Well, I've got both the consignment returns I was waiting for. It's hard to make a judgement on the US returns, since they haven't had Carpe Astra long, and they've just switched from biweekly to monthly billing. But there certainly isn't a large jump as a result of the BoardGameGeek competition and sales calls. In the UK though it's a different story. The UK returns show a large improvement over the previous month, though whether that's down to the sales visits I've been making or the BGG competition it's hard to tell.

I'm going to do some more sales visits next week (ahead of my attendance at the Beers and Pretzels convention next weekend. I also need to concentrate on picking a game for my Essen release. I've a couple of potentials, but nothing certain yet. Playtesting over the next couple of weeks should help to confirm things, if you're going to Beer and Pretzels, stop by my table and ask to play a prototype with me (and while you're at it, why not try Sumeria!).

I'm even considering a few sales trips a bit further afield. There are several shops up North that I could visit, but to do so would probably mean staying the night somewhere, so it's a bit more of a commitment than the local trips I've been doing so far.

Pre-orders are a great way to cut out the middle man and help both the publisher and the customer. Publishers usually offer the pre-ordering customer a discount in return for either cash up front (helping to pay for the production) or a commitment to buy the game direct from the publisher.

Pre-ordering helps the publisher by providing them with more income that they would get selling the games through shops and distributors and also providing early return on investment. Normally, selling to distributors it's at least a month after delivery that the publisher will see any money, since the usual invoice terms are NET30 (payable 30 days after invoicing). In the case of cash up front (which I don't do!) it also allows the publisher to part-finance the production of the game using customers money - which reduces the risk. It also gets some copies of the games out in the hands of the playing public very quickly - which will hopefully lead to quicker referral sales where someone who has played someone else's copy wants one of their own.

Pre-ordering also helps the customer - it allows them to get the game cheaper than retail price, and sooner than they would be able to through the shops.

Sounds great so far - who doesn't it help? The shops and distributors that have been cut out as middlemen! Although, if the early copies that went to pre-orderers get played and lead to more sales then it will indirectly help them. Obviously, once the game has widespread distribution continuing to sell it at a crazy discount from the publishers website will really hurt the shops, since the publisher can definitely sell it cheaper than shops. For that reason, once the game is available most publishers close their pre-order offers, so as not to undercut the shops who are also their customers.

My pre-ordering process has always been: I offer a 30% discount to anyone who signs up before the game arrives at my warehouse. Once it has arrived, I email everyone who has signed up offering them the chance to pay (and get the cheap copy), or ignore it - no obligation to buy. It's all done using PayPal buttons and a hidden webpage (a page on my website with no links to it, other than the one in the emails I send out). I also offer free delivery to anyone who wants to collect the game at a forthcoming convention.

Seeing as there's a credit crunch on and everyone is feeling the pinch - I've decided to increase the pre-order discount on Sumeria to 40%! Yup, if you pre-order you get it for £15 instead of the usual £25 (plus postage and packing). I had hoped the exchange rate between the GBP and the Euro would enable me to reduce the retail price of Sumeria from £25 to £22 (same as Carpe Astra) but unfortunately nothing is doing on that front so I'm doing this offer instead to help out my most loyal customers. If you're interested just send me an email. If you've already pre-ordered, don't worry, you'll get the extra discount too.

Which do you want first?

The increased discount has lead to a lot of extra pre-orders for Sumeria, which is great, I could do with some more, but every little helps :-). I've mentioned it here, on BoardGameGeek and in my newsletter, plus W. Eric Martin has tweeted about it on Boardgame News. Not sure where else I should mention it really. Maybe Facebook?

The bad news is that I've been blacklisted by Microsoft. Since my last email newsletter went out, all Microsoft email addresses are bouncing my emails. So that's: @hotmail.com, @live.com and @msn.com. This is really annoying. I've sent out the newsletter and they've received it, they then reply asking above the Sumeria deal and when I reply to them it bounces. At that point I have to resort to re-sending the email from my personal GMail account.

This is especially annoying since the wording of the bounce email seems to imply that the blacklisting is in response to a Microsoft customer complaint. Everyone on my list is on my list because they have asked to be there. At the bottom of each email there are 'unsubscribe' instructions. Now I've got to find out how to go about un-blacklisting myself.

Tomorrow I'll be doing some more sales visits to local-ish shops, so most of today will be spent preparing for that. I popped into a couple in Bristol (we were down there for the weekend visiting family) - one seemed quite interested in It's Alive! and Sumeria, the other had a very small stock of board games, including Carpe Astra :-)

This weekend I'll be heading to the 20th Beer and Pretzels convention in Burton-on-Trent. It's my third time attending, and somehow this year feels very different.

Beer and Pretzels is run by Sally and Phil of Spirit Games, and is held in the Burton-on-Trent Town Hall. It's a fairly big convention (I'm guessing over 200 attendees) and has a really nice atmosphere, with a bar, food, lots of different types of games and a prize ceremony at the end for reviewers on the Spirit Games website.

I first went in 2007, getting the train down from York and staying in a local pub. I had a carrier bag full of hand-made copies of Border Reivers, and a prototype copy of It's Alive! The convention went well - despite the convention being run by a shop, Phil let me sell hand-made copies of Border Reivers, and I sold quite a few. I went for the second time last year, and although by then I was technically a pro game publisher, it felt very similar. I got the train down from York, stayed in the same pub round the corner and again I had a carrier bag full of hand-made games, this time the last few copies of the hand-made edition of It's Alive!, which I duly sold out of. Phil had even reserved me the same table in the corner by the bar :-).

This year everything feels very different. I'm driving up from Bedford, and instead of a carrier bag full of hand-made games to sell myself, I'm taking a couple of boxes of professionally manufactured games and an invoice for restocking the shop. I'll be demoing my games this time, but if anyone wants a copy I'm going to direct them to the shop instead, where Phil will have some available. I'll also have the Sumeria prototype which I'll be demoing and I'll be taking pre-orders for Sumeria at the new, reduced price. I'm going to leave the Sumeria prototype with the UK Games Expo guys (who will be attending to hand out flyers at some point), so that they can start playtesting it as a contender for the UK Game of the Year competition which I helped to judge last year. Since Sumeria is now only a couple of weeks away it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

If you're going along too, stop by and say hi. If you're not: change your plans - it's their 20th birthday!*

* "I live on another continent" is no excuse!

I had a great weekend in Burton at the 20th Beer and Pretzels games convention. I delivered a box of Carpe Astra and a box of It's Alive! to Spirit Games the shop that runs the convention, as they had sold out of both in the weeks leading up to the convention. After that I set up on a table and proceeded to demo my games and do some playtesting. I did my usual thing 'working' during the days until about 5-6pm and then 'playing' during the evening. The only difference being that while I'm 'working' I only play my own games (and prototypes), in the evenings I have a beer and play whatever anyone else wants to play.

Sumeria was well-received, with a gratifying percentage of players pre-ordering after their game. It would have been higher, but several people didn't pre-order a copy as all their gaming buddies were already on the pre-order list :-). It's Alive! sold a few copies over the weekend, and Carpe Astra was popular too. In addition, I got several playtesting games of one of my prototypes in too.

I also spent some time gaming with Paul, who runs Games Lore one of the biggest UK online games stores. He's running low on stock of my games and says they was a large spike in the number of Carpe Astra sales after my competition on BoardGameGeek. Nice to get some confirmation that the competition worked!

All in all, a great weekend, and I returned to lots of emails including a few more email pre-orders of Sumeria. I've now more than doubled the number of pre-orders I've got for Sumeria since reducing the pre-order price. Everyone is getting the price reduction, including those who pre-ordered before I reduced the price, so I lost some money from those early pre-orders ( £17.50 down to £15, so £2.50 per customer). Thankfully, the number of new pre-orders more than makes up for that!

Just before I left for Beer and Pretzels I heard from the German manufacturer that Sumeria is being assembled on Wednesday. All being well it will arrive at my warehouse before the end of next week.

Yesterday was a very busy day. In addition to a bunch of business stuff I needed to do, I also needed to sort out a few things regarding the new house we're buying, which took much longer than necessary.

I did manage to get to the Post Office just in time to send the Sumeria prototype to the UK Games Expo guys to allow them to judge it for Game of the Year. I also had a few prototypes to send back to designers at the same time.

I've just heard from the UK Games Expo guys that the packaging for the Sumeria prototype arrived today as expected, sadly the contents are absent without leave. This was my only prototype, so now I have to quickly knock up another prototype to send off to them. Hopefully, this one won't go missing again.

In other news, the people who played Sumeria at the weekend have started to rate it on BoardGameGeek, so it's climbing nearer towards the 30 ratings it needs to get ranked, and I've been sent a Russian translation of the rules to Sumeria which I need to layout and post on my website. Things are moving on...

When running a business one of the things you've got to keep a close eye in is cashflow - how much money you have on hand at any one time, and how you expect it to vary over time. This is especially true of a publishing business where you have to pay for the product up front, and don't get a return on your investment until you have sold at least half of your print run.

Things are better this time round. For It's Alive! and Carpe Astra it was the first time I had dealt with those manufacturers so they wanted half the money up front (before manufacture) and the other half upon delivery. Now, since I'm an established customer of Ludo Fact's they are willing to let me pay on delivery. Still, I have to pay before I get any return other than the pre-orders (which are done through PayPal, so I get the money within a week). My first sales to shops and distributors will be on NET30 (they have 30 days to pay) so I will have to pay the manufacturer before they pay me.

The last few months have been a bit quieter than I had hoped, so I've not got enough cash on hand to pay for Sumeria - there will be a small shortfall for a month or so. Where does this leave me?

Yesterday I dressed up smart and popped over to my bank to discuss the options. My business specialist, Helen, is very supportive and also quite excited by Reiver Games as a client, so it's not hard to get my hands on some ready cash if I need it, even in these credit-poor times. Helen's advice was to get an overdraft on my business account, that way I only pay interest on the debt while I need it - they sooner it's paid off the sooner I stop paying them interest (unlike a loan, which always generates interest). There's an arrangement fee, but that's the same with a loan too.

Cashflow is what sinks most businesses. Even a successful business that's in a good position and doing well will go into administration if it can afford to pay it's creditors - i.e. if it runs out of money. It doesn't matter how short this lack of funds is, if you can't pay your debts it's game over. Being on good terms will your bank really helps - a short term overdraft is enough to get Sumeria paid for, and cover the couple of weeks until I start getting paid by my distributors.

In other news, Sumeria has been assembled in Germany and will be shipping on Monday, it should arrive at my warehouse next Friday (29th) - last chance to get 40% off for a pre-order.

The next two weeks are going to be very busy. Fortunately, the last couple of weeks haven't been too taxing and we've just had a long weekend (yesterday was a public holiday in the UK).

We bought a house down here on Friday, so now we've got to get it ready and move in. It needs decorating throughout, and there are a couple of more major jobs we'd like to get done before we move in.

This week my parents are coming up from Bristol to help us decorate, so I'm taking Thursday and Friday off work to go over to the new house and decorate with them, and we'll be working on it on the weekend too. Friday is also the day that Sumeria arrives in York. On Saturday The Wife is off to Sweden for a week for work, so next week I'm home alone.

Having my games in York has saved me a lot of money. In York I'm paying £1 per pallet per week, with a minimum order of £10 a week. I'm down to 4 pallets now, so I'm paying £10 a week. Down here in the South I was quoted £2.75 per pallet per week. For those four pallets that's only £11 a week, but I used to have more, and on Friday another 6 pallets are arriving from Germany, in York that has no effect on the amount I pay (still within the minimum invoice charge, just!), but down here that would add £16.50 a week to my costs. The downside is when a new game arrives I need to get my hands on a lot of stock, that means several trips to York to load up a car-full of games and bring them down here. So next week I will be mostly on the road and fulfilling pre-orders and stocking orders. In addition, I've the UK Games Expo that weekend, so I'll need some more stock for that.

In addition to everything else, I need to get ready for the Expo: preparing my stand, working out how much stock I'm taking, getting new business cards made and getting some Point-of-Sale signs done.

Today and again Tuesday I'll get some information about whether or not the BoardGameGeek competition lead to a boost in sales.

Most of my distributors place a stocking order of 30-90 games and then I don't hear from them again until they've run out and need some more. Since I competition I've had one of those re-orders but to be honest I've no idea whether that was related to the competition or not.

A couple of my distributors have my game on consignment. They place a large order, and then each month they tell me how many games they've sold. I invoice them for those games only, and then they pay me. This allows me to better track how sales are progressing as I have a monthly history with these distributors and I can see any peaks and troughs in their sales. I can charge more for games on consignment too - since by only paying for a game when they've sold it the distributor is getting an improvement to their cash flow and reduce their risk at the expense of my cash flow.

Will the competition have helped sales? I hope so, and judging by BGG ownership stats I think so, but the consignment returns over the next few days should either confirm or deny it.

I bought Bonnie and Clyde on a recent business trip to Singapore, at Paradigm Infinitium, Midpoint Plaza, Orchard Road. Chee Seng was the one who recommended this shop. I remember I have been to Paradigm Infinitium before, but the surroundings did not seem familiar. Maybe they used to be at another location, or this is a different branch. They have a very good selection, but prices are a bit steep. Well, I guess if you are Singaporean or earning Singapore Dollars they are OK, but for a Malaysian the prices are steep. Yet, I couldn't resist buying this, because I am a fan of the mystery rummy games designed by Mike Fitzgerald.

Bonnie and Clyde, like the other mystery rummy games, and like gin rummy, have you making melds (playing 3 of a kind), making layoffs (playing cards after existing melds), and try to "go out" by playing all the cards in your hand. Like all other mystery rummy games, it has the concept of gavel cards - cards with special powers but you can only play one during a turn, which means that they are handy, but they also make it hard for you to go out quickly. This time there is only type of gavel card - Ted Hinton, the sheriff, but you can use it in 3 different ways - draw two cards from the draw deck, pick any one card from the discard deck, or peep at one of the 10 location cards.

Location cards are the unique element in Bonnie and Clyde compared to other mystery rummy games. This game has a board, depicting 10 locations where events in the criminal life of Bonnie and Clyde took place. At the start of the game, the Bonnie card, the Clyde card, and 8 other regular cards are shuffled and placed face-down at these 10 locations. During the game, the players try to peek and pick up cards from these locations, in particular they will try to catch Bonnie and Clyde, the capture of each awarding you 10pts. There is a car marker which starts at location 1. When melds are played, it advances. When layoffs are played, you can choose to move it forward or backward. The location of the car and when you play melds or layoffs is very important, because you can only capture Bonnie or Clyde when you play a meld or layoff for the location where the car is located. I guess that translates to you, being a police officer, being at the right place at the right time. Also if the cards you play match the car position, you score double (4pts per card, as opposed to 2pts). The car position is also important because the player who goes out also scores a bonus based on it.

Like all other mystery rummy games, there is a shut out condition. If you capture both Bonnie and Clyde, and you are the one to go out, then you shut out all your opponents. They don't score.

So far I have only played 2-player games (the game supports 2-4). I quite like the game. It is quite simple. I'd say roughly the complexity of Mystery Rummy: Jekyll and Hyde. There is a tendency to hold back your cards and wait for the right moment to play them to score big, but that can be a risky thing to do, because your opponent may be doing the same, and may suddenly go out before you can play any of your cards. I find the manipulation of the car position interesting, also the bluffing of where Bonnie and Clyde are. I find that I rarely use Ted Hinton cards to peek at cards. I often use it to draw more cards, and occasionally to pick discarded cards, but almost never for peeking. Maybe there are some tactics that I have not yet explored.

Among the mystery rummy games that I have played, I'd rank them in this order: Jack the Ripper, then Jekyll and Hyde and Bonnie and Clyde, then Al Capone and the Chicago Underworld, and finally Wyatt Earp (not officially part of the series, but is similar). Al Capone is just OK for me. Maybe I was traumatised and thus biased by that 11-1 losing streak that I once had when playing with Michelle. I only played Wyatt Earp once, a long time ago, and don't remember much about it, other than that I didn't really enjoy it. In complexity, I'd rank them Jack the Ripper, then Wyatt Earp, then Al Capone, then Jekyll and Hyde and Bonnie and Clyde.

This is probably going to be one of the geekier posts, which probably only the more hardcore boardgamers will appreciate, and the more normal people will just shake their heads or roll their eyes and think "geek", or "nerd", or "wierdo". These are the things that I usually do when I open a new game.

Punching - I enjoy punching cardboard pieces from the cardboard sheets. I do it with some care, so that I don't tear anything. The pieces must be punched from one specific direction, the direction where you can see the grooves. The other side is the flatter side. You must punch from the "groove-side" because it helps to reduce the risk of tearing. I find that usually games made in Germany have very good cardboard punches. Quite often some of the pieces have already fallen off by the time you open the game box, and the rest are very easy to punch out because they are cut so well.

Sprues (cardboard) - I used to keep them all in a bag, and not do anything with them except occupy space. Then I evolved to keeping them under the box insert. This lifts up the box insert slightly, so that when you close the box, the lid fits very snugly, with minimal space. Your components won't fall off their compartments and get mixed up if you store your games upright (which I do in most cases). Now I give the sprues to my children to play with as stencils. Sometimes I dump them into my recycling bin (for waste paper).

Bagging - I have many zip-lock plastic bags that I bought in Taiwan in 2004, varying from size #2 to size #6 (not sure whether there is an industry standard). I still have not used them up. Most games do not provide bags or do not provide as many bags as I would like, but that's no problem at all. In fact sometimes I prefer using my own bags, so that I can use a standard size. I prefer to use the same sized bags, so that after playing a game, I don't need to worry about which bag to use for which components. If that's hard to achieve, I try to use just two sizes, so that at least it's easy to tell which size for which components. E.g. for Agricola, only one bag size. 1 for all the animals, 1 for resources, grain and vegetables, 1 for round cards + begging cards + major improvements + ref cards, 1 for occupations (2P ones, as I mostly play 2P games), 1 for "used" minor improvements, 1 for "unused" minor improvements (Michelle and I shuffle all minor improvement cards to play, and we make sure we have played all of them before we shuffle all again and start again another cycle), 1 for each player's pieces - people, fences and stables, 1 for all cardboard pieces - food, guests, multiplier markers, 1 for wooden/clay rooms, 1 for stone rooms/ploughed fields.

No rubber bands - One of the basic laws of boardgamegeekdom. Rubber bands melt or disintegrate over time and leave stains on your cards. I bag my cards. I have heard of some elastic bands / elastic tapes which are suitable for cards, but I have never seem them before in Malaysia. Bags work well enough for me.

Box inserts - I usually keep them, but sometimes I throw them away if they are troublesome. I threw away the one for Through the Ages (2nd edition, i.e. FRED 1st edition), because I think it looks nice when you open the game, but it's not helpful when you want to organise the components well. I threw away the one for Race for the Galaxy: Gathering Storm so that I can put both the base game and the expansion in it. A Game of Thrones LCG because it's silly to have an insert which can be used only for your 4 decks of cards, and you have to hide all the other components under the insert. Power Grid because I want to put the France/Italy expansion, Benelux/Central Europe expansion and Power Plant Deck 2 expansion in together. The inserts for Lord of the Rings: Battlefields expansion and Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation Deluxe Edition are poor, but I can live with them.

Catalogues and foreign language rules - I hide them under the box insert. I can't bring myself to throw them away, even the Fantasy Flight Games or Rio Grande Games brochures which I have so many copies of. I have some German version games. Usually I print the English rules or English translation downloaded from the net, and I hide away the German rules that come with the game.

Card sleeves - I usually do not sleeve my cards. Not even for Race for the Galaxy which I have played 200+ games. Actually, especially because I am playing it so many times. I find them a nuisance when playing and when shuffling cards. I can live with some wear and tear, as long as they are uniform. Well, with the Gathering Storm expansion added in now, if I want to I can tell whether it's a new or old card by looking at the card back only, but when I play, I intentionally avoid looking too closely, so that I wouldn't know. I apply the same principle to Carcassonne, which I have a mix of older and newer tiles. I do sleeve cards which will get heavily used - e.g. the role cards in Citadels, the major improvement cards and the round cards in Agricola.

Concise reference sheets - This is something I have been doing since I started getting into the hobby seriously. I do these quick ref sheets which I find handy when I need to teach a game and when I need to look up rules quickly (e.g. how much money you start the game with, or how many cards each player gets at the start of the game). Quite often before I buy a game, I have already researched it and have made a concise ref sheet for it. I'd print it out and put it in the box. I'll do some self-promotion here - the latest set of my concise ref sheets are uploaded to BGG, here.

Shelf space allocation - One of my relatively recently applied policy is that I have assigned one particular section of my boardgame shelves to be the hot section. This section is right at eye level and is easily reachable. Newer games which I expect to play more frequently go here. Some favourites, which I also tend to play more, also go here. I find this system quite convenient. Games which I think I will be playing less will get moved out from this hot section.

Update BGG - I keep my collection on BGG up-to-date.

Maaan... I just love opening new games.

Do you have any peculiar thing that you do when opening a new game? Smell the game? Record the box fart?

When you get your copy of Sumeria (you are all going to buy one, aren't you?), take a minute to look at the back of the box, and consider briefly just how much of a bitch it was for me to do.

The saga begins on Friday with me (your sheepskin-clad, over-muscled hero - though I like to think with slightly more intelligence than your standard-issue barbarian hero) trying to get the box and rules artwork to the printers in Germany by the end of the day. I decided fairly early on that I wouldn't have time on Friday to get the box tray art done, so I checked that the box art could wait until Monday without delaying things too much. With that out of the way my plan was to finish the rest of the art, get it FTP-ed to the printers and then go to a local print shop to get a printout of the board done. I had two print-outs of the board with me, my home-made quad folded board with the final artwork but a bunch of printing errors from my printer and the colour-correct proof from the German manufacturers which they had folded in quarters to fit in an envelope - so I couldn't use either of those.

The trials began sending the rest of the artwork to the printers. My computer decided to inexplicably go very slow on-and-off during the afternoon (at one point it took half an hour to shutdown) so by the time I finally got everything sent off it was 4:30pm. Running a bit late. I thought I'd better check what time the print shop shut and they shut at 4:45pm. Damn, I'd missed them and would have to go Saturday morning.

Saturday morning, with visiting parents in tow, I went to the print shop and got the print out of the board done. We spent the rest of the day hanging out with my folks, and the next morning I got Dad to help me with setting up a photo of the game. When it came to make the mock-up board for the photo I realised the print shop had somehow managed to print it out 80% of the correct size, so it would no longer fit with all the other components. Grrrr. Still, I got Dad to help me set up the home-made board, and show me how to get a good photo of it. We could do the layout and tweaking with the photo of the home-made board and I could get a correct print out on Monday and drop that in instead. We took the photos, picked one, did the layout and then in the evening I did the associated stuff (barcodes, logos, descriptive text, etc.). I then got Michael (thanks!) to do a German translation of the box text and in the meantime I went back to the print shop, got a correct size print-out, came home, glued it onto some board (I just made a full-size open board, rather than faff around making a quad folding board that I can't do tidily) set the picture back up, took some more photos stripped out the background in the photos and added the new photo to the box.

Getting it done was far more complicated than it needed to be, but I'm very pleased with the end result:

That's what my last two days effort is called according to The Wife.

Yesterday I was going into London to meet Philip duBarry (of Revolution fame) for dinner. Seeing as I was spending £25 on the train fair into London I figured I might as well make a day of it and visit a few board game shops hawking my wares. Today I've done something very similar in St. Neots and Cambridge - a bit nearer to home.

In preparation for my visits I first rang the shops to arrange a rough time for my visit and to make sure that they were interested in seeing me. With one exception they all seemed quite keen - I didn't feel too much like a cold-calling salesman, which was effectively what I was. I also got together a small pack of information for each store: a business card, and 'sellsheets' for each of my games (a sheet of A4 with information about the price, some art and the blurb from the back of the box). I stapled this information together so that I wouldn't have to be faffing around when I got there.

For each visit I got the name of the person I spoke to (or should speak to on the day) so that I could ask for them when I reached the shop. I hit five shops in London on Wednesday and three today. On arrival I went up to the desk, introduced myself and asked to speak to the person whose name I had got on the phone. I then handed over the information pack (so they've got something to check after I've left and remind them of the salient points) and then spent 15-20 minutes giving a brief overview of my three games: It's Alive!, Carpe Astra and Sumeria.

About half of the shops I visited already stocked one or more of my games, the others generally had never heard of them. As a result of the trips all of them were interested in stocking them, though admittedly some only if I acquiesced to their conditions (in some cases ridiculous). Three of the shops are going to pick them up as a result.

Even in the cases where they already carried my games it was often only one of the two (so it was worth it from an awareness raising point of view) and in most cases the staff had only seen the game box, never the contents and knew nothing about how to play the game that wasn't written on the box. Hopefully in these cases the extra information will lead to the staff recommending my games to some of their customers.

In addition, a couple of the shops wanted me to come in one Saturday and demo my games to their customers. This sounds like a great idea, so I'm going to be visiting them for the day to demo my games - like a mini-convention. The shops will advertise it in advance and get some stock in so that interested customers can buy the game there and then.

I consider these visits to be a great success and I'm now trying to work out which other shops are within range of another day trip.