We put up a tiny, tiny fake tree and put ridiculous ornaments on it.
Welcome to our latest installment of behind the scenes!
The Money Aspect
Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Hosting: ($17.06)
Stories: ($135.00)
Art: ($245.51)
Advertising: ($20.00)
Processing Fees: ($16.61)
Printing: ($1o.99)
Donations: $49.00
Ad Revenue: $1.01
Book Sales: $24.82
Total: ($813.54)
QTD: ($1,360.68)
YTD: ($11,503.31)
All Time: ($38,372.45)
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. (This does not apply to special content which does not have a specific month associated with it.) 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 best I can. Paypal has made it more difficult, so I’m not as capable of covering international fees.
Sales are down. I have yet to figure out how best to market us during the post-Thanksgiving extravaganza, but I run into a few problems. The first is that I’m not a fan of Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Second, we don’t exactly have a robust shop and we don’t do any of our own sales. Third, I’m not able to offer discounts through Amazon and I price the print books as low as I can go. Coupons for Smashwords are my main option, and that’s a little lackluster.
I do participate some affiliate programs for places like Amazon, iTunes, Powell’s, and Smashwords. I’ve considered doing a “shop with a mad scientist promotion” but haven’t followed through.
Submissions
We were closed to submissions in November. All time acceptance rate remains 48.84%.
Followers
Number of followers in social media as of the end of last month. In order to better promote backers through Patreon, we created a new Mad-Scientist-Journal-only Patreon. Trying to have a single Patreon that reflected both my own writing and Mad Scientist Journal was proving to have some problems. Since the change, not everyone has moved over to the new Patreon, so our number of followers has been adjusted to reflect that.
Facebook: 1,046 (+17)
Twitter: 417 (+9)
Google+: 58 (-1)
Tumblr: 115 (-1)
Mailing List: 44 (-1)
Patreon: 6 (-4)
Traffic
Our traffic was down further in November. We had a total of 798 visits. Our traffic consisted of 448 users and 1,232 page views. Our highest day of traffic was 49.
This month’s search engine terms were sadly lacking, and mostly spam. So this month we have the return of “ebay 1979’s quilt patterns”.
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