Sorry for the lateness of this post. I was busy on the 1st and I didn’t want to distract from the new story that came out on the 2nd. So here we are today.
The Money Aspect
This month we actually have income. Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
June 2012
Hosting: ($17.06)
Stories: ($170.00)
Art: ($130.00)
Advertising: $0
Paypal Fees: ($16.77)
Donations: $30
Total: ($303.83)
YTD: ($980.20)
All Time: ($1,085.95)
To add a few notes:
I noticed that some of my totals from last month don’t match my spreadsheet. I don’t know what happened with that. Lacking other evidence, I blame mind control satellites.
As with last month: Some of the writing and art was paid for before June, but I’ve listed it in the month of in order to highlight the cost of the actual content for that month. I similarly haven’t listed the cost of stories for July that have already been paid for. Also, I’ve opted to pay the Paypal fee when paying writers and artists.
In addition to the four stories we published, I also paid the authors for their inclusion in the anthology. Because I want to try and reward writers wherever I can, the model for the anthology is basically an advance towards royalties. So 13 authors equaled another $130 in advances. My hope once I start running advertisements on the site that I can offer royalties from traffic as well. Assuming, of course, that I can track it down to individual authors.
The photos we ran with a couple stories were a bit more than what I’ve been paying for art, but will probably be my new standard.
I didn’t spend anything on advertisements. Part of it was that I felt burned by my screw up in May. Part of it was that I was figuring I’d save money for July when I’m also pimping the collection. Part of it was sloth.
One of the donations we received was from an author who returned his payment to support the magazine. The other $20 was from a fan.
Submissions
Three regular stories were submitted in June. Two were accepted. We also received 14 submissions for the fictional classifed ads, which I think we’re going to accept all of. This gives last month a 94% acceptance rate.
To date we’ve received 48 submissions and accepted 35, which comes out to a 73% acceptance rate. We have enough content to continue going through late August.
Traffic
June had a total of 913 visits. This consisted of 630 unique visitors and 1,617 page views. Our highest daily traffic was 105 visits. All in all, a nice improvement.
Facebook continues to be the predominant source of our referral traffic, earning us 193 visits. Stumbleupon also continued to be a strong source. Some interesting sources of traffic came from SFSignal.com, Twitter, and the blog of someone calling themselves “Totaldickhead.” It’s a blog about Philip K. Dick. Seriously.
There have also been some great search engine strings over the last few months, which I would like to praise as “Searches of the Month.”
April: “binding spells gone wrong” (1 visit)
May: “carnivorism the guy who ate a guys face” (1 visit)
June: “unicorn skull model” (3 visits), “pictures of dissected palm of monkeys” (1 visit), and “is it possible to open a pickle jar with your butt cheeks???” (1 visit)
And that’s it for this month!
Follow us online:
The Totaldickhead traffic is my fault, sort of – I’m starting a print magazine with David Gill, who runs that site and is a great SF writer himself in addition to being a PKD scholar. There’s a link in our official announcement to show off my cred.
Glad to see things are going well!
Ah, yes! I now remember going to the actual post that linked to the site. When I was looking through things for this post, I didn’t look as closely and didn’t remember the connection.