This month, the payment from our Kickstarter dropped, so we actually look profitable for once! Plus, we shipped out copies of our first print edition of our zine to contributors, so our printing costs spiked. Let’s look at those numbers.
The Money Aspect
Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Hosting: ($17.06)
Stories: ($100.01)
Art: ($329.88)
Advertising: ($20.00)
Processing Fees: ($291.23)
Printing: ($303.74)
Donations: $99.00
Ad Revenue: $0.54
Kickstarter: $3,080.00
Book Sales: $231.66
Total: $2,351.03
QTD: $1,465.89
YTD: $1,465.89
All Time: ($8,980.35)
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.
As happened last year, Kickstarter skewed our numbers a bit. Also, the amount that was originally pledged was not the amount that was actually processed. We had received $3,085 in pledges, but after they processed all the credit cards we only had $3,080. One of our $5 backers fell through.
Submissions
We only accepted submissions for Selfies from the End of the World in March. Because of the limits of our book budget, we were only able to accept a small fraction of what we received. Out of 118 submissions, we have accepted 24. That’s 20.33%. This drops our all-time acceptance rate to 48.52%.
One of our backers asked if we could give a summary of submissions. We don’t release the names of our submitters, as it’s sort of awkward to list everyone whose stories we have declined. If people want to self-identify, that is their choice. Instead, we choose to celebrate the people we did choose. We’ll have a list of the authors we accepted once we get all the contracts back.
But I can summarize the sorts of submissions we received. In terms of how the world ended, we had:
- 11 alien invasions.
- 3 ends brought about through supernatural means.
- 21 tales of what I’m calling “natural disaster”, which ranged from the sun exploding to meteors hitting the earth to the Earth just imploding.
- 29 pandemics. 7 of them involved zombies, 1 involved werewolves, 1 that only targeted men.
- 1 story that featured the extinction of all women by men.
- 4 tales of social/financial collapse.
- 1 famine.
- 1 killer monster.
- 14 global wars, 6 of them nuclear.
- 10 stories that I just didn’t know how to neatly classify.
- 15 that did not explain how the world ended, just that it had.
- 8 stories that did not meet the submission guidelines. This broke down into 3 not in 1st-person POV, 5 that did not have an apocalypse. (I didn’t bother to figure out the nature of the apocalypse for the not-1st-person stories.)
Followers
Number of followers in social media as of the end of last month. We had a weird drop in followers on Facebook. I’m guessing a bunch of dummy accounts got eliminated. Either that or people really lost interest in us after our Kickstarter.
Facebook: 938 (-12)
Twitter: 382 (+9)
Google+: 53 (+7)
Tumblr: 72 (+4)
Mailing List: 36 (+1)
Patreon: 10 (+1)
Traffic
Our traffic increased in March. My best guess would be because of call for submissions for Selfies. We had a total of 2,404 visits. Our traffic consisted of 1,576 users and 3,631 page views. Our highest day of traffic was 135.
This month’s search engine term is “scientist butterfly”. Because I would like to believe they were looking for a butterfly that is a scientist. For honorable mention, it’s worth noting that we had another visitor looking for “ebay 1979’s quilt patterns”. There were two last month, so having a third this month is just mind boggling.
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