This last month saw a victory of sorts: I finally got Mad Scientist Journal up on Amazon. It’s a mixed blessing, as I’ll explain below. Otherwise it’s just another month in the word mines.
The Money Aspect
Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Hosting: ($17.06)
Stories: ($70.00)
Art: ($250.00)
Advertising: ($50.00)
Paypal Fees: ($8.05)
Donations: $10.00
Ad Revenue: $0.93
Book Sales: $4.90
Total: ($379.28)
YTD: ($1,544.67)
All Time: ($4,860.72)
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 one author donate their payment back to us. We had a spike in advertising revenue, for all that you can call 50-cents a “spike.” We also advertised more this quarter, with our ebooks on Amazon finally and the launch of our new collection last month.
All of our sales in April come from Amazon. We sold 14 ebooks. Prior to this we had sold 25 on Smashwords over the course of nine months and another 15 scattered between other markets that Smashwords is partnered with. So a definite improvement. I think we have more visibility overall on Amazon, which is good.
The downside is that they offer a lower royalty rate at the 99-cent price point. 35% instead of 56% at Smashwords. At $2.99 or higher, you get the 70% rate. I’ve started phasing our earliest stories off of the site, so I may slowly increase the ebook costs as the content becomes more exclusive.
Submissions
In April we received 7 submissions, kind of a low for us over all. We accepted 3, for a monthly acceptance rate of 43%. Our all time acceptance rate is still about 55%.
Traffic
April had a total of 1,611 visits. Our traffic consisted of 1,269 unique visitors and 2,589 page views. Our highest daily traffic was 163 visits. Not exactly our highest, but higher than last month. Nothing earthshaking about our traffic sources. StumbleUpon is proving to be a valuable tool.
April’s search engine term for the month is “spring ursus (bear) fart”. I mean, who looks that sort of thing up?
That’s it for numbers today. See y’all next month!
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