Sales were up today

[Kevin]

Sales were up today

Don’t get too excited, because we’ve been seeing this yo-yo ride ALL year, but I was pleased and relieved to see very strong online sales overnight. In fact, it was the best Thursday to Friday morning sales in 9 weeks! Pre-orders were up too. Very good to see. Thank you, to those of you who ordered.

Now if only sales would stay at that level or something close we'd be in pretty good shape. As I’ve stated before, the frustrating thing about sales these past several months is that they rise and fall dramatically. Way up, then bottom of the barrel. Way up, then way down or something in-between. No consistency. And it has been like that for most business people I have talked with, including totally unrelated businesses like T-shirt and novelty printers, book printers, comic book sales, plumbing and heating, and retail stores. Sheesh. Nerve wracking, but we are hanging in there.

A busy week full of planning

Yesterday and most of this past week has been days of planning, plotting, talking, and organizing. I’ve talked with a zillion artists and a few writers about current and upcoming books. I've been assigning artwork and art directing covers, and figuring out who does what and when. That also includes email correspondence and a fair number of Murmurs. These communications have stolen away some of my time from finishing Fleets of the Three Galaxies™ this week and diving into the editing and rewriting of Mysteries of Magic™ and Dimensional Outbreak™, as well as sending out contracts to freelancers -- but we are making good progress and I hope to get a bit caught up over the weekend. I’m about a week behind where I wanted to be in production, but we’re looking pretty good overall.

New Coffee Mugs

The first two coffee mugs are a big hit, so Wayne and I spent some time this week creating new non-book products.

The beautiful, black, faux velevet dice bags with the gold Rifts® logo were almost sold out, so we had to reprint them. The midnight blue Rifts® dice bags are getting low too, but we decided to wait before reprinting them.

The first of several new coffee mugs are coming your way in 2-3 weeks. It is the same large, high quality, 15.5 ounce, black coffee mug with the words “Property of the Coalition States™” printed on both sides in white. People have raved about the first two coffee cups, which we also had to send in for a second run this week.

We did a cool Dead Reign™ coffee mug too, but we’d like to see it printed “red” on black. White on black looks great, but our red on black computer mock-up looked even better. Of course, nothing is ever simple or easy, and there is some question about the quality of the red. The printer has to print white first, and then the red on top of it, and he wants us to see a few different application processes and pick the one we like best, or stick with white on black. We should get the sample sometime after July 13 and the Dead Reign™ coffee mug should be available (in one color or another) the first or second week of August.

We are thinking about doing a NEMA™ logo coffee cup, Palladium Fantasy® and Heroes Unlimited™. What else would you folks like to see on your Palladium coffee cups? Please let us know.

Rifts® Baseball Cap

We are also getting a quote on the Rifts® baseball cap people went wild over at the Open House. So with a little luck you should see it available (black Rifts® Logo printed on a tan and black cap) by the end of July. It is a very nice cap and the one, out of three samples, that fans at the POH went crazy over. We hope to keep the price under $15.

Odds and ends

I'll be back on the Gateway to the Megaverse® live podcast show on Monday, July 6, 2009, 6:00 PM.

Our new Press Release will go up later this evening.

Keep an eye out for the new products being released all month long!

Gotta get back to finishing up Fleets of the Three Galaxies™ – almost done.


Sincerely,
Kevin Siembieda
Publisher, Writer & Game Designer
Palladium Books®, Inc. – 28 years of RPG Publishing

© Copyright July 3, 2009 Palladium Books Inc. All rights reserved.

Rifts®, The Rifter®, RECON®, Splicers®, Palladium Books®, Phase World®, Palladium Books®, The Palladium Fantasy Role-Playing Game®, Megaverse®, Nightbane®, The Mechanoids®, The Mechanoid Invasion®, Coalition Wars® and After the Bomb® are Registered Trademarks of Palladium Books Inc. Heroes Unlimited™, Beyond the Supernatural, Dead Reign, Warpath, Shemarrian Nation, Fleets of the Three Galaxies, Mysteries of Magic, and other published book titles, names, slogans and likenesses are trademarks of Palladium Books Inc., and Kevin Siembieda.

Robotech® and Robotech® The Shadow Chronicles® are Registered Trademarks of Harmony Gold USA, Inc.