Hello again! July has been a crazy month between travel and trying to get the book together. Due to a combination of factors, it’s not ready by the end of the month as I’d hoped. But I’m hoping to have it up soon. I’ll also be putting out a call for submissions for our Summer 2012 issue Real Soon Now. Probably tomorrow. Mainly I want to get a head start on some things so that it will be available closer to October 1st.
The Money Aspect
Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Hosting: ($17.06)
Stories: ($115.00)
Art: ($150.00)
Advertising: $0
Paypal Fees: ($9.00)
Donations: $0
Ad Revnue: $0.05
Total: ($291.01)
YTD: ($980.20)
All Time: ($1,271.21)
Again, I’m waiting on the Spring 2012 anthology to go up before digging back in with the advertisng. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Katie Nyborg has put together some awesome ad graphics for me, so it’s all poised ready for launch.
This month we have also started running ads on our site. I went with Project Wonderful because I’ve had mixed experiences with Google’s ad system. After two weeks we’ve earned… 5 cents!
Yeah, not overwhelmingly awesome. I’m not sure if I would do worse or better with Google ads.
The other frustrating aspect to this is that I had hoped to reward writers for traffic to their stories. And I’ve begun reflecting that with tentative language in contracts about them getting a portion of any income that comes from traffic to their story. But Project Wonderful doesn’t pay based off of traffic. It pays on bids per day. And, well, at best we’re getting bids of about 2 cents a day. At best. I could rearrange it so that I’m paying half of all revenue to the writers, and then split that based off of percentage of page views. But really this means splitting half of 5 cents eighteen ways. An average of $0.00139? Not going to tear through advances any time soon, so I have time to consider what to do. I’m open to suggestions.
As with last month: Some of the writing and art was paid for before July, but I’ve listed it in the month of July in order to highlight the cost of the actual content for that month. I similarly haven’t listed the cost of stories for August that have already been paid for. Also, I’ve continued to pay the Paypal fee when paying writers and artists.
Payment for stories this month also included $5 payments for all of the authors of classified ads. Do you know how obnoxious it is to send 13 $5 payments over Paypal? Whoa, nelly.
Submissions
Seven regular stories were submitted in June. Four were accepted, one of which was a request for rewrite that was resubmitted and accepted. Arguably we received eight submissions, but I’m not going to double-count the resubmission. This gives last month a 57% acceptance rate.
To date we’ve received 55 submissions and accepted 39, which comes out to a 71% acceptance rate. We have enough content to continue going through late September. One more story and we’ll have our Summer 2012 group complete.
Traffic
July had a total of 924 visits. This consisted of 616 unique visitors and 1,666 page views. Our highest daily traffic was 67 visits. Overall it’s about the same as last month, but with traffic spread out a bit more evenly throughout the week.
Facebook and Stumbleupon were almost tied for lead traffic sources, 144 and 145 respectively. The strangest one so far is 20 hits from the discussion boards over at “hockeybuzz.com.” I have no idea how that happened. I can’t find the thread that brought it up.
July’s “Search of the Month” is “barbeque stick transformed into laboratory equipment”.
And them’s the facts as I know them.
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