That Man Behind the Curtain: March 2014

Here’s a look at the numbers for March:

The Money Aspect

Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.

Hosting: ($17.06)
Stories: ($586.00)
Art: ($431.33)
Advertising: ($95.75)
Paypal Fees: ($2.22)
Kickstarter Fees: ($397.82)
Donations: $0.00
Ad Revenue: $1.21
Book Sales: $17.96
Kickstarter: $4,378.00
Total: $2,866.99
QTD: $2,026.50
YTD: $2,026.50
All Time: ($5,486.07)

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.

So, Kickstarter. It brought in more money than we’ve ever seen. It also brought more monthly expenses than we’d ever seen, and there will be more down the road once we start accepting stories and printing actual books. But we also made more profit from it than I had accounted for. (I had estimated very conservatively, perhaps too conservatively.) It’s a breath of fresh air, though, to have a positive balance for the year. It’s also very telling that our all-time loss is still significantly more. (Also: The Amazon Payments site is kind of annoying.)

We’ll be doing another one of these next spring, probably. I don’t know that it will generate nearly as much money since it won’t be Cthulhu-oriented. But hopefully doing these will help over all with our bottom line.

Submissions

In March we received 24 submissions, 6 of which were for the new anthology. Since we won’t be deciding on these till next month, I’m going to call it 18 for purposes of acceptance rates for March. We accepted 13, making our total for the month 72%. Our all-time acceptance rate is 55.97%.

This gives us enough content for the site through mid-November.

Traffic

Traffic increased in March. We had a total of 1,970 visits. Our traffic consisted of 1,320 unique visitors and 3,545 page views. Our highest daily traffic was 142. Better than the month before, making it the new second highest day.

March’s search engine term of the month is “sudden boils on face.”

That’s all for this month.