Wyngraf

Cozy New Year, friends and fellow publishing nerds! Here we are in 2024, following Wyngraf’s biggest year by far. It’s time to take stock of our finances, reflect on what worked and what didn’t, and share everything we can in hopes it might help other indie presses and authors.

Yes indeed, friends, it’s time for another numbat numbies numbers post!

If you find this post useful or interesting, please consider joining our mailing list. You get over a dozen exclusive short stories free as soon as you sign up, and even better, you’re doing the single best thing you can to support an indie publisher (short of buying loads of books, of course).

The Big Picture

If you’re some sort of weirdo who hates reading detailed financial breakdowns, here are the headlines. You can also scroll down to the “By the Numbers” section to see dollar amounts for each release.

• Bard City Blues blew up on Kickstarter (and still sells well!)
• Wyngraf #4 stumbled out of the gate, probably due to lax promotion
• Wyngraf #1 and #2 continue to sell, bringing in helpful profit, and Wyngraf #3 is reasonably close to earning out
• The 2023 Romance Special taught us about Amazon ebook pricing (and we’re making changes this year)
• Our experiments (At the Winding Path’s End, The Little Cozy Book, The Saberlight Chronicles) were a mixed bag

Let’s dig in!

Bard City Blues Crushes Crowdfunding

Looking back at our internal predictions for the Bard City Blues Kickstarter campaign, the benefit of hindsight makes them almost hilarious.

• Our goal was $860, and the hope was to first-day fund in about 12 hours. Instead, we funded in 1:45, and by the 12-hour mark we had raised $2,300.
• By the end of 48 hours, we hoped to raise about $1,100 and fund our first stretch goal. Instead, we’d hit $3,440, more than we expected to raise in the entire campaign.
• Raising so much so fast meant we had to scramble to add stretch goals, since we’d blown through even our most pie-in-the-sky hopes. We wound up unexpectedly funding a deluxe hardcover edition of Bard City Blues and a color illustration inserted into the paperback.

It’s hard to know what to make of these results. Obviously our readers came through for us in a huge way, but our existing support couldn’t account for such a smashing success all on its own.

A Novel Offering

One powerful lens is that Bard City Blues was our first novel. The majority of fantasy readers, especially in social media spaces like Twitter and Reddit, prefer novels to short stories. In fact, there’s a strong culture of “the longer the better” in the fantasy readership—600 pages is better than 300, and a trilogy beats a standalone (as long as the trilogy is complete!). Wyngraf began as a short fiction magazine, and we’re not abandoning that, but you can expect more full novels from us in 2024. That starts with Bard City sequel The Great Elvish Bake Off in May, but we have more up our sleeve…

About That Sequel

The Great Elvish Bake Off was funded as a Kickstarter stretch goal—we thought it was a reach!—and originally expected to deliver in December. Obviously May is pretty far off from that date, and that’s on us. Nathaniel Webb, our publisher and the author of both novels, vastly underestimated how much of his time would go toward our other projects during the summer and fall. That meant writing Bake Off slowed considerably, and at times, stalled altogether. The good news: this isn’t one of those vaporware Kickstarter fails where we take the money and run! The funds earmarked for Bake Off are safe in Wyngraf’s bank account, and writing has moved much quicker since mid-December. The process of finishing the novel, gathering beta reader feedback, and getting it printed will take time, but it’s all going smoothly.

The lesson—which any crowdfunding veteran will tell you—is not to crowdfund anything that hasn’t been written yet! We’re taking that to heart going forward. Some lessons you just have to learn for yourself.

Budget Comparison

After fees and failed pledges, the Kickstarter netted us $5,309.04. (The campaign closed at $5,914, so we lost a hair over 10% of that, which is what we expected.) So how did that huge chunk of cash stack up against our expenses?

The total expenses for Bard City Blues (not including the money saved for the sequel) came to $3,937.51. That amount covers everything, from art to printing to shipping, even a set of ten ISBNs at a whopping $295 (since printing the books ourselves meant we couldn’t get free ISBNs from Amazon).

But we had budgeted $3670.26 for Bard City and $1638.78 for The Great Elvish Bake Off, so Bard City was $267.25 over budget. What happened? Stretch goals happened! Our art budget for the deluxe hardcover (assuming we hit that stretch goal, which we did very quickly) was $500, and our art budget for the color insert was $0 (we planned to reuse the hardcover dust jacket art). Instead we wound up spending an extra $250.

That money paid for the line art of various objects that appears in the chapter headers of the hardcover, and the beautiful color illo of Gally’s guitar, Alix’s scarf, and Chill’s coins that appears beneath the dust jacket of the hardcover and as the color insert in the paperback. It was well worth it, but it did put us over budget on the book.

Two silver linings, though. First, our budget was (otherwise) spot on! The extra illustration was a snap decision, so our anticipated costs matched what we got from Kickstarter almost perfectly. Considering the variability of printing and shipping costs, that’s pretty impressive. The art of budgeting a crowdfunding campaign is obscure and rather painful, so we won’t get into it here, but if it sounds useful, let us know and we can write it up.

Second, post-Kickstarter sales of Bard City on Amazon and elsewhere have been stronger than expected. As of writing this, the book has earned $244.05 in wide release, meaning we’re only a few bucks short of breaking even. Not bad!

Operational Pain Points, Cozy Fantasy Edition

A final thought about Kickstarter: its tools for managing bonus rewards, add-ons, and shipping are absolutely terrible. We wound up writing our own custom software to parse Kickstarter’s messy reports and massage them into a database we could use to get the info we actually needed. We could have eased this pain point a little by simplifying our pledge tiers (which would also have minimized backer confusion) but ultimately, Kickstarter’s tools just aren’t too good.

Luckily, there’s a new kid on the block: BackerKit, who’ve offered Kickstarter management tools for years and just launched their own competing crowdfund platform. All our research suggests that their built-in tooling is much, much better… so you might see us there in 2024!

Wyngraf #4 Has a Rocky Start

One major takeaway from 2023 is that you can never rest on your laurels—or your mailing list. By the time Wyngraf #4 released in October, we’d built up a pretty solid newsletter base and social media following. Because of that (and a general time crunch) we forewent a lot of the hand-crafted promotion we’d done for Wyngraf #3, such as contacting reviewers about ARCs, finding interview opportunities on podcasts and YouTube, and so on.

The result? Wyngraf #4 had the slowest first month of all our issues so far.

It would be easy to blame this on the perennial troubles short fiction mags have, but as you might recall, issue #3 had our strongest launch. It’s also possible that our vastly increased release schedule—we ran a Kickstarter and published two books between issues #3 and #4—created some burnout in our readership. It certainly gave us a hard time! It’s not easy to promote each new book when they’re so close together.

We’re not big enough yet to support a book or issue every month, and that’s okay. In 2024, look for fewer but larger releases, a little more spread out.

How About the Other Issues?

As previously reported, Wyngraf #1 and #2 earned back their budgets in good order. That means every sale they make is pure profit, and boy has that helped. Issue #1 is still our reigning champ, closing in on $2,000 of sales as its second birthday approaches. Wyngraf #2, meanwhile, has earned a respectable thousand and change.

As for issue #3, recall that it was our first issue paying writers 1.5 cents per word, a bump from our original rate of 1 cent. That doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up quickly in our budget: Wyngraf #3 cost about $1,100, compared to $700 for #2.

Nevertheless, #3 is closing in on breakeven. As of writing it’s made about $950, so a few more good months will see it in the black!

Love Never Dies

We discussed our budgeting issues with the 2023 Romance Special in the previous finances post. In short, our $0.99 price point for the two-story anthology triggered much lower royalties from Amazon. So while the special has sold terrifically (131 copies and counting) it’s still nowhere near to earning back its budget.

Rather than declare the whole thing a loss, we’re changing it up for our 2024 edition: it’ll cost a bit more, but it’s much longer! Not only does it feature a hefty novelette and a tea recipe by Lynn Strong and a short story from J. Alexander Cohen, there’s a third tale in this year’s special, written by Wyngraf publisher Nathaniel Webb. By offering a bigger anthology at a higher price, we’ll qualify for a much higher royalty from Amazon, meaning every copy sold will net us far more than last year’s.

Want to catch the cover reveal and be the first to hear when pre-orders open? Join our mailing list!

A Year of Experiments

As we’ve said many times, 2023 is the year Wyngraf experimented with much more than short stories. Alongside Bard City Blues, we published…

• A novella, The Saberlight Chronicles
• A flash fiction anthology, The Little Cozy Book
• A poetry chapbook, At the Winding Path’s End

So how’d these experiments do? Well, as befits experimentation, each one was different.

Let’s start with The Saberlight Chronicles. This novella, written by Fellowship singer Matt Corry and telling the story of the power metal album of the same name, had already seen a limited release on the band’s website. We gave it an editing pass, ordered up some gorgeous cover art from Matthew Spencer, and put it out for free.

So how’d it do? As of writing, we’ve had 29 downloads—but that’s only from mentions on our mailing list and social media. The next phase of the plan is to make sure all Fellowship’s fans know about the book, then to reach out to the wider power metal community. Keep an eye on this one!

The Little Cozy Book features a mix of the best flash fiction from our website series, plus a handful of exclusive new stories. Like the other experiments, we didn’t know what to expect from this one, particularly since much of it is reprints of stories we previously ran for free.

Well, this little book surprised us! Right now it’s only $11 away from breaking even, and we couldn’t be happier. Surely the rich, warm cover art by Kirsty Greenwood helped, and so did big names like Hugo winner Cora Buhlert, Hugo finalist Gideon Marcus, Ziggy Shultz, L Chan, and Jonathan Olfert. But we also wonder if there’s a solid market out there for little bite-sized stories, easily readable on the bus or on lunch break.

Our final experiment was At the Winding Path’s End, a collection of cozy fantasy poetry by Stew Shearer, fully illustrated by Carolyn Smith. We knew from the start that a poetry chapbook was a gamble, which led to an unusual budgetary structure. We agreed with Stew that rather than paying an up-front fee for his poems (many of which had already appeared on his website) we would use a modified royalty structure: after paying back the initial cost of the cover art, every time the book earned $50, it would go to Stew, until he’d made $150.

As it turns out, despite a July 1 release, we still haven’t made a payment to Stew. This is partially due to the lower sticker price on the book, but it’s also done smaller sales numbers than our other releases. It seems poetry is just a tough sell!

Nonetheless, we love how Winding Path’s End came out. It might take us years to pay out Stew’s contract, but we’re delighted to have such a lovely little book on our roster.

By the Numbers

As of this writing, Wyngraf has $276.34 in the bank, not counting the funds set aside for The Great Elvish Bake Off. The numbers don’t match perfectly (we’re always paying ahead for projects that haven’t released yet) but here’s where that money came from.

• Wyngraf #1
  • Budget: $842.14
  • Revenue: $1,908.86
  • Profit: $1,066.72
• Wyngraf #2
  • Budget: $702.90
  • Revenue: $1,005.54
  • Profit: $302.64
• Wyngraf #3
  • Budget: $1,100.19
  • Revenue: $945.06
  • Profit: -$155.13
• Wyngraf #4
  • Budget: $1,061.90
  • Revenue: $425.33
  • Profit: -$636.57
• Romance Special 2023
  • Budget: $149.98
  • Revenue: $67.45
  • Profit: -$82.53
• At the Winding Path’s End
  • Budget*: $55.55
  • Revenue: $50.55
  • Profit: -$5
• The Little Cozy Book
  • Budget: $255.08
  • Revenue: $244.02
  • Profit: -$11.06
• Bard City Blues
  • Budget: $3,937.51
  • Revenue: $3,931.56
  • Profit: -$5.95
• The Saberlight Chronicles
  • Budget: $150
  • Revenue: $0
  • Profit: -$150

Total

• Budget: $8,255.25
• Revenue: $8,578.36
• Profit: $323.12

And that’s it! 2023 was a year of testing and learning for Wyngraf. We had some wild successes and some hard-earned lessons, but in all, we ended the year in a solid place financially, with plenty of exciting projects to spend our savings on.

Thank you for all your support this year. Here’s hoping 2024 is as thrilling for you as it will be for us!

If you found this baring of our financial heart useful or interesting, please consider joining our mailing list. You get over a dozen exclusive short stories free as soon as you sign up, and even better, you’re doing the single best thing you can to support an indie publisher (short of buying loads of books, of course).