Our table at Pulicon!
A relatively quiet month. We got in interior art for I Didn’t Break the Lamp, laid out the ebook, and sent it to contributors for review. Here are some numbers.
The Money Aspect
Amounts in parentheses are losses/expenses.
Web Resources: (-$17.06)
Stories: (-$168.00)
Art: (-$1,239.28)
Advertising: (-$1,494.16)
Processing Fees: (-$20.40)
Printing: (-$346.83)
Donations: $81.71
Kickstarter: $6.00
Online Book Sales: $82.34
Total: -$3,115.67
QTD: -$3,115.67
YTD: -$3,776.48
All Time: (-$39,960.05)
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.
Some big expenses last month. Our yearly charge for Hootsuite came due. We use it for both MSJ and our publisher account, so it’s hard to know how much of it to apply to MSJ. I decided to just dump it all into the mix.
We also had to pay artists for interior art in I Didn’t Break the Lamp and ship contributor copies for Summer 2019.
Kickstarter in this context means funds received through Backerkit for add-ons to our Kickstarter.
Submissions
In June we received 227 submissions, a record breaking number of stories for us. It took us long enough to read through all of them that we didn’t get numbers for you last month. Of these, we accepted 22 ads and 37 stories. For the final quarterly, we decided to accept more stories than normal so that it is a big hurrah of a finale.
This comes down to a 26% acceptance rate for June, and a final all time acceptance rate of 33.54%.
Followers
Below is the social media following we had at the end of June.
Patreon: 32 (+1)
Facebook: 2,199 (-4)
Twitter: 696 (+3)
Tumblr: 353 (+1)
Mailing List: 286 (+1)
Instagram: 211 (+0)
Traffic
Last three months:
July 2019: 774 visits, 607 users, 1,303 page views, peak day 40 visits.
June 2019: 1,330 visits, 850 users, 2,595 page views, peak day 89 visits.
May 2019: 1,153 visits, 882 users, 1,964 page views, peak day 75 visits.
Last three Mays:
July 2018: 1,297 visits, 964 users, 1,953 page views, peak day 90 visits.
July 2017: 1,216 visits, 914 users, 2,210 page views, peak day 120 visits.
July 2016: 1,013 visits, involving 812 users and 1,745 page views.
