Running a small business like Sonlight Press, LLC is a challenge. Getting your novels written and out to the public is even harder. Putting those two together requires a bit of money and a lot of faith.

Here’s where my money went this past year.

• They say Editing and Book Covers are the most important parts of making your book attractive to customers and we put our money where our mouth was, spending 55% on making the book as good as possible.
• We spent 15% on Marketing efforts and 15% on Technology, such as mics, lights, drives, etc. for podcasts and video interviews.
• Maintaining this website was relatively inexpensive, comparatively, comprising of a mere 5% of total costs.
• Office supplies and corporate fees took up the remaining 10%

Marketing is a general term that can be used in a lot of different ways. Here’s where I spent the money allocated toward getting the word out about out stuff.

• Printing paperbacks of Kneel & Prey to seed with people and groups in the hopes of growing the Gabby Wells series consisted of a whopping 50% of the marketing costs.
• Shipping those books cost another 17% of the overall marketing budget.
  5% of the cost went to General Marketing, which consisted of marketing e-books, most of which were on sale for $0.99.
• And Multimedia (Video and Podcasts) totaled 28% of the marketing expenditures.

I don’t know if this is normal for authors pushing their first series, but all of the costs made sense to me. Marketing should increase this next fiscal year, as we’ll have more books in the series, allowing us to take advantage of a number of online marketing options, like Facebook advertising, Bookbub-ish companies, etc.

I have a five year plan for this company and we’re right on schedule after year one. I wish I had written one more novel, but life and health interrupted my plans a bit. I hope, by this time next year, we’ll have found out if the Gabby Wells Thrillers have gained their audience and propel the series forward. If not, I have a number of other series in the works.

Until next fiscal year. ?