We've had a number of people ask why we need to raise so much money and I certainly appreciate and understand the question. It's certainly a reasonable one to ask!
Let me start by giving you some history and an understanding of how the site works. I apologize in advance for a looooooong post.
Once upon a time, I used to be a web development manager for a large corporation. I started YABC while I was still working and it was basically a hobby for me. It was a way for me to keep in touch with the stuff that interested me while I was (selling my soul) working a regular job. So, from 1998 to basically 2004, that's how things went. The site cost me quite a bit to run every year, but I wasn't concerned about it because I made a lot of money (that's the good side of having a corporate job) and it was fun and it made me feel connected to the things I loved. As a web development manager, I also had lots of friends that could help with coding the website and I also did a large portion of it myself. The site as it exists today was mostly coded in the first couple of years it existed.
Then I took the big leap and quit my corporate job to write full time, effectively cutting our income in half. We also moved to another state (and then moved again AND had a baby). I was able to spend more time on YABC before I sold my first book, but now the cost of the site was a factor. Still, I loved doing it and wanted to keep it going. I was lucky to add on a number of volunteers, some of whom are still with the site. All of YABC's volunteers are unpaid.
As the site has grown, so have the costs. Last year expenses were almost $4,000.00 (
after I implemented many cost-saving measures) and while I'm (yay!) finally making some income as a writer, reports of us all being millionaires are complete fantasies (I wish!). At this point, after discussing it with my husband, we came to the conclusion that either we had to get the website profitable enough we could hire some people to help run it/maintain it or I needed to give it up to concentrate on my writing. I'd looked into possibly selling the site as-is for someone else to run but couldn't find anyone who would do so in the manner in which it was intended.
There are also so many things I've wanted to do with the site for years but couldn't do because of the associated costs. Tons of improvements and upgrades, the ability to pay reviewers, etc. etc. We also need to incorporate the site, which costs a few thousand dollars.
So, now you can see why making the site profitable is important to me. One of the issues was that I had never tried to make any income off of the site. Sure, I'd added the Buy from Amazon links and had put up Google Adsense ads, but those pull in
very little income (not even enough to cover just the hosting costs alone). I'd never bothered with search engine optimization or advertising, and had allowed the site to just kind of grow organically by word of mouth. That just doesn't cut it anymore.
Nor does the site itself, anymore. YABC was around before blogs were. It
isn't a blog, though this blog is part of it. There's a LOT more to it than free blog software can handle. There are literally thousands upon thousands of lines of code (currently in ColdFusion) and thousands of lines of data in a database (SQL Server). As an example, if you wanted to re-create the website in just plain HTML, you'd need to code over 30,000 pages of stuff and each time you made a change to one page, you'd need to ripple it back to change other affected pages. There's an entire administrative site that visitors don't see, but the volunteers use on a daily basis to maintain the site. When I put the site together way back in the late 90's, it was fairly cutting edge. Now? It's woefully out-of-date. It needs a major overhaul. And even if I personally wanted to tackle it? I can't. My skills are so far out of date that they might as well be non-existent (and often feel that way).
We've gotten in two bids so far to do the following:
- Come up with a completely new look and feel for the site with all new graphics, etc. and set up all new template pages.
- Re-code the site (either in ColdFusion or another programming language), including beefing up the security and improving speed.
- Help move the site (if necessary) to a new host to take advantage of new technology platforms.
- Come up with a marketing and management plan to get the site on track and profitable.
- Optimize the site for search engines to attract more traffic
- Begin to add in some additional functionality.
It's actually key for us to attract more traffic. We've got quite a bit, but not enough to break the threshold where we could have a management company manage and sell the ad space for us. That means we have to sell the ad space ourselves (which is, honestly, key to us surviving at this point). More traffic also means that we're more attractive to advertisers and sponsors, which would also allow us to offer more giveaways and incentives, hence driving more traffic. It's a bit of a chicken and egg thing. It, of course, also takes time.
We're looking into getting additional bids and into how we can maybe do some of the work ourselves (my husband has been buying up books on everything from Google AdWords to xHTML and CSS to ASP and .NET). Because honestly? $10,000 is a ton of money. Sure, the site has cost me that much to run it just in the last 2 - 3 years, but it wasn't all at once (and I need to
reduce expenses, not increase them!). And I've had some news on the writing front that's very exciting, but also means that I'm going to have less time to work on the website. So we're re-evaluating to see how we can keep things going.
So, that's kind of the long and involved version of more than you ever wanted to know about YABC. Please know that I absolutely HATE asking for help, especially asking for monetary assistance. If I could afford to do it all myself, I would. But I just can't (you know, hey, unless you guys want to go out there and buy a LOT more of my books) ;-) .
If YABC is important to you (and I hope it is) and you like our mission and our message (we're all about connecting readers with books and with providing an outlet for authors to promote their books), we hope you'll help us. I especially encourage you to take a
look at the auctions with items donated by authors. I truly appreciate their support and I hope you'll support them too by learning more about them.
The author of A Life Revealed has stopped by YABC for an interview! Be sure to read it and get some great advice for writers, learn about Suzi's hobbies, and discover what it was like growing up in a family with six girls. Can you imagine?
A poem about a First Basemen's mitt:
