A festive drinking fountain from Storybook Land in Aberdeen, SD.
April involved the extension of our submission period for Battling in All Her Finery. Backer surveys have continued to trickle in, and some revenue has come with it. Also we’ve seen an increase in our Patreon support.
The Money Aspect
Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Web Resources: (-$76.06)
Stories: (-$40.00)
Art: (-$239.57)
Advertising: (-$195.91)
Processing Fees: (-$29.15)
Printing: (-$6.45)
Conventions: $50.00
Donations: $85.71
Kickstarter: $172.00
Physical Sales: $226.00
Online Book Sales: $41.87
Total: (-$11.56)
QTD: (-$11.56)
YTD: (-$398.76)
All Time: (-$24,136.69)
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.
Website costs in April include our subscription renewal for an anti-spam plugin on our website.
Kickstarter funds for April represent additional income generated for add-ons purchased by backers and backers who had previously had their credit card declined by Kickstarter proper.
Printing costs for last month were for fulfilling add-ons of past anthologies.
The conventions category is a positive amount because one of the events we had registered for was cancelled and we received a refund for it.
Submissions
We were open to submissions for Battling in All Her Finery through March and April. We received 143 submissions spread between those two months. We’ve accepted 21 stories for the anthology (14.7%), and 4 stories we offered to take for the regular Mad Scientist Journal publication (2.8%).
Our all time acceptance rate is 36.4%.
Followers
Below is the social media following we had at the end of April.
Patreon: 30 (+1)
Facebook: 1,897 (+78)
Twitter: 607 (+15)
Tumblr: 302 (+4)
Mailing List: 133 (+21)
Google+: 65 (+2)
Instagram: 106 (+15)
Traffic
Last three months:
April 2018: 2,256 visits, 1,500 users, 3,871 page views, peak day of 110.
March 2018: 2,527 visits, 1,840 users, 3,616 page views, peak day of 217.
February 2018: 1,250 visits, 984 users, 2,134 page views, peak day of 70.
Last three Aprils:
April 2017: 1,133 visits, 709 users, 1,751 pages views, peak day of 51 visits.
April 2016: 1,080 visits, 761 users, 1,878 page views, peak day of 59 visits.
April 2015: 1,703 visits, 1,225 users, 2,935 page views, peak day of 127 visits.
Traffic was still relatively high, likely due to our call for submissions. Normally we would have a slump in traffic right now, but the extended deadline for our anthology call kept numbers up.
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