Twenty five dollars
of the financial year here in Australia, which is a time a lot of people dread, find boring or forget about, but I really like. It's an odd thing, I acknowledge, to enjoy tax time, but I think what I really love is the sense of wrapping something up. Being done with all the business of the last year or so.
I keep my own accounting and each year is a chance to refresh things and make that all a bit smoother and more helpful.
For example, one thing I've become quite interested in is 'how much money has tall poppy made?', it's a question that, due to how I have been accounting, is impossible for me to answer. My accounting wraps all my different art expenses into one bucket - so if I buy a new camera, pay for this newsletter or pay for printing of a tall poppy book they all go in the same big bucket. Similarly, the money I've made from art - publishing, teaching, selling, speaking - ends up in one bucket, which makes it hard to then pull apart without lots of manual work which I don't want to do.
Now that's all legal and above board - but what it does do is make it tricky for me to go 'well for the $xxx I spent on Tall Poppy I made $xxx'.
And this month money is on my mind - and as I get close to owning and running this business for 2 years - I'm also a bit more informed about the costs, profits, etc. Earlier this year I sat back and decided that, for the next year, my metric for tall poppy is to try and make an average profit of $25 per sale of a book/t shirt/poster/merch.
Now some sales are much less than this - for example a sale to a bookstore is 40% less than a sale to a customer and might only return the costs of making the book. Or when I run a sale the profits may be lower. On the other hand, sometimes things are more profitable, and that's ok too. I don't quite know if I'll hit this metric this year - especially understanding the costs is a tricky one for me - but I'm getting better.
Over the next financial year, I estimate I'll publish 5 more books and that will be around 1250 units. So, if I sell out (which I won't, but older books will keep selling too) AND I make my $25 average, that's $31,250. Well, it won't be that much because some books I profit split, and then there's extra costs like web hosting, traveling to fairs, etc, etc.
But still - that's the goal, and let's see how well I do :)
I'll let you know in 12 months' time!
Note: over July there'll probably be a bit of a money focus on this newsletter, I tend to be really specific with profits and income and all that stuff, but if it's boring I apologise. I know this is quite opaque for a lot of people and I don't see any reason to hide it other than social propriety, which doesn't seem that important a reason to me. After all, people can just not read it if they don't care.
Also:
I'm teaching a workshop in Sydney - learn more and sign up here
As always, the Tall Poppy shop is open - for the rest of today we have 15% off lots of things, use the code EOFY at check out for the discount