They were wandering the halls of Norwescon near midnight before Easter, asking people if they wanted candy from strangers. No, really.
March was a hectic flurry of activity in the wake of our Kickstarter ending: shipping out backer rewards for add-ons, getting Spring 2017 out the door, and dealing with the tsunami of slush that came in for the anthology.
The Money Aspect
Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Hosting: ($17.06)
Stories: ($75.00)
Art: ($300.00)
Advertising: ($30.00)
Processing Fees: ($527.55)
Printing: ($276.15)
Conventions: ($50.00)
Donations: $53.05
Ad Revenue: $0.30
Kickstarter: $5,355.00
Online Book Sales: $31.78
Total: $4,164.37
QTD: $3,074.33
YTD: $3,074.33
All Time: ($16,950.14)
As 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.
Though our Kickstarter raised $5,459, $343 of those pledges did not successfully process. There’s always a few pledges that don’t clear, but we don’t usually hit that high. Backerkit allows us to collect additional funds, which allows backers a second chance to pay if their credit card didn’t go through. It also allows last minute add-ons. The Kickstarter total is the amount successfully processed ($5,116) plus the amount collected later ($15), plus the add-ons that backers purchased on Backerkit ($239). It still leaves a $300+ hole in our original pledge total that we probably won’t recoup.
Submissions
We were open to submissions in March for the new anthology. We’ve received 242 submissions and are still in the process of reading slush. I’ll have to give an update next month regarding acceptance rate. Prior to this, our all time acceptance rate was 44.2%.
Followers
At the end of March, we had:
Facebook: 1,621 (+32)
Twitter: 519 (+10)
Google+: 63 (+0)
Tumblr: 225 (+10)
Mailing List: 75 (+2)
Patreon: 15 (+1)
Traffic
In February, we had a staggering 3,344 visits. Triple what we normally have. 2,139 users and 1,599 page views. Our peak day was 379 visits.
As best I can tell this is legit? We’d had a problem for a while with “referral spam”, but I have mostly fixed this. The bulk of this traffic has been arriving at our Submissions page. With the submission period over, the traffic has gone back down to usual volume in April. Apparently being able to offer more money to authors is good for traffic. Or, at least, traffic to that one page.
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