That Man Behind the Curtain: January 2018

Our table at Foolscap 2018!

Our table at Foolscap 2018!

January saw the final steps towards launching this month’s Kickstarter, so some of the expenses reflect that.

The Money Aspect

Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Web Resources: (-$67.06)
Stories: (-$260.00)
Art: (-$684.00)
Advertising: (-$85.43)
Processing Fees: (-$18.39)
Printing: (-$21.59)
Donations: $44.71
Ad Revenue: $0.25
Online Book Sales: $88.57

Total: (-$1,002.94)
QTD: (-$2,094.45)
YTD: (-$4,188.90)
All Time: (-$27,926.83)

As 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. (This does not apply to special content for quarterlies, which does not have a specific month associated with it.) Sales are for sales when they take place, not when they’re actually paid out to me. Online book sales reflect the royalties given after the retailer takes their cut. Physical book sales represent gross income, not counting the cost of the physical book. Donations include Patreon as well as other money sent to us outside of standard sales.

The huge spike in art was payment for both our Kickstarter book cover as well as our quarterly book cover.

I finally broke down and pulled our banner ads. After six years of getting 50-cents a month, I decided that it was just too ridiculous a failure to keep hoping will succeed.

Submissions

We were closed to submissions in January. Our all time acceptance rate is remains 37.9%.

Followers

Below is the social media following we had at the end of January. It is perhaps worth noting that for the money part, I record when we get the funds from Patreon at the beginning of the month. Here we have the number of backers at the end of the month. So we had a drop off in backers between the patrons being charged and the end of the month. It was offset by some new patrons, but still a net loss.

Patreon: 13 (-1)

Facebook: 1,774 (+24)

Twitter: 574 (+4)

Tumblr: 286 (+7)

Mailing List: 96 (+10)

Google+: 63 (+0)

Traffic

Last three months:

January 2018: 1,650 visits, 1,251 users, 2,534 page views, peak day of 73.
December 2017: 1,441 visits, 1,077 users, 2,419 page views, peak day of 84.
November 2017: 1,491 visits, 1,137 users, 2,108 page views, peak day of 121.

Last three Januarys:

January 2017: 867 visits, 662 users, 1,537 pages views, peak day of 48 visits.
January 2016: 1,601 visits, 979 users, 3,270 page views, peak day of 94 visits.
January 2015: 2,063 visits, 1,400 users, 3,740 page views, peak day of 172 visits.

Traffic is continuing apace from last month. The previous Januarys appear to be outliers in our traffic patterns, but we think it’s because we started our 2016 Kickstarter in mid-January, and we were open to submissions in January 2015.

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