Posted in Financial, General on Apr 15th, 2007 No Comments »
It was an 11-hour-long tax form session.
The tax system is unbearably and unnecessarily complicated and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t do anyone any good to have it that complicated - at least not those paying or receiving the taxes, it’s just the intermediaries that benefit.
Why was it so rough?
Last summer I had a severe garage [...]
Posted in Business Ideas, General, Writing/Publishing on Apr 8th, 2007 No Comments »
I spent some time today browsing small-press book and anthology publishers trying to get more information about how they run and the way they do business.
The reason I’m doing this research is because I’ve discovered that there is a serious lack of markets for fantasy and science fiction in the Novelette to Novella range, i.e. [...]
Posted in General on Apr 6th, 2007 No Comments »
I now have the results of my mailing list invitation.
Of the 373 people I invited to join the mailing list, 116 signed up. That’s 31%. I now have the beginnings of an email list. Let’s hope I use it wisely.
Another question I have to answer is: How do I handle those who have bought single [...]
Posted in General, Marketing on Apr 4th, 2007 No Comments »
I mentioned a few days ago that I had signed up for the http://www.aweber.com autoresponder and mailing list manager service. Although I’ve had a subscribe form sitting on the PulpSource site, that’s still moderately under construction and doesn’t get any traffic yet. I’ve just added subscribe lists to the All Possible Worlds and [...]
Posted in Financial, General, Writing/Publishing on Apr 1st, 2007 No Comments »
So, for the month of March, here are my results:
All Possible Worlds: 7 subscription sales, 17 single issue sales (brings the total to 11 subs and 19 singles counting preorders)
Google Ads: $9.61 with just over 14k page impressions. Google terms of service prevent me from giving any more info than that, but [...]
Posted in General, Programming/Software, Writing/Publishing on Mar 30th, 2007 3 Comments »
I’ve recently switched from Microsoft Outlook 2003 to Mozilla Thunderbird. This completes the chageover to using open source software exclusively for my magazine publishing workflow.
For anyone who has used Microsoft Outlook I don’t have to go into great detail about all of the problems and annoyances, but there are two that pushed me [...]
Posted in General, Writing/Publishing on Mar 27th, 2007 No Comments »
I’ve just finished reading about 40 stories submitted to All Possible Worlds. I don’t know the exact total, but I’ve now read over one million words worth of submissions. Some people don’t read that much in a lifetime and I’ve done it in about a six month time period.
Yesterday I caught myself saying that I [...]
Posted in Business Ideas, Financial, General, Web Design, Writing/Publishing on Mar 26th, 2007 No Comments »
I’ve been working on making some deals with pulp magazine publishers to get some stock into PulpSource. So far everyone I’ve chatted with (via email) has been pretty open to the idea of opening an online small press magazine (and eventually book) shop. I’ve even had more than one offer of ad exchanges [...]
Posted in General, Marketing on Mar 24th, 2007 No Comments »
Comparing my All Possible Worlds ad statistics for Yahoo search marketing and Google adwords, here’s what I get:
Google:
~82k impressions, 22 clicks, cost < $2.
Yahoo:
~23.5k impression, 28 clicks, cost < $3.
So, for the same ads and the same terms, Yahoo seems to be delivering more effective results. Both clickthrough rates are still abysmal, and I [...]
Posted in Business Ideas, Financial, General, Music, Writing/Publishing on Mar 24th, 2007 No Comments »
In the past couple days I’ve read a huge amount of stories for All Possible Worlds. In fact, catch-up might not run too much beyond this submission period, which ends 4/15.
Speaking of 4/15, I’m going to have to do taxes pretty soon. It’ll be really ugly since my garage burnt down over the [...]