All about donations
Helping a good cause has been the main driver for the whole Skye At Night project.
Sure, there’s a lot of personal satisfaction from seeing my hard work in print (there’s a book in all of us apparently). But there’s a bigger goal than simple “ego-publishing”. Charities like the Skye Mountain Rescue Team (SMRT) exist thanks to the goodwill of others. I know from my wife’s experience in the third sector how tough it can be to keep things running. The treadmill of continuous fund raising is hard and can sap energy and enthusiasm.
In buying a Skye At Night book, people are getting a lovely coffee table book that they’d no doubt like to have about the house anyway. A tangible thing that they can look through when planning a trip to the island, or reminisce after their visit, or marvel at the scenery just down the road. A very nice side effect is that the profit from that book goes to SMRT. It’s a “toofer” - a “two-for-one” - get a nice book, make a donation.
As you can see from the big picture above, I’ve now sent £2,650 to SMRT. This is the profit from the first run of 250 books. My initial target was to raise £10/book so I’m really happy to have exceeded that.
The actual process of calculating and executing the donation is quite tricky. The amount contributed per book sale is highly dependent on how the book is sold. You’ll notice I’ve held off stocking on Amazon (though the listing is on there). That’s because Amazon take a rather large referral fee as well as a monthly seller fee, on top of which there is then postage, packing and other logistics to sort out. It will get stocked on Amazon once things calm down a bit, as I reason that every book sold is more money for SMRT whether it’s £5 or £10 a book, and loads of people will buy on Amazon as it’s so easy.
To get all the numbers right, I have to keep track of whether books are sold directly by me face-to-face (and whether its a cash or card payment), by a retailer on the island, or online on this website. All have different costs and overheads. Needless to say I have a complicated spreadsheet and an accounting system that helps.
Then there’s cashflow to manage. Book printing is rather expensive, especially when really high quality paper and binding is used as for Skye At Night. A print run has to be paid for up-front, by me. There’s no publisher with deep pockets involved, it’s all self-financed. Therefore the first two print runs are relatively small at 250 each. This also avoids overstocking, and makes it faster to get money to SMRT compared to doing a very large print run and waiting ages to get into profit.
Another factor to bear in mind is that most orders are online using card payments. It can take some time for the money from these card transactions to get paid out, so that needs to be balanced against the overheads and donation amount.
Happily, things are now stabilising a bit after the initial setup costs, launch event costs, and buying stuff like packaging materials. Card payment money is landing in the Skye At Night bank account (I set up Skye At Night Ltd to ensure everything is kept separate from an accounting and operations perspective) and that makes it possible to work out profit numbers and send donations over to SMRT.
As more books are sold (the second print run is over 50% pre-sold already), I’ll keep a cadence of donations going as the accounting allows. Needless to say it feels bloody brilliant to press the “send” button on my banking app to ping another donation over to SMRT.