Editor Dawn Vogel cosplaying as Velma Dinkley at Renton City Comic Con.
August was comparatively quiet, all told. Our big shipping extravaganza hadn’t happened yet, so the expenses are pretty low.
The Money Aspect
Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Hosting: (-$17.06)
Stories: (-$290.00)
Art: (-$562.63)
Advertising: (-$87.02)
Processing Fees: (-$34.96)
Printing: (-$154.62)
Donations: $310.96
Ad Revenue: $0.32
Online Book Sales: $26.31
Total: (-$808.70)
QTD: (-$2,417.57)
YTD: (-$2,903.87)
All Time: (-$22,924.10)
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.
This month’s main expense was final cover art cost for both Utter Fabrication and Autumn 2017.
The donations amount is a little weird. We have, historically, had an unspoken policy to sell extra copies of books to contributors at cost. Starting with Utter Fabrication, we have made it a spoken policy to the contributors. And several of the contributors were interested in it. Especially with Utter Fabrication. Historically, when it has happened, we just noted it on this post as a donation. It didn’t feel right to squeeze it in anywhere else. Arguably it could be considered an offset against our printing costs, but that feels less transparent. Especially since payment and delivery are in separate months.
Our trivial amount of advertising revenue has returned to its previous trivial amount.
Submissions
We were closed to submissions in August. Our all time acceptance rate remains 38.6%.
Followers
At the end of July, we had:
Facebook: 1,669 (+29)
Twitter: 548 (+6)
Google+: 63 (-1)
Tumblr: 233 (+3)
Mailing List: 76 (+0)
Patreon: 16 (+1)
Traffic
I’ve found it can be hard to tell how we’re doing overall based off of just a snapshot of traffic, so I thought I’d offer a little bit more data.
Here are the last three months:
August 2017: 965 visits, 762 users, 1,581 page views, peak day of 47 visits.
July 2017: 1,216 visits, 914 users, 2,210 page views, peak day of 120 visits.
June 2017: 1,423 visits, 958 users, 2,808 page views, peak day of 112 visits.
Last three Augusts:
August 2016: 809 visits, 587 users, 1,318 page views, peak day of 55 visits.
August 2015: 951 visits, 633 users, 1,793 page views, peak day of 50 visits.
August 2014: 1,106 visits, 727 users, 2,232 page views, peak day of 95 visits.
It looks like in August 2014, we were open to submissions, which drives up traffic some. But August also appears to be a slump month for us.
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