This is a little delayed as I wanted to use the first of February for posting about our special call for submissions. It’s been a crazy month, with a few more frustrations than we’re used to, but we have soldiered on.
The Money Aspect
Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Hosting: ($17.06)
Stories: ($190.00)
Art: ($150.00)
Advertising: ($15.00)
Paypal Fees: ($15.65)
Donations: $0
Ad Revnue: $0.42
Books Sales: $4.00
Total: ($383.29)
All Time: ($3,699.34)
As per usual, I try to list costs for art and stories under the month that the stories run on the site rather than when I pay them. I also cover Paypal expenses when paying authors and artists.
We had a few more art and story payments for Autumn 2012 that didn’t get paid till early January. As previously mentioned, the end of December was a little nuts.
Copies of the collections were about the same as previous months, but this month I had dropped the price to 99-cents in hopes of generating more sales. So far it doesn’t seem to be doing as well. I’ve begun talking with some authors about limiting our archives to drive readers to buy collections for older content.
Submissions
In January we received 18 submissions and accepted 8. One author withdrew his story and resubmitted it on the first of February, so that also skews results a bit. There were originally 9 accepted, but we returned one story to an author who did not wish to sign our standard contract.
All told, a 42% acceptance rate for January and a 52% acceptance all-time acceptance rate. We have enough stories to get us through early June.
Traffic
December had a total of 1,390 visits, down a bit from last month. We haven’t been advertising as much, so it makes sense. Our traffic consisted of 963 unique visitors and 2,285 page views. Our highest daily traffic was a staggering 243 visits. Facebook was our biggest source of traffic by a healthy margin.
There were many fine search phrases, some of which left me wondering “how would anyone even search for that?” But I’m going to name the winner for January’s Search of the Month “mummification process for kids”. Because I want to believe that they are looking to mummify children.
Follow us online:
Perhaps it would help sales if it were available on Amazon.com as well. Some people who get Amazon gift cards as presents might be willing to try a digital download for their Kindle and they might be more willing to try something new if it’s with money they’ve received as a gift anyway.
There are a long list of problems that currently prevent me from having MSJ on Amazon.