That Man Behind the Curtain: May 2013

Here’s another glimpse behind the scenes.

The Money Aspect

Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.

Hosting: ($17.06)
Stories: ($50.00)
Art: ($150.00)
Advertising: ($16.00)
Paypal Fees: ($6.16)
Donations: $60.00
Ad Revenue: $0.44
Book Sales: $2.01
Total: ($175.77)
QTD: ($55.05)
YTD: ($1,720.44)
All Time: ($5,036.49)

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/artist donate their payment back to us. We also used a photo from Dawn for one story, so we had zero cost for that. We’re trying to diminish our losses a bit, so we’re cutting back on the amount of original art we use. We’ll still be supporting the artists we love, but the love will be spread out a bit more.

I’m finding the challenge of selling through Smashwords and Amazon is that you don’t get real-time updates about sales from their partners. So there were April sales that hadn’t appeared when I wrote my report for April. I may need to shift these reports to later in the month so that I can get a more accurate assessment of what sales looked like the previous month.

Submissions

In April we received 20 submissions, of which we accepted 13. So a 65% acceptance rate for the month, 55.5% for all time. Six were classifieds (all were accepted). Four were exclusives (we accepted one). And we accepted our first serial fiction, which is super exciting! There’s a lot of hurdles from here on out, so it may still fall through. But we’re super excited by this!

This puts us at enough content to last us through mid-October.

Traffic

April had a total of 1,342 visits. Our traffic consisted of 997 unique visitors and 2,550 page views. Our highest daily traffic was  136 visits. Generally down, though little impact on page views. Make of that what you will. No big shake-ups in traffic sources.

May’s search engine term for the month is “dr jane macdonald ottawa veterinary”. Because I think that someone was trying to find a real vet and found us instead. That’s just beautiful.

That’s it for numbers today. See y’all next month!

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3 Responses to That Man Behind the Curtain: May 2013

  1. October, eh? Does that mean I should hold off on sending you the piece I started working on yesterday (prettymuch as soon as I found your site via Submission Grinder)? I feel it fits well with the stories I’ve read here, but I don’t want to bother you with even more excess material.

    • No, please send it. It’s only an issue if we have a year’s worth of stories. All this means is that stories accepted now will not appear on the site until a few months after it’s accepted.

  2. Sent! I hope it meets your needs.

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