Editorial Assistant Amanda Cherry at the launch for her debut novel.
February was our Kickstarter, yet another exhausting wild ride. A lot of time (and ad funds) went towards this, and it’s reflected in a lot of our metrics. We also expanded to a new social media site to help build up more of an audience.
So let’s see how it looks in the wake of crowdfunding madness.
The Money Aspect
Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Web Resources: (-$292.06)
Stories: (-$95.00)
Art: (-$188.46)
Advertising: (-$479.05)
Processing Fees: (-$8.57)
Printing: (-$10.14)
Conventions: (-$50.00)
Donations: $45.71
Physical Sales: $14.00
Online Book Sales: $20.38
Total: (-$1,043.19)
QTD: (-$3,137.64)
YTD: (-$5,232.09)
All Time: (-$28,970.02)
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. Donations include Patreon as well as other money sent to us outside of standard sales.
Kickstarter funds didn’t clear until this month, so those will get summarized in next month’s report. The increased cost for web resources is due to us buying a six-month subscription to Moksha in order to handle the submissions for the new anthology. Last year we blew out our limit of submissions for Submittable and had to start taking submissions via email. It didn’t make financial sense to upgrade our Submittable account, we have gone with Moksha this year. Ironically, we’ve gotten less submissions so far.
Submissions
We were closed to submissions in February. Our all time acceptance rate is remains 37.9%.
Followers
Below is the social media following we had at the end of February. New for February is that we created an Instagram account. Because we have awesome artists who work with us, we thought it could be good to try posting there while also promoting our Kickstarter. We are still too small to get solid metrics on there, but we currently have 69 followers.
As seems typical for a Kickstarter campaign, we had a surge in followers. Facebook gets the bulk of our ad dollars, so that comes as no surprise. We did a better job of getting our Patreon in front of people with the Kickstarter tie-in reward, so that has been a nice bump. The one that seems most surprising is the mailing list. Up until recently we’d only gotten maybe one or two a month. Now we’ve gone up 20 in the last couple months.
Patreon: 20 (+7)
Facebook: 1,816 (+42)
Twitter: 578 (+4)
Tumblr: 294 (+8)
Mailing List: 108 (+12)
Google+: 63 (+0)
Instagram: 69 (+69)
Traffic
Last three months:
February 2018: 1,250 visits, 984 users, 2,134 page views, peak day of 70.
January 2018: 1,650 visits, 1,251 users, 2,534 page views, peak day of 73.
December 2017: 1,441 visits, 1,077 users, 2,419 page views, peak day of 84.
Last three Februarys:
February 2017: 908 visits, 724 users, 1,599 pages views, peak day of 154 visits.
February 2016: 1,798 visits, 1,209 users, 2,647 page views, peak day of 133 visits.
February 2015: 1,777 visits, 1,110 users, 3,309 page views, peak day of 95 visits.
Traffic was down a surprising amount last month, considering that we had a Kickstarter campaign running. Normally this results in a spike in traffic, but both this year and last year saw a drop in traffic for February. Not sure if our advertising campaign diverted people away from other resources we had on our site or if there was some other influence.
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