Short and Curious By The Numbers

A couple of days ago I decided to finally collect a whole bunch of my little silly one / two page strips together into a single collection. Bundling some one page future shock style stories, the holiday strips and a couple of autobio comics (incl the one about my mum) and sticking it up in gumroad.com It’s called PJ Holden’s Short and Curious (a title I was very pleased to have come up with).

It’s priced at free or pay what you like (owing to my inexperience with gumroad I’d initially set the price as $2+). Anyway I have some numbers, firstly my plan wasn’t to make money (making money in comics is hard, and I’ve seen smart publishers lose money on comics, so no way would this comic hit any where near what I’d make if I were paid to do it)

But I was curious to see how much I’d make and how many people would download it.

First of all, lots of people paid way over the odds – thank you, you crazy fools! I think I averaged around $4 per sale (many were more generous than that!)

So there two sets of numbers – one is from twitter. How many people see a tweet and click a link.

So the initial tweet has these figures:

Impressions: 22,067
Engagements: 480
Detail expands: 135
New followers: 0
Profile visits: 24

I have a following of about 15k followers on twitter, and in order to get these numbers I had to push QTs of the original tweet every few hours for a day or two.

Slightly depressing. 22k impressions for 480 engagements is 2.1% rate!

So … is it not hitting the right people? I dunno. I could risk some promotion on twitter, and that be worth playing. When it comes to gumroad and the comic the figures look like this:

I’ve been told by a few people that a 14.8% conversion from looking to buying is pretty damn impressive. So thats great! (and is even higher when people are emailed the link)

The country breakdown is pretty interesting too:

Somehow the United States, where I’d assume the majority of people might have come from, only had 35 visitors and only 3 purchases – THE SAME NUMBER OF PURCHASES AS NEW ZEALAND. That’s peculiar – surely? (I mean not that they’re the same, but rather, that the US is so low…) I’m not sure whether that’s just because I have a lot less US followers than I realised or the comic wasn’t being seen during US awake hours

So I’ve made a grand total of $168 (I think that’s after fees) but by the time that gets to me, maybe £120? at any rate, that’s actually enough pocket change to print the thing up and drop it off to my local comic shops or other venues that MIGHT be able to sell it, and really, that’s the fun of self publishing, isn’t it?