Happy new year! What a year it’s been. On a personal level, it’s been really hard for a lot of folks, and we’re no exception. 2017 was a year of taking stock, facing tough truths, and returning to priorities. We found ourselves in the position of being able to offer some helpful tools for this, especially Dr. Faith G. Harper’s zines and her book that came out this year, Unf*ck Your Brain and Set Sytes’s humorous but so so true guide to How Not to Kill Yourself. It turns out that a lot of you really, really needed funny, practical mental health guides and getting to connect with many readers about this was a highlight of the year.
Last year we reported that 2016 was Microcosm’s best year yet (and not just financially). Well, we are amazed to be able to let you know that 2017 exceeded that by a whopping 52.48%!
Since last January 1, we’ve published 17 books and dozens of zines as well as adding about 500 titles to our distribution catalog (which we were intending to completely dismantle just a few years ago). This includes a 200,000% increase in witchy books, a subject that had not previously been on our radar but through which our sales team of Jeri Cain and Kristine ably steered us. Despite plans to end our touring program and reduce travel, we ended up doing a record number of events in 2017 too, including a trip to Europe in Aug/Sept! At the same time, our production schedule is booking dates in 2024 and we sent our final Spring, 2018 titles to the printer this morning.
We added some more staff changes this year: Kristine Anstine, former Comics Relief and Last Gasp long-timer came on as major accounts sales manager, Trista Vercher hopped onto our fast-moving wagon to do production, illustration, customer service, and paper pushing. And former star intern Sidnee Grubb will be taking a job here handling all of our precious human resources, sales, operations management, and making us the best Cosm we can be. Her future-husband Ben will also take on a role in our retail store and doing film and photography for us. Oddly, we didn’t lose a single staff person in 2017. We added four more!
We sold about 168,000 books last year; about 460 per day!
Here’s a breakdown of some math about our year, as powered by charts:
Our total income for the year was $754,939.94 (a 52.48% increase from 2016). Here’s a pie chart that shows what we’re selling. “Other” is mostly Slingshot planners. Z-MC Books is what we publish.
So as with most years, our bestsellers were our own books. Let’s look at a further breakdown of sales minus expenses of those books:
And here’s the sales figures in order of income, not taking expenses into account:
Unlike previous years, our biggest sellers are brand new and all of the top 10 (except the perennial Make Your Place) are from the past 15 months! Still, sales continue to democratize. In the past we relied on a single title to pay for all of our bills but now we have to rely on every book to bring in even just $5 per month so we can make that difference up in volume.
Lastly, here are our expenses, totaling -$820,034.61 and forcing us to borrow a bit of money. You see, we are growing so fast that we cannot finance it with our book sales alone. This is a wonderful problem to have as we recently learned on Planet Money! And we increased employee wages 19.37%!
We also donated $$59,672.00 (72.59% increase) worth of books to cool organizations! And wow, check out our rollercoaster ride:
And just like we tell you every year: While we’re legally a “for-profit” organization, we choose to operate on a break-even basis. This means that when we have profits (which isn’t all the time, but we try), they don’t go into our owners’ yacht fund; they go into staff wages and taking a chance on publishing new books we believe in. Getting to do work we care about every day and put books out there that help people change their lives is way better than a yacht. Which is an important attitude to have in the publishing industry!