The State of the Ghost: Third Quarter 2016

by on October 6, 2016 at 4:52 pm
Posted In: State of the Ghost

Transparency is important to Vengeful Ghost. Comics is hard business. It gets easier if we share information and our hard-fought lessons learned. In posts like this, Parker will lay out the Ghost’s quarterly numbers and try to provide some context.

Vengeful Ghost came into being in the Summer of 2015, 9 months before the debut of “Thursday Night,” when I formed a Limited Liability Company in the state of Maryland. That was important to me. I wanted to have an official legal structure of some kind before I started asking artists to take my ideas and turn them into real life things. I wanted to be able to write respectable contracts and have some protection just in case something went really poorly–or really well. So on 20 August 2015, we became all official and I started contacting artists and building the website. Then, in May 2016, readers got to join the team when Olivia, Bambi, Laura and I introduced you to Khadija and Matt. Since then, we’ve been working to make our motto true: original short comics, one page at a time. Now, we’re done with our first story and we’re 75% through our second. We’re rolling right along.

Second Quarter 2016 was short and zipped right by, so I didn’t do this kind of roundup. I’m including it here. If you have any questions about the numbers, or if there’s a specific analysis you’d like to see, hit me up in the comments below. I’ll do my best to figure out an answer. I’m not an expert, but if you can learn something by watching me stumble around, I’m all for it.

Second Quarter 2016

Pages published: 6
Pageviews: 690
Average monthly visitors: 111
Patreon patrons (at the end of the quarter): 5

Revenue: $5.40
Expenses: -$903.15
% of expenses to Ghostfriends: 85.6% ($772.88)
Net: -$897.75

No physical or digital sales
No in-person events

 

Third Quarter 2016

Pages published: 13
Pageviews: 1353 (+663)
Average monthly visitors: 82 (-29)
Patreon patrons (at the end of the quarter): 8 (+3)

Revenue: $564.60 (+559.2)
Expenses: -$2,266.07
% of expenses to Ghostfriends: 64.5% ($1,461.21)
Net: -$1701.47 (-$803.72)

Physical distribution

Thursday Night

Sold/gifted/traded: 35

The Coriolis Effect

Sold/gifted/traded: 26
Lost/destroyed: 1

Convention Appearances

Bmore Into Comics Issue #10

VG books sold: 12
Ghostfriends books sold: 7
Revenue/table fee ratio: 4.68

Baltimore Comic-Con

VG books sold: 22
Ghostfriends books sold: 2
Revenue/table fee ratio: 1.27

Project tracker

  1. Thursday Night: Web and digital published. Limited print run of 50. Revenue/Printing=1.09. No revenue sharing goals reached.
  2. Coriolis Effect: Web publishing. Limited print run of 75. Revenue/Printing=0.64. No revenue sharing goals reached.
  3. Project Tokyo: In final art production.
  4. Project Jakarta: In final art production.
  5. Project Delhi: In second-stage editing.
  6. Project Manila: In first-stage editing.
  7. Project New York City: In draft.

Analysis

  • Although two points make a line, they don’t exactly tell us a lot about trends. It will be interesting to come back to these numbers when we’ve got a year or so under our belts to see how they shape up.
  • A bunch of people checked out the website when we first launched– 25 May was our biggest day ever for pageviews and we had, like, three pages up at the time. It seems like some of them didn’t come back. Are they lost forever? Or would another push like we had around launch get some of them back in and reading regularly?
  • I included the revenue/table fee ratio because I found Baltimore Comic-Con a massive learning experience, one I’m still trying to digest all the lessons from. I have an untested theory about how some shows are to sell and some shows are to network–broader experience will tell, I guess.
  • It will also be interesting to see if my numbers from Bmore Into Comics decrease significantly when I go back in December. I had a lot of goodwill this time because it was my first event with my first book, and I sold a bunch. I wonder how much I saturated that particular market.
  • I am incredibly privileged to be able to pursue comics with the intensity I have. This is an expensive business, building a portfolio and telling stories.

Thanks for reading. Please comment with any questions. If you want to help make those numbers a little prettier, consider clicking over to our Patreon campaign, buying something from our online store, or throwing something in the tip jar.