DMsGuild Product Pricing
When you upload your Dungeon Masters Guild title, you will enter all of the metadata for your title, including setting its price. You have the option to set the price to be free ($0). You also can set the price to be Pay What You Want (PWYW), meaning that each customer can set their own price (from $0 up) to pay for your title. Most titles will be priced at a fixed price.
The ideal fixed price varies with the length of your title and its quality of writing, art, and design. Based on historic data from DriveThruRPG sales for PDFs, the most successful price points are $1.00, $2.00, $2.95, $3.95, $4.99, $7.95, $10.00, $14.95, and $19.99.
More detail can be found in this Medium blog post. The article is a bit dated but the information is still valid.
Crowdfunding on DMsGuild.
All products listed on DMsGuild, private or otherwise, are subject to the DMsGuild community content agreement. All payments and transactions for those titles must take place on DMsGuild.
Products may not be used as rewards for patrons, backers or other types of crowd funding.
If payment has been exchanged in some form such as backing a Kickstarter or supporting a Patreon tier, you cannot distribute "free" copies of your Dungeon Masters Guild title.
It is NOT recommended to use crowdfunding for DMsGuild projects as the benefit to the customer is limited since the final product cannot be given as a reward.
Getting Paid
Once you activate your Dungeon Masters Guild title for public sale, your account will begin to accrue a 50% royalty every time your title sells. You can withdraw your accumulated royalties via PayPal by going to the My Money section of the Account page. Note that the My Money section of your Account page will not display until you have a balance accrued.
There is a $1 fee to cover the cost of each withdrawal, but you will pay no other fees, either to us or to PayPal, to receive your money.
To prevent certain types of fraud, we must hold back the amount of royalties you earned in the past 30 days from being eligible for withdrawal. The amount eligible for withdrawal at any time, is your total account earnings balance less the amount earned in the past 30 days. You may use your earnings as site credit to pay for orders on site; this will lower your earnings balance and the amount eligible for withdrawal.
We pay royalties only via PayPal. Creating a PayPal account is free and easy, and in most countries, you can connect your PayPal account to your bank account and transfer money from PayPal to your bank in a few business days.
How to Run a Royalty Report
There is only one way to get a report on how many sales your title has received.
From the Account page, in the My Content Section, choose Royalty Report.
The resulting page gives the option to run a royalty report for a specified date range:
DMsGuild's current reporting tool cannot do large date ranges, it's recommended to only run a report for a few months at a time. Admins cannot pull sales reports for community creators.
Donate proceeds to Extra Life or other charities.
Extra-Life.org is a non-profit that supports local Children's Miracle Network Hospitals by connecting players around the world to host fundraising and gaming marathons. If you would like to support Extra Life with your Dungeon Masters Guild title(s), there are a couple easy ways to do so:
Donate proceed for a select period of time:
- Use the Royalty Reporting tools to determine the royalty amounts for that period of time.
- When you go to "Get Paid", edit the "amount to redeem" to match the royalties you wish to donate.
- Send to this e-mail address: accountspayable@cmnhospitals.org.
To permanently donate all proceeds of a product to Extra Life:
- Go to "Manage My Royalties."
- Select "Split" next to the appropriate title.
- Give your full percentage to this e-mail address: accountspayable@cmnhospitals.org.
You can use the second method to permanently donate a portion of proceeds to other charities as well. Click here for a list of non-profit organizations who have accounts with Dungeon Masters Guild and its sister sites. Use the e-mail address of the organization you want to support instead.
If you donate your full portion of royalties to one of our supported charities, Roll20 (DMsGuild) will match up to 10% royalty donation. After adjusting your royalties, email dmsguild@roll20.net to inquire about completing this setup.
1099 tax form for royalty income.
We do not issue 1099-MISC forms to authors who receive their royalties from us via PayPal payments. The Internal Revenue Service does not require us to include payments made via PayPal on Form 1099-MISC, and as PayPal is currently the only means of withdrawing author royalties, we do not issue 1099-MISC.
Please be aware the Internal Revenue Service does require PayPal to send you a separate, Form 1099-K for PayPal payments when both of these are true: a) payments into your PayPal account total more than $20,000 and b) the total number of payments exceed 200, within a calendar year.
It is therefore likely that many authors will not meet the thresholds for PayPal to send a Form 1099-K. In this case, authors will neither receive a Form 1099-K from PayPal, nor will they receive a Form 1099-MISC from us.
Such taxpayers can then self-report this royalty income with their annual tax-filing by going to their Account page’s My Money section and visiting the “Customer Account Payment History” page. This page will report the total payment amounts made via PayPal during the calendar year. For purposes of reporting this royalty income, the payer is our site’s parent company OneBookShelf, Inc.. The payer information is:
Roll20, LLC
2657 Windmill Parkway
Henderson, NV
89074
EIN: 20-5670573
For authors who also have publisher accounts with Roll20 marketplaces, you may have additional payments from Roll20 made by PayPal or check from your publisher account. See the Publisher Knowledge Base tax information section for more information.