CALL to RPG Bloggers - Let's Give The Publishers Some Love

Yesterday the gaming community raised over $50,000 through individual $20 donations from thousands of gamers and fans of role playing games. If you don't know what the hell I'm talking about, then click on that big graphic in the corner. Basically, One Book Shelf has done a great service by matching the donations and giving 100% of the proceeds to Doctors Without Borders for their efforts in Haiti. In addition, they included a MEGABUNDLE of over 100+ PDFs from publishers who were willing to donate to the cause. Hats off to OBS for taking the initiative and rallying the whole community. It's really been amazing to see the out pouring of donations.

Hats off to the publishers who donated their creations to the $1400+ bundle of eBooks and PDFs too. As a publisher myself, I wanted to check out the "sales count" of the PDF bundle promotion (since it's a product that, even at $0 in price, is tracked just like any other product). Last I checked there where 2,714 bundles 'sold' - representing $54,280 in donations. OBS is matching that for a total well over $100,000 of good will for Doctors without Borders.

But take a moment to step back and think about that... each bundle would have retailed for $1,481.20 as it includes over 120 products. Those sales numbers would have generated $4,019,976 in retail sales revenue!

Now granted, that number assumes that OBS would have eventually sold 2500+ of each of the 1400+ products included in the bundle - which simply would have never happened. Nonetheless, it represents a HUGE loss of potential revenue for OBS and the indy publishers who participated in the charity drive.
Many of these publishers have other products for sale. By reviewing, or even just pointing out to the community which PDFs you particularily love or find useful you can help all these publishers by getting people interested in their other products as well. So, the least we can do, as a blogging community, is highlight the PDFs gems that are included and hopefully direct our readers to support some of these small press companies.

So, consider this an OPEN CALL to the RPG Blogging community. If you are a blogger, and you have donated to the Gamers for Haiti program - then please take some time to go through the list of PDFs to find the gems included. Write one, two or a dozen posts about your favorite PDFs, and highlight what else these publishers have to offer gamers. It's the least we can do to help promote the indy RPG gaming market - and they deserve the additional coverage.

If you do so and decide to link back to this post at The Core Mechanic - I'll also post a linked list for everyone to copy/use as a jumping off point.

DISCLAIMER: Being that I am technically a publisher, I want to begin this post with a disclaimer that I'm not trying to generate any free press or blogging for the two projects I'm involved in. This post was inspired by the charity of the independent publishers involved with the Gamers for Haiti promotion from OneBookShelf, and nothing more.

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