UKGE 2025 Summary

We brought in pretty much exactly £6,000 over the three days we were there. As a distro, we've been buying stock up front at 40% (for the most part, and have always paid more to creators who can't make those numbers work). Let's round up and say that 50% of our revenue goes on replacing stock and that leaves us with £3,000, minus the costs of ~£1,350 and we're left with £1,650 profit. A few things to note: I'm not including my own pay here because that's a fixed monthly cost for the business and I can take TOIL for working a long weekend. I timed a big operational shift for PCP with the event too; we're going to move towards a consignment model, so this stock will be getting replaced in the future but most of it won't be paid for until it sells again. I bought a lot of stock specifically for UKGE and still have a lot left over, so replacing it won't be an immediate cost. If you remove the cost of replacing that stock from our costs, we're talking a significant jump in profit.

It's also worth pointing out that we weren't initially planning on attending, but our friends at Shiny Games had something come up and were not able to attend. They sold us their stand at a slightly reduced price, I believe.

This also doesn't include a lot of the indirect costs of attending incurred by me doing a rebrand: this year I bought costumes (£80 for two), canvas banners (£400), a photography background stand to hang the banners on (£50), a new price gun, new business cards, several thousands of pounds on new stock. Luckily, my dad owns a van so travel to Birmingham and back was actually free for me other than covering fuel.

General Observations

1. We brought 83 SKUs with us and had 70 out on the table at most times. That's a lot of books! The price gun was invaluable - it saved us hand-writing a load of price-tags, and meant we could easily price tag everything on show so folks could pick up their book and go. Pitching becomes difficult when you have that many books on show - I definitely found myself struggling to remember details of everything off the dome and I can't expect anyone staffing the stand to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the range either. This is my first loud drum to beat, then: add blurbs to your books! I have some books with no blurbs (no naming names) and found people picking them based on some cracking cover designs, flipping the book, seeing no blurb, flicking through a few pages, and putting the book down. I don't care how "minimalist" or "artsy" your project is: put a blurb on your book. The inside can be as whacky as you please, but the front and the back are there to sell your book.
   1. Things to feature on your front cover:
      1. The title of the book
      2. A catchy subtitle, a one-line pitch
      3. Your name
   2. Things to feature on your back cover:
      1. Player count (solo games are a growing market so you need that to be clear
      2. What one needs to play (a full polyhedral set, a tarot deck, playing cards, just d6s?)
      3. The vibes (what is your game about?)
      4. The features (how does your game do it?)
   3. Things to not make really big:
      1. Compatibility logos. Seventy thousand people came to UKGE and the number of people I spoke to who knew what LUMEN, Caltrop-core, etc. I could count on one hand. HOWEVER, if you're making modules, rather than systems, a clear signifier that your book is for Mothership or Mork Borg is actually really useful.
2. Solo games are big. The vast majority of our sales were solo games and it's a good thing I brought a shitload of them. On Friday, I arranged the table by genre (Dune-likes like Vaarn and Electrum Archive were on one end, horror games on another, cosy stuff in another). That turned out to be a mistake: the most common question I was asked was: where are the solo games? We rearranged the table on Saturday morning to be format-first: solo games here, OSRish adventure games here, fun formats here (scrolls, games on USBs, map games, etc.). We then divided each section into genre: solo horror games here, solo cosy games here, and so on. This made a very noticeable impact on people's browsing; those who didn't want to be sold to could browse in peace, and those who had questions could pick up several books at once and ask for recommendations etc.
3. We need a better organisation system. A big part of Josh's job during the weekend was replenishing books from a whole stack of completely opaque black boxes. Ideally, this is an issue solved during packing: labelling boxes, making sure books are assigned a certain box and live in that box, and so on. This is something that I'll think about later as part of our general warehousing rework.
4. We squeezed every ounce of value out of our tiny stand. We weren't planning on attending UKGE at first but our friends at Shiny Games couldn't make it and so we swooped their stand at the last minute. It was a regular 3x2m stand in (I think) superior space so we were quite close to main avenues + doors. All in all, we made £1,000 for every square meter of space we got. I think superior space is around £80/sqm so we more than 10x that cost in. PCP continues to punch well, well above its weight at conventions! We have to, considering our lowered margins compared to a traditional publisher stand. I'm not sure if expanding would make sense for us - an additional 2m/sq would mean we'd have to bring another staff member, we'd have to bring 25ish more books, spend more money on food and accommodation, and so on. That said, if we're currently making £1k/sqm then I think we're a ways to go before we hit diminishing returns: even making £600-800/sqm would pay for itself.
5. Price ranges are great. On the Friday we sold out of some high-ticket items like Mending and Dialect, and sold a couple Fall of Magics. I was worried that this would heavily reduce our takings over the next few days but had a counter hypothesis: we could fill that space with a bunch of smaller, lower-priced items that we brought with us but didn't put out on the table and be able to sell a higher volume of them. I was really glad to find that the hypothesis held up: we ended up selling over 15 copies of some £12/£15 zines because they had strong pitches and their prices didn't need thinking about. Another surprising fact was that I brought 2 copies of The Zone, 5 Fall of Magics, and 2 City of Winters. Despite all of those coming in between £80-£130, I sold all of them and had people coming back to ask about them. I think if I brought more, I would have sold them too. That leads me on to the next point:
6. I realised too late on Friday that keeping a display copy is really good marketing. It was after I sold out of Dialect that I realised I could have left a copy on display and offer free shipping. We did exactly that with Thousand Year Old Vampire and some other books and found it to work well: we ended up coming home to 19 online orders waiting for us from folks who ordered online at the stand. It was a bonus for them, too, because they didn't have to carry as much home. On Sunday afternoon we started selling off the display copies so that we didn't have to carry as much home. A few things make this possible for us: because we're a fulfilment business, our business rates with Royal Mail are much cheaper than retail and our weekly picking+packing time is a fixed cost for the company. The money we charge for shipping on the PCP website includes RM fees, but it also comfortably covers the cost of our warehouse, packaging, labour, and with some margin to spare. Volume makes everything cheaper: the more packages we send out in a week, the bigger our volume discount; the more packaging we order, the cheaper it gets; the more similar orders we get in a week the more efficient our picking process, and so on.
7. In a way that is not illegal under UK competition laws, I never bring books that I know will be present somewhere else at the convention. (It's not illegal because I don't agree to do that with anyone, I just don't do it as a strategic decision and also I don't have a holistic overview of what everyone else will stock). I had a few people come up and say: I saw this on your website and replying: you can go give the author your money directly at stand xxx is ace.
8. This was a really affirming 3 days after I considered shutting PCP down last year. I'm gonna huff my own farts for a bit, sorry! My broad aims for PCP in the last year have been to build a boutique RPG retailer which:
   1. is a little cheeky and irreverent
   2. has a strongly curated selection of impressive work
   3. proves that, actually, there's more than £5 being passed around
   4. has a positive effect on the brick-and-mortar landscape in the UK

This is not me exaggerating, but the number of people who said something along the lines of: you have the most interesting selection here was not insignificant. It mostly came from punters but not just, because when it came from industry professionals from RRD, Modiphius, and others, it carried extra heft. Compliments about the stand, the branding, the selection, the website, were all special every time. Meeting retailers who were excited to carve out a little bit of space between all the board games for our corner of this make-believe industry was special. I'm not going to lie: PCP is still in "start-up" mode. We still need to grow before I fully feel comfortable with this as a long-term prospect, but UKGE was really the turning point where I looked at my forecasts and saw a strong 6 month runway so that if I got sick for a couple of weeks, things wouldn't really explode. If you have a local game shop interested in ✨the best selection of UKGE✨ point them my way. I have a warehouse to fill with books.