Ko-fi and Tipping

To start things off, this is us reminding people we have a Ko-fi account! ​You can send a couple bucks our way for a coffee. We're trying to work from a place other than our home office once a week to keep our sanity, so anything helps.

Anyway, for those that have seen, starting at this past convention, we've begun adding tips to our checkout screen. We don't make much off of it; for example, this past con we made just about the same amount as we paid in Square fees.

​Why, you ask?

While we plan to go into more detail during our "Behind the Scenes of Furry Literature" panels, it comes down to this: furry publishing is very much a labor of love. It is a very low-margin business, meaning we make very little on the books we sell. Some of these titles we make next to nothing on. However, we truly believe in what we do, and it's why we continue to do it.

Making these books takes a lot of work. Just factoring in accepted manuscripts, I personally put in well over $1,000 worth of work into each title (if you take what we'd charge to edit and typeset each book into account, and we don't even charge that much compared to other freelance editors). That doesn't even factor in that we pay for cover art, pay for stock, pay to sell the books at conventions, and pay for other things that come up.

On average, we make about $2.50 on a full-price book. We sell 100 copies and we've probably made back what we spent on cover art, and a small dent in paying for stock (not to mention a lot of these copies are NOT likely sold at full price). So that's a lot of hours of free labor that's never going to get paid.

While tipping, just like getting me a coffee via our Ko-fi page above, is certainly not expected by anyone, it very much helps us keep doing what we're doing. Even if it's a dollar here or there, or purchasing an extra book than you were planning, everything is very, very appreciated.

If Weebly gets it together and adds a tipping option on here, we will certainly go forth with that as well. But who knows when that will happen.
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