Most important things first: if we break $25,000 in funding before Friday at noon Central time, I'll give all print backers an extra gift with their copy of Distance. There are only 48 hours remaining in the project. We can hit this – turn the word out!

The rest of this post is going to be pretty heavy on number crunching, but such is the way when discussing… the business plan. I believe in providing as much transparency as humanly possible, and sharing the numbers behind Distance represents a good first step.

Distance is meant to be a self-sustaining enterprise. Authors get paid. I get paid. The whole thing takes on a thin air of professionalism that can only exist in a world where I am no longer sleeping next to a thousand copies of a book I once made.

I'm working with my friend Jason to open a coworking space in my neighborhood, six blocks from where I live. There will be space for me to store and ship copies of Distance, and for me to work on Distance and other freelance projects. I'll also have 24-hour access and a rooftop deck for throwing interesting events and local talks. I very much want to build and nurture a local community around my work, and this place is going to be ground zero for it. This week, the varnish is drying on the floor, meaning people can't go inside, but I'll post photos of our progress as soon as I can.

I've registered as a sole proprietorship in Illinois, and have the DBA paperwork to prove it. Towards that end I've put up a very rough site at Distance Press, and future work will be released through that. (For instance, when the second edition of Cadence & Slang is released, it legally needs a press name on its Library of Congress record. So now it's going to have one.)

Expenses

I've put together several big fancy complicated Excel spreadsheets to include all Distance-related expenses, including a few (like Dropbox and Typekit) that I formerly used in other projects. I've broken expenses into one-time expenses, monthly rolling expenses, per-issue expenses, and annual expenses. Then I run it through a bunch of fancy calculations that make the annual expenses into per-month expenses, etc., and I come up with a monthly total.

One-time expenses:

• $2,200: Typeface licenses
• $52: Business checks
• $13: Binder for said business checks
• $13: Rubber stamp for envelopes
• $40: Portrait of myself to use in the "about the authors" section
• $1,600: Kickstarter postage (approximate)

Annual expenses:

• $276: Shopify storefront
• $175: Endicia (postage software)
• $25: Typekit
• $138: Dropbox, for coordinating edits and supplementary content with authors
• $30: Hosting for distance.cc
• $45: Cloud.app, for posting screenshots and sharing assets with authors
• $19: Simplenote
• $34: Domain registration (distance.cc)
• $49: Domain registration (dsn.tc, for shortening URLs in citations)
• $14.50: Domain registration (distancepress.com)

Issue expenses:

• $5,400: Printing. This is the absolute worst case, as I haven't selected a printer yet. It could go as low as $2,800, and will more realistically settle around $4,500.
• $3,000: Author payment ($1,000*3)
• $120: Author portraits
• $106: Stickers to include in the printed issue
• $66: Envelopes
• $134: Labels
• $25: ISBN (I bought a block of ten for $250.)

Monthly expenses:

• $375: Coworking desk
• $5: Fetch (Shopify extension that allows digital downloads)

Not counting one-time expenses, which I've already bootstrapped – and which this Kickstarter project is meant to address – this all calculates out to $3,470.13 in expenses per month, or $10,410.39 per issue. I've already paid around $3,900 of my own money to get Distance running, most of which went towards typeface licenses. Once the project finishes, I'll be paying that back to myself.

Revenue

You already know a lot about my revenue: the prices are to the right, there, along with the number of people who have purchased each, and in an earlier update, I mentioned that I'll be doubling the cost of sponsorships once the Kickstarter project ends in two days. Right now I have issue 2 almost sold out for sponsorships (one left!), and am in talks over a few of issue 3's slots.

I plan to print 2,000 copies of every issue of Distance – and once an issue sells out, the digital bundle will be your only option. If I sell out the print run of every issue and make no digital sales – an impossibility, granted, but humor me – I'll make around $19,300 per issue. (Copies are $20, but subscriptions are $75, meaning the average revenue is a little less than $20.) And digital sales are essentially pure profit, minus Shopify and Fetch's fees. And and: digital sales will go on forever after a release, bringing in trickles of money that will likely compound as more issues are released.

The takeaway (scroll down here if you got bored)

Distance will allow me to eat burritos in a city with a really low cost of living if it pulls any more than around $10,000 per issue. But you've already raised so much, nickd!, you say? Not really, though: because of the way this is organized, I have four issues to print and ship to those who have subscribed. We aren't break-even yet, and while we basically have the first two issues covered, I'm currently betting on the ability to raise enough awareness to cover at least the next two.

I wouldn't be doing this project if I wasn't confident enough about my ability to sell out copies – and for the essays to be good enough that they'll speak for themselves. But that's where we are right now, and as with any other publication of this type, word of mouth is all we're going to have. If you like Distance, tell the world. Show it to your friends and colleagues. Talk about it on your blog. Debate authors about their views. Make this better: you're publishing it, too.