So starting today, Livejournal will be showing ads at the top of any free basic blog to people who aren't logged in (so a random person visiting the blog will see ads but when I log in I won't).

This annoys me because my blog is embedded in a frame on my websites, so these new ads mess up how my home pages look (it pushes down the top of my blog a bit and you see parts of the ad only, which doesn't look good).   I am not happy. I'll have to figure out a way around this--the easy way is to just have a paid account, but I don't really want to do that. The other option is I just stop using LJ and go with something else. That's a bit drastic.

New Layout


Old Layout


And ads for dating websites are my least favorite ads, ugh. That's part of the reason I have AdBlocker on whenever I have to check my MySpace messages--that site is lousy with dating site ads.

It is now officially tax season and this time around I have my small business taxes to file in addition to my regular kind. This is going to be interesting, I can already tell. Thankfully, I kept all my 'business' receipts organized - so it shouldn't be too hard, just tedious. The advice given to me by a friend who does independent stuff on the side like myself is that I don't really want to make a profit, just to break even at best and have my 'business' pay for all the stuff I do (like conventions, advertising, etc). It helps that Dad is self-employed, so he has been giving me a lot of help (told me to open separate accounts for business stuff, have separate credit cards, etc).

I can tell you right now there is no way I made a profit in 2007, I would of had to sell about 1,000 copies of The Magic of Eyri for that to happen. While there are things I like about being independent, financially it isn't the most fun. But this is the road I'm on at the moment, so I may as well stay the course see where it goes.

I bit the bullet and put up some Google Ads on danieljhogan.com and magicofeyri.com. I won't make a bunch of money off it but it'll help a bit. My preference is not to have ads, but getting some kind of income from the sites is nice. I can always take them down. I already had to block three ads from my sites (one was for a 'sexy singles' website), so I have to keep an eye on what is popping up.

I have a feeling any refund I get from my regular taxes is just going to go back and help pay off my bills from all of this book stuff. All things considered though, I'm not doing too bad. Yeah, I have some debt because of all of this but it isn't that much and I'm playing parts of it off each month and I'm watching my spending. Skipping conventions would be the best way to cut my costs, but I really can't do that - the exposure I get there is well worth the money and being able to sell books face to face to people is a priceless experience for me.

Oh well. At least people are buying the book, if they weren't and I was spending all of this money then I'd be in real trouble ;)

Here is a flier for the book signing I'm doing in March along with jimhines , the flier was designed by Dean Stahl (aka wookiee71 ) - is going to be there as well. I had to shrink it down to fit in this blog - sorry Dean!



In other news, I got my December sales numbers from lulu.com the other day. I sold four copies during the month - woo hoo! That puts me at 94.
I got some interesting sales data last week courtesy of author/editor William Jones. He was able to look up my Nielson sales scan data for me - yes, the lameo system that TV uses to guess who is watching what is now being used for books. I'll try and sum up what I learned - first they don't count Amazon, so these are sales at places like Barnes & Noble.

Regions
17 copies sold in the East North Central region
3 copies in the Pacific region
2 copies sold in the South Atlantic region

Geographic Places
12 in Suburbs
8 in City
2 in Rural

Looks like I'm rockin' the suburbs. William also said that the number I need to shoot for is 1,000 copies sold, after that chain stores will take notice. I guess I have some more promotion to do!

EDIT: I forgot to mention that William said that chain stores triple their Nielson scan data, so he said my 22 copies actually count as 66. So, considering that - I only need to sell 333.333 copies to hopefully get noticed by the chains (yeah, only) - and these all have to be sales through a store that actually contributes to this data. Interesting stuff.

Goals in 2008:

Read at least 25 books (tried to do this last year, but fell a couple short)
Submit short stories to magazines
Do a weekly sketch and post it in this blog (can be anything, just have to post some kind of drawing once a week.)
Finish second Magic of Eyri novel
Get an agent
Get both Magic of Eyri novels published by someone other than myself
Redesign websites
Advertise websites on a more frequent/regular basis
Submit The Magic of Eyri to Amazon's Search Inside
Look into making The Magic of Eyri available for Amazon's Kindle eReader

A few days ago I put up what could be considered my first ever advertising on magicofeyri.com.

I could argue that all of my links to other places are advertising, although free advertising (especially for all the comics and blogs I have links to). This was the first time however, I put something up that I could potentially get money back from. I put up ads for RetroDuck.com, a t-shirt website - and a business based right here in Lansing (well, East Lansing). I've known Adam, who is the CEO, for a while now and I recently met Luke who is in charge of marketing (...and also found out we were at Grand Valley State University at the same time and know some of the same people).

They aren't paying me for ad space by any means, I get 10% of every order placed by someone following the links to RetroDuck on my site - and even then, I only get paid after I reach $30 in sales. And they didn't ask me either, this was my own idea. I'm all about helping out my fellow independent artist types. And heck, they sell a shirt based on Jim Henson's film, The Dark Crystal. That makes 'em all kinds of awesome in my book.

The funny thing is I'm making this sound like I'm doing them a huge favor - when I know they easily get more traffic and sales than I'll ever get :)

I did draw the line at having an animated ad, so I tweaked theirs a bit and made it just a still picture (I'm not a fan of animated ads). They do custom shirts too, and I keep meaning to have them print up some shirts for me (even just a couple).

Christmas is over, and I'm beat.