P-Cat, Biscuit, and our giant tabby kitten Foggy.
There were a lot of expenses in June, as we paid a bunch of creators for their contributions to Battling in All Her Finery and have started to do some different things with marketing. Let’s look at how we measured up.
The Money Aspect
Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Web Resources: (-$17.06)
Stories: (-$1,939.00)
Art: (-$900.00)
Advertising: (-$190.45)
Processing Fees: (-$37.96)
Printing: (-$362.82)
Donations: $90.71
Kickstarter: $34.00
Online Book Sales: $25.94
Total: (-$3,296.64)
QTD: (-$3,800.46)
YTD: (-$4,187.66)
All Time: (-$27,925.59)
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.
Stories and art last month were payments out to most of the authors and illustrators that we have planned for Battling
Advertising is up a little because we have hired a publicist to help with social media. It will be up more in future months. We’ve decided we wanted to do more with DefCon One Publishing, the company that MSJ is published under. Normally, we’ve used it just for MSJ and books published by Dawn and I, but we’ve started publishing a small number of books by other authors. Combined with the fact that our publishing is continually losing money, we figured we needed to do something. So, enter publicist for our social media.
Since then, we’ve realized that we had other stuff that we needed to do in order to get benefit out of this increased work from a publicist. Stuff like upgrading our (normally unused) Hootsuite account and paying Facebook and Twitter to promote our freshly created created social media profiles for DefCon One Publishing. Those costs will appear on next month’s report.
I haven’t decided how I’m going to reflect these advertising costs in the future. For now I’m just going to list it for MSJ because it’s still 90% of the books that we publish.
Kickstarter income represents funds added by backers through BackerKit.
We didn’t have any conventions and sales were slow online. So not a lot of income this month.
Submissions
We received 146 submissions. This consisted of:
- 22 classifieds, of which we accepted 17 (77%)
- 80 regular submissions, of which we accepted 15. This was 13 as regular, 2 as quarterly exclusives. (19%)
- 44 exclusive submissions, of which we accepted 7. 4 as exclusives, 3 were accepted as regular submissions instead. (16%)
Our all time acceptance rate is 35.7%.
Followers
Below is the social media following we had at the end of June.
Patreon: 28 (-1)
Facebook: 1,985 (+11)
Twitter: 630 (+19)
Tumblr: 309 (+3)
Mailing List: 153 (+7)
Google+: 65 (+0)
Instagram: 126 (+9)
Traffic
Last three months:
June 2018: 1,899 visits, 1,271 users, 3,125 page views, peak day 109.
May 2018: 1,713 visits, 1,353 users, 2,512 page views, peak day of 82.
April 2018: 2,256 visits, 1,500 users, 3,871 page views, peak day of 110.
Last three Junes:
June 2017: 1,423 visits, 958 users, 2,808 pages views, peak day of 103 visits.
June 2016: 1,092 visits, 703 users, 1,907 page views, peak day of 59 visits.
June 2015: 1,180 visits, 844 users, 1,861 page views, peak day of 120 visits.
