If you want to stock Pelgrane products, please ask your distributor. You can also email Impressions Advertising & Marketing, if you need to find a distributor carrying our line, or if you are a distributor seeking to do so. Impressions Advertising & Marketing supplies all our distributors and through them the retailers. We also sell to retailers through Indie Press Revolution.

Contact Details

Impressions Advertising & Marketing
Phone (925) 240-0862
eFax (240) 220-8780
aldo@impressionsadv.net

Distributors

Walrus & Carpenter – Australia
Lion Rampant – Canada
Universal West/New Century – Canada
Everest Wholesale – Canada
Arcane Tinmen – Denmark
Enigma – Denmark
Fantastaspielpelit – Finland
Pegasus Spiele GmbH – Germany
Ulisses Spiele GmbH – Germany
Brave New World – Germany
Raven Distribution – Italy
Esdevium Games – UK
ACD Distribution, LLC – USA
Aladdin Distributors, Inc. – USA
Alliance Game Distributors, Inc. – USA
GTS Distribution – USA
Southern Hobby – USA
Warpath Games Distribution – USA

At GenCon 2010 for the first time, we supplied PDFs to all of our convention customers. It was a very popular move.

Similarly, through the Retailer PDF program, retail customers of bricks and mortar stores can supply our ebooks to their customers with the print version where we do. Other publishers do this, too, and it seems silly for every publisher to have a bespoke method for supplying these PDFs.

So, Fred Hicks of Evil Hat and a number of other publishers started chatting about a way of extending this program through a central non-profit organisation, where like-minded retailers and publishers could come together to share PDFs. The result, the Bits and Mortar initiative we announced at GenCon.

Fred has written a simple but effective back end which allows registered retailers to email links to their customers, a better solution, I think, than the Dropbox method Pelgrane Press has been using.

We’ve just about finished the beta phase, and you can expect to see many more publishers listed in a few weeks.

Retailer Support FAQ – Join Our PDF Support Program

Most of the sales of our games are made through quality games retailers. Retailers let us print greater volumes of our books, giving us better quality printing and reach more customers. We sell through major distributors, and we want to help you sell our games. This page tells you want you need to know.

How do retailers buy our games?

We sell through all major games distributors including Indie Press Revolution, Alliance Games Distrbution,  Lion Rampant, Walrus and Carpenter, WarPath Games Distribution and Esdevium Games. To find your local stockist, see our contact page.

What support do you offer retailers?

To support our retailers, and encourage you to sell and promote our games, we are offering retailers the chance to give their customers copies of the PDFs of our games. We also want you to have the chance to offer pre-orders – giving your customers the PDFs of our games before shipping out the print version. These offers are not open to online discounters.

How does the PDF support program work?

You can get copies of any of our PDFs through the Bits and Mortar program. Bits and Mortar is a collection of like-minded publishers who want retailers to be able to supply PDFs to their customers where the publisher does. It’s free for retailers to join.  Sign up here.

How does it work with pre-orders?

When a customer pre-orders one of our products,  you simply share the PDF with them. Sometimes, we’ll update the PDF on the basis of customer feedback. In general, it will take three months from pre-order to print version, and your customers should be aware of that.

What is the Retailer Playtest Program?

Some of our more major products have long pre-order periods of up to six months. When the game is ready for playtest, we open pre-orders. Pre-orderers can playtest the game and give us feedback. The PDF will be regularly updated.  Any participating playtest group and store will be included in the credits. Eventually the game will be ready for released, and added to our usual pre-order scheme. Currently, only Ashen Stars is planned to be made available like this.

Games available for pre-order

None at present.

Games available for the Retailer Playtest Program

Ashen Stars

As I discussed in Pelgrane Biz Part 1, it’s expensive and risky to print books by offset litho, even though the results are gratifying, and the rewards, if the sales are high enough, are excellent. But there is every chance that Trail of Cthulhu is a one-off success, and won’t be repeated.

That said, I really want to print Ashen Stars as a full colour smythe-sewnbook. The setting deserves the full colour treatment, and if you’ve seen the starship schematic and Jérome’s artwork, I hope you’ll agree the art warrants it, too. Also, I have high hopes for the game; both the setting and the system I think will have widespread appeal. I’ve just sent out the first  to the 32 GMs who have answered our questionnaire, for what will be our largest playtest ever.

Even so, it’s still just a hope. I don’t know how many copies I’m likely to sell. My solution is to sell as many as possible by pre-order, before the book is printed, supplying the PDF with the pre-order.  Now, retailers and distributors don’t like publishers doing pre-orders with PDFs, unless they can join in – but now we have the Retailer PDF Program open to any retailer who wants to join, and that removes my competitive advantage.

To make this work, I need to sell 200 copies by mail order in advance. This is a large barrier, but not insurmountable, and I am doing two stages of pre-order:

Pre-pre-order. After the first round of playtesting, I will open the pre-pre-order  – probably late in August. People who opt in at this stage will get a late draft of the game – some extra content, and their name in the credits with special thanks. As the game is updated, we’ll update the PDF. If we are not able to do a full colour hardback version, these people will still get a special version – perhaps a hardback where everyone else is a paperback, or some other special treat. The PDF in any case, when it’s released, will be in full colour. I suspect few retailers will take us up at this stage – this will be our loyal core of users.

Pre-order When the final version is ready and laid out, we’ll start the pre-order proper. There’ll be a brief window where we’ll ask people to respond with any typos (this worked well with the Skulduggery pre-order) and then get printing.

If I can get 200 mail order pre-orders, plus however many retail pre-orders, it will mean I can justify the realtively short and expensive full-colour print run, and be in with a good chance of selling through that run in two years. It will also mean I can produce more, better supplements, with new tech, deckplans, alien races and adventures.

My question to you is, what would be a good name for the pre-pre-order?