Co-editor Jeremy standing by his Kensei books (from DefCon One) at the PNWA Autograph Party!
Things have slowly started to settle down after the surge of activity the previous months. Slowly. Very slowly. How about those numbers?
The Money Aspect
Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Hosting: ($17.06)
Stories: ($70.00)
Art: ($420.00)
Advertising: ($55.00)
Processing Fees: ($13.61)
Printing: ($105.19)
Donations: $102.71
Ad Revenue: $0.04
Physical Sales: $44.80
Online Book Sales: $39.10
Total: ($539.01)
QTD: ($3,560.62)
YTD: ($486.30)
All Time: ($20,511.76)
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 for quarterlies, which does not have a specific month associated with it.) Sales are for sales when they take place, not when they’re actually paid out to me. Online book sales reflect the royalties given after the retailer takes their cut. Physical book sales represent gross income, not counting the cost of the physical book.
The art cost is up because of the last of the Utter Fabrication art coming in, plus the cover art for Summer 2017. We’ve had more advertising costs because we’ve had more content. For each of those posts, I boost it with advertising.
However, despite an increase in traffic, our ad revenue is almost nothing. I may need to rethink our provider. Since starting out, I have used Project Wonderful because I liked their business model a bit more. They were scrappy and independent. But despite an increase in web traffic, and click-through rates, our revenue has just gone down until we plummeted to 4 cents for a month of advertising.
Submissions
We were open to all submissions in June. We received 121 submissions, much more than we typically do. I’m guessing we have a little more visibility after our Kickstarter.
This breaks down to 48 quarterly-exclusives, 18 classified ads, and 55 regular submissions. Of these, we accepted 10 quarterly-exclusives (21%), 16 classifieds (89%), and 19 regular (35%). We originally accepted 17 classified ads, but one author had a strict white-list email filter that blocked us from contacting them to sign a contract. We weren’t able to find them anywhere on the internet or reach them through Submittable, so we had to revoke our acceptance.
Pro tip: If you are submitting to a fiction market, be sure that they can contact you.
Our total acceptance rate for June is 37.2%. Our all time acceptance rate is 38.6%.
Followers
At the end of May, we had:
Facebook: 1,630 (+13)
Twitter: 535 (-2)
Google+: 63 (+0)
Tumblr: 227 (-2)
Mailing List: 76 (-1)
Patreon: 15 (+1)
Traffic
In June, we had a staggering 1,423 visits, an increase over the previous month. 958 users and 2,808 page views. Our peak day was 120 visits.
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