Annual report 2025

Now that Mythic Europe Magazine Issue One is out, its time for me to buckle down and put some podcast episodes in the can. Much as the Cornish and Venice episodes eventually collated into a book, the larger series of episodes may eventually cohere into a larger work.

The three broad series in the upcoming episodes are as follows.

Monster of the Month: this is an ongoing series and hopefully will eventually lead to another volume of Ars Magica Monsters. It’s the first calendar week each month

Mythic Cheshire: I’ve had trouble finding where to start on this, but recently hit on a series of legends based on Longdendale, which is a remote valley in (traditional) Cheshire’s far north east. It has all of the standards of English folklore: Arthur, Robin Hood, druids and so on. It may be a covenant book, like Triamore, in time. It’s the third calendar week each month.

I’ve wanted to do something in Cheshire since I helped write Magonomia, the roleplaying game of Elizabethan sorcery. In the Magonomia bestiary I statted up a sea dragon. One of the plot hooks tied to a story in the Petamerone where eating the heart of a sea dragon causes magical pregnancy for a queen desperate for an heir. In the original story the maid who cooked the heart also becomes pregnant, just from the scent of it cooking. My idea was that this would let Elizabeth have an heir without marriage. She’d likely try to call him “Arthur” because the name isn’t confirmed unlucky as yet. In her reign, the heir to the throne is, generally, the Earl of Chester. The title Prince of Wales is also sometimes handed off, but it’s a little more irregular and she’d likely have kept it because she was incredibly short on money. The saga idea is that the player characters are all the children of maids-in-waiting who were bought in to witness the queens eating the heart, and smelled its juices by accident. The Earl of Chester has his own barons, separate from the English font of honour, so that’s the player character role in that sort of Magonomia saga.

Vendors in the Merceria: We have a heap of monsters that are statted up, but don’t seem to have made their mark on the available stories. I’d like to add them into the faerie market in the heart of Mythic Venice. I’ve only part-prepped two so far. The first is a fae-blooded human who acts as a sort of safe centre for characters navigating the Market. For Australians he’s based on Edward Cole. Cole was a Melbourne eccentric who owned the largest bookstore in the southern hemisphere, and did Barnum-styled stunts to get publicity. He’s the character, hinted at in Mythic Venice, who has decided that cranking magical books through a printing press in a high Faerie aura is a grand idea. Aside from Master Caul, I’ve also written up a pair of mask-makers, who are a magical and faerie gorgon trying to make a sort of found family out of each other. This is made harder because Euryale is a genuine gorgon-who-knew-Medusa Magical gorgon and Gabriella is the faerie that has sprung up around her story. The Venetian habit of finding secrecy alluring, and Euryale’s constant masking, means there’s this sexier, more social thing walking around calling her “mother”. That’d be confronting for anyone. It’s the final calendar week each month. Eventually I’ll get enough of those to give the book some bulk, add a chapter on urban fantasy, and ship it, or I’ll get stuck and use these as the kernel for a themed issue of the magazine. This was originally my “30 days 30 posts” plan for this year, but I’d like longer to cook on each one.

The second calendar week, and third in months five weeks long, is miscellaneous.

There may be some crossover – for example the Giant Slug Monster of Longdendale might slide its way into the Monster of the Month slot.

Mythic Europe Magazine Issue Two is still dependent on sales. Time for the math:
Be aware these are back of the napkin calculations.

My author costs for Mythic Europe Magazine Issue One were, swapped into USD at today’s rates USD692. Note for those of you scaling your own projects some authors refused to accept payment and I wrote two of the articles.

I’ve priced it at USD6. .With Drivethru’s revenue split, that’s $3.90 pre-tax income per sale. As a rough rule of thumb, income tax and transaction fees would be would be about 30%. in my case, so that brings it down to USD2.73.per sale. Technically higher on itch or Patreon, but Drivethru is where most of my previous two books did their work.

So, break even is 254 sales. That’s high given the size of our community and that its not a product with the sort of clear hook of “Venice? Monsters? Give me a buck even if you don’t play ArM”.

That’s to see if its the sort of product that can stand alone, in terms of a second issue. Here we see a bit of the thinking on my release timing though.

This year I know I will owe a lump sum of income tax on the money bought in by the Atlas payment, Magonomia royalties, Drivethru sales and the difference between my Games From Folktales subscriptions and my hosting costs. I’m not sure how large it is exactly, but its big enough that I can’t call renumerated hobby on it. It is assessed on June 30 and due October 31 because I’m Australian and that’s when we do these things.

It’s probably three hundred dollars American at a very loose guess.

If I structure my writing business correctly some of the the cost for the authors of MEM1 comes out of that lump, because the tax is on profits or drawings, not on turnover. It doesn’t make MEM2 more likely, it doesn’t pull the break even of this one product down. It does, however let me move some of the money I’d be paying as income tax on my writing to an expense. This gives me a cushion for for if MEM1 flops. Roughly speaking, I don’t lose actual money on it if I sell 143 copies because of that one-off presence of income from earlier writing.

There is a complicated question as to how I apportion the money coming in from the podcast Patreons, because I gave MEM1 to all paid subscribers. So, you could think of that as 37 prepaid subscriptions. If I get to 106 sales, I feel I can say I’ve come out even on this one product. I know that’s not actually how the math works (I’m essentially increasing the material to the subscribers without upping the price) but I feel that’s acceptable because I can’t be bothered running a proper subscription service.

220 sales (on top of the GFF subscribers) is where I can say “Well, that all worked out splendidly and it’s worth doing this again at that price point.” as opposed to “I should go and write another book” or “I should get a team together to write (Specific Thing With Good Hook).”

Currently, there are 48 sales since 30 April, plus the 38 subscribers.