Doing taxes for Sword’s Edge Publishing and realizing what an incredibly unprofitable venture it is. If I had paid myself 3 cents per word, we would have had a net loss of $ 3.530 in calendar 2011. Since I don’t pay myself, we only lost $ 420.
As a point of reference, we had $1762.13 in revenue for 2011.
Now, since most of the stuff published in 2011 was written in 2010, I can’t say I wrote it all in 2011, but we published 120,920 words that had not been published anywhere previous in 2011. On a standard of 250 words per page, that’d be about 480 pages published in 2011.
The costs of operating SEP in 2011:
Production (Print) 406.10
Sub contracts 700
(including: Art 200; Layout 300; Maps 50; and Editing 150)
Advertising 247.75
Travel 551.24
(this is for GenCon, but can only claim 50% of actual costs, so I could claim 275.62 for tax purposes)
Internet : 381.95
Podcast hosting 72
Website hosting 86.69
Taxes: sometimes they unearth some interesting stuff.