That Man Behind the Curtain: February 2015

And now: numbers.

The Money Aspect

Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.

Hosting: ($17.06)
Stories: ($240.00)
Art: ($409.68)
Advertising: ($90.00)
Processing Fees: ($18.24)
Printing: ($15.93)
Donations: $69.00
Ad Revenue: $0.33
Book Sales: $212.48
Total: ($509.10)
QTD: ($885.14)
YTD: ($885.14)
All Time: ($11,331.37)

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. Sales are for sales when they take place, not when it’s actually paid out to me. I also cover Paypal expenses when paying authors and artists.

Sales continue to be solid, if not as amazing as last month. After doing our special call for submissions in January, February had the spike in payment for stories that we accepted. There was also an added cost for art because we paid more for the cover for the first print edition of our quarterly. Mad Scientist Journal: Spring 2015 will be available in print as well as ebook. The hope is that having it available in an additional format may make it more approachable to people who haven’t jumped on the ebook bandwagon.

Submissions

We received 29 submissions in February, of which we accepted 7 (24.13%). Our all time acceptance percentage is at 53.56%.

Followers

Number of followers in social media as of the end of last month.

Facebook: 950 (+33)
Twitter: 373 (+34)
Google+: 46 (-2)
Tumblr: 68 (+12)
Mailing List: 35 (-2)
Patreon: 9 (+0)

Traffic

Our traffic decreased a bit in February, which seems odd since I’d have thought we’d have more traffic during the Kickstarter. But it was still better than we’ve experienced in past months. We had a total of 1,874 visits. Our traffic consisted of 1,180 users and 3,415 page views. Our highest day of traffic was 128.

This month’s search engine term is “ebay 1979’s quilt patterns.” Not necessarily because it was the funniest. But because two people came to our site on that search. I don’t know how they managed it, but bless them for their persistence in believing that they could find 1979 quilt patterns on ebay through us.