on top of it being a relatively low key year overall, I'd argue. Yes, there were two Siege novels on general release, and The Buried Dagger before them, but they didn't really have much in the way of big blockbuster sellers. Their output was generally lower, it feels like, with them investing more in specialized content.

 

Between the return of artbooks, really expensive (outside of Audible) 4-CD audio drama boxed sets, the Warhammer Horror imprint, Necromunda, Blackstone Fortress stuff.... 2019 was also a year of comparatively excessive amounts of reprints and updating the back catalog, especially when it comes to audio and omnibus releases.

 

A couple of the most notable releases this past year have also been pretty divisive, the stuff they've marketed the most wasn't necessarily what people were looking for, and a couple of their most reliably good authors haven't had much to offer throughout 2019. Josh Reynolds took a bit of a hiatus from writing BL tie-in fiction after Apocalypse (though thankfully Dark Harvest and Darkly Dreaming are in the running for good stuff the past few months), Dan had a ton of re-releases in audio and print but Anarch was surprisingly low key. French didn't get the third Horusian Wars novel out, instead we only got an anthology with mostly old stuff, Josh's Fabius Bile isn't coming til later this year at best, still no Penitent, and the Horus Heresy has slowed down to a crawl as far as ancillary stories went, at least until the advent season. Space Marine Conquests stopped after Apocalypse, which wasn't really marketed, and a couple of novel releases were very unconventional, like Rites of Passage or Terminal Overkill. Output of original content was extremely limited compared to the past few years.

 

Still, at the end of the day, beyond the obviously mishandled stuff like writing deadlines on Josh's Apocalypse, or the limited edition Siege situation, or the terrible website that's still not up to par with basically any other store in the 2010s, I'd argue that a slower paced 2019 isn't necessarily a bad thing.

 

A couple of years back, BL kept rolling bank, leading to a lot of investments and expansion into audio. What BL has done in 2019, but also to a degree in 2018, was revitalize some of their older properties, like Ciaphas Cain, the Sabbat Worlds, Gotrek & Felix, Necromunda, Last Chancers, but also provided ways for newer folks to get the classics again, by way of keeping Omnibuses more reliably in print, and producing audiobooks of old content. These aren't really going to sell like crazy, because their established fanbase will likely have read the greatest hits already anyway, but they're important to solidify their catalog for the future.

 

On top of that, they've been making efforts to approach new angles to their ranges through Horror, and 2020s Crime imprints. Considering Crime was only recently announced, I'd say that Horror has so far been a success to them. It's a risky project, though, due to the very minor branding on the books, and the content being a bit out of the ordinary for BL as a whole. They're diversifying their approach, and I like that a lot, but that was always going to come with risks, especially when you have to schedule authors for projects that don't contribute to the mainline as a result. Besides that, their editing staff was probably rather busy with newcomers and stuff like Inferno!

 

To me, it looks like BL is playing it smart in many ways. They appear more forward thinking right now than a few years back, where they'd scrap series and labels on a whim. The real question is whether they can grow their 2019 experiments to the point of greater success and reach even the folks who were reluctant to, say, read something labeled Warhammer Horror. If they've seen the critical acclaim for, say, Reqiuem Infernal, they'll also have to amp up marketing of that kind of content in the future. But at the end of the day, that level of drop in performance for 2019 does not look bad at all when you consider just how slow the year was for them overall.

[Marshal Rohr]

I don’t know how feasible it would be, but BL doing more books like the Sabbat Worlds sourcebook would be something I’d buy every entry in the series. Cross sections and Atlases like the old Star Wars stuff would probably sell like hot cakes too. BL should really step off the gas in fiction and move into world building products.

[MegaVolt87]

Cross post-

 

http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/topic/359756-gw-profits-up-again-shares-up-700-in-three-years/?p=5424286

 

BL not doing well is fine, its a good intro gateway to the hobby. Even if it was in the red it would still be ok because you gotta spend money to make money. 

[DarkChaplain]

Looking over the 2018 list, man, that year was stacked. It had SIX Horus Heresy books alone. 2019 had 3, with 2500 copy limited editions.

2018 also had 5 Primarchs novels, 4 if we exclude Corax, which had its general release in February. 2019 had the general release of Corax, Angron and Curze.

 

Besides the Heresy, 2018 had a Ciaphas Cain novel, an Alpha Legion novel, Outer Dark by Robbie MacNiven, which was rather hotly anticipated, The Lords of Silence, Plague War (the third novel in the Dark Imperium trilogy did not happen in 2019, possibly 2020), Fehervari's Cult of the Spiral Dawn, The Magos, Incarnation, The Voice of Mars (third Iron Hands novel did not happen in 2019 either), Wild Rider (third Ynnari novel missing too... see the pattern?), heck, they didn't even follow up Swallow's Corsair audio series with a second part all of 2019 - at this point it's been two years since the pilot!

Space Marine Conquests had 3 books in 2018, 2019 only had Apocalypse. Space Wolves had two books including SMC and Lukas the Trickster.

 

BL's left a lot of series, trilogies and as a result also fans hanging in 2019, so it's no surprise that sales are down a tad.

[theSpirea]

While it is true there weren't that many heavy-hitting releases in 2019, it still falls down to marketing issues. I have plenty of friends who read thriller/horror mainly and they haven't heard of WHH and they read close to 100 books a year, they try to look up new books, go to bookstores, etc. The first two books in Horror came out in April and I haven't seen it being advertised anywhere outside of BL yet. I introduced them to WHH and they are slowly getting into it (none of them was impressed with the first two books, I had to convince them to stick with it).

 

It's nice they are diversifying their catalog but they also need to properly inform people. If I wasn't checking multiple sources couple times a month I would have missed quite a few releases. It's clear they are trying to improve things, and I believe they are on the right track. However, they can do better; they have the material and the writers to do so.

 

It feels like they either don't have enough experience in publishing (outside of publishing fluff for bunch of nerds) or they lack resources. Apocalypse Special Edition was printed in the UK, so it looks they were trying to move the printing there. They didn't promote it enough (at all), they decided to go with Special Edition for 5th book in a series that gets only paperbacks/ebooks - this can also hurt sales.

 

I'm sure the numbers will look better from now on. Horror books are slowly getting out, soon we will have Crime ones, and their audiobooks on Audible are becoming more and more popular.

[mc warhammer]

haven't had a chance to read up on it yet, but has there been a slump industry wide as well? or in retail in general? context is always important

 

if that was taken into account in the PDF, ignore me

[caladancid]

I'm not surprised at all. BL marketing is beyond terrible; and not just marketing.

 

• They don't properly announce new titles. Just remember what happened with the Solar War LE: and they did it again just last Saturday with Sons of Selenar LE. Not as many people were angry but there were still plenty of angry rants on forums/FB groups.
• Their Coming Soon section is a joke, there's no need to even comment on that part.
• Black Library website needs an overhaul, desperately. It absolutely doesn't help newcomers to pick a book, doesn't suggest reading order, etc.
• Majority of the books are not available: unless the book was published recently, only ebooks are available. Lots of people don't read ebooks. Older books are only available as Omnibuses (paperback or ebook). Again, lots of people don't like omnibuses and are often put off by the size of the book.
• BL Instagram - they can't even regularly post news/new releases. 16 year old girl would do a better job
• Warhammer Horror imprint - they've published already quite a few books, however, they again failed to promote it.
• Sales: if you're okay with ebooks, you can get them super cheap via Amazon, etc. Audiobooks people usually get via Audible (and BL gets less % if the don't sell directly)

It all comes down to terrible management.

 

edit: people mentioned Requiem Infernal and Dark Harvest. Writing a good book is not going to help if they don't promote it and don't get the word out. Requiem Infernal hardback took forever to sell out. They need to attract new people to the setting. They are running the business as a supplement to GW/models.

Most of this I 100 percent agree with.

 

But those ebooks sales you talk about don’t happen on the US amazon store. At all. So that’s another weird choice.

 

And they have a lot of trouble getting new releases out on ebook or hard copy on Amazon. Just look at the new Kharadron Overlords release. The new CL Werner book came out, I guess. But you can’t buy the ebook or hardcover on Amazon. That probably doesn’t help sales.

[theSpirea]

I don't know why but usually hardcovers don't go to general bookstores (Siege of Terra, Primarchs, and WHH hardcovers being an exception).

[MegaVolt87]

I don't know why but usually hardcovers don't go to general bookstores (Siege of Terra, Primarchs, and WHH hardcovers being an exception).

 

Gotta keep some public customer book trade in house man, LE and hard covers looks to be how to do it. 

[StrangerOrders]

I will toss in a quick observation on Space Marine books. 

 

Alot of the better (and better selling) Astartes books dwell more on chapter/legion culture, expanding on the oddity and grand scale of the Astartes and generally making the setting feel larger than life. 

 

BL however has an almost obsessive compulsion to make Space Marine books include Bolter Porn where it isnt needed or does not add anything to the story (Palatine Phoenix being one of my favorite examples of needless bolter porn).

 

The Siege of Terra books have actively been dumbing down or stripping Legions of interesting stories for a relentless slurry of bolter porn. Not even especially good bolter porn since they existing books are a weird mix of frantic pacing (Solar War) and slower than an ill snail (L&tD).

 

Not saying that more Xenos books would not help but BL seems to be favoring the weaker parts of Space Marine books and I don't think that helps. 

[b1soul]

I think a Coming Soon section would help with book sales the same way preview trailers help with movie ticket sales

 

I don't see how it would hurt sales and it's not hard to do

[Felix Antipodes]

My first thought on reading this thread was on cause and effect; are sales down due to the dwindling number of releases in the last year or are they releasing less due to poor sales?

 

Have to agree with most of the complaints so far. A good, well maintained, Coming Soon section drives the hype for an upcoming book and also allows you to plan out your future purchases. Things like last weeks release of a LE into the wild only creates bitterness towards the company whether you lucked out and got a copy or not.

 

Their website desperately needs updating as well. It has got to the stage where I rarely visit it anymore, where in the past I was checking it out a couple of times a day. Time for it to get the same upgrade as Forgeworld at a minimum.

 

The decision to drop the timeline references with 8th edition hasn't helped BL either. I was indifferent to it at first, but it has really muddied the waters in both the SM Conquests series as well as the campaign books from GW proper like the current PA series, making them confusing to some readers (a common complaint in my group). They need to expand past the first founding Chapters as well IMHO. There are plenty of them in existence already crying out for a good backgrounding novel or, shock, let the author create their own.

 

On a positive note, the expansion into new genre imprints like horror and crime is something I applaud. The widening of the settings in recent releases (Navigator Houses, Inquisition, Blackstone Fortress) and the return of old favs like Necromunda and Ciaphus Cain is also a positive thing. The deeper you can pull an audience into a setting the more likely they are to stay. I'd love to see one of the authors have a go at a novel set in the Astra Telepathica or the Administratum. And more Imperial Navy stuff. It's been ages. Astra Militarum also seems to have had its day.

 

The recent influx of new (to BL) authors is also a good thing. Will be interesting to see how many survive to become regular contributors.