First things first - I dont regularly use or donate to AO3 but I have made an account to see what the fuss was about. Fanfiction just isnt my thing but I see why people like it.

AO3 is a 501©(3) organization. What that means - No Profit for owners or investors. What that does NOT mean - no cash at year end or not paying employees a livable wage/salary. If you’re contrivance with a non-profit is that they allow their employees to survive under capitalism, then you need to rethink your priorities.

That being said, AO3 has no employees. All work is volunteer based. ABSOLUTELY ZERO people are making money from this site. (Outside of contractors and professionals who are vendors and not affiliated with AO3.)

I’m going to break down the 2019 Audited Financials because that’s the most recent. And compare them to the budget and notes:

The auditor’s opinion is “unmodified.” That means these are as accurate as they get.

Their assets: $1.3M in cash. $197k in the value of the servers. (That’s the price they bought the servers minus depreciation. Depreciation is a tool we use to slowly devalue fixed assets over time. Without it, companies would recognize huge losses at year end when they sell old assets. That’s not reliable information when you’re trying to analyze the financials.) Why would a non-profit need a million dollars in cash? Partly to fund the next year’s work - it looks like they’re trying to bring on new servers which can cost upwards of $400k each time. They also have a history of protecting fans from people like Anne Rice who wants to sue them into debt and oblivion. We’ll talk about the legal stuff later. But in the case they would lose an expensive case, they need funds on hand to pay that out.

Revenues - this is the money in. They received $733k in donations and the like. Their expenses are about 37% of these. Which tells me, they are focused on managing their cash balance, and doing well. Again. No organization would survive if they had no cash at year end.

You might see the “In-Kind Revenue” and not know what that means. $190k is a big amount. But if you look at their expense statement on page (4) you’ll see “In-Kind Expenses” for the same $190k. In-kind means services in kind of cash. Or services instead of cash. So they had $190k of pro-bono (donated) legal work in 2019. They mention it in the budget and later in the audit footnotes. There are other “professional fees” for about $28k. That’s also legal/audit work but they had to pay cash for. It wasn’t donated.

Cash expenses:

Server fees = $79k (these are higher than 2018 because they installed a new server.)

Transaction fees = $27k (these are charges from your banks/credit cards/paypal to process donations. They are roughly 3% of donations which is about correct.)

Contractor fees = $15k (the budget noted they paid for a security test - this is actually a pretty low cost for something like this.)

Supplies = $14k (I couldn’t find notes on this but it’s similar to 2018, so it’s probably just normal business things.)

Postage = $12k (This is high compared to 2018, but I hazard a guess it’s related to sending out promotional items for donations.)

Advertising = $10k (looks like a new cost this year, but is related to fundraising efforts. And might be related to those promo items.)

Other non-cash expenses:

In-kind = $190k (those donated lawyer fees we talked about earlier.)

Depreciation = $74k (again this is an accounting process that every company with fixed assets does.)

The cash flows statement just confirms which expenses were and weren’t cash. And it shows us that they have $1.3M available for the next year. Glancing at the 2020 budget they planned on spending a third of that to upgrade servers. And they have another $400k budgeted for 2021. Honestly to me, the cash looks low considering some years (2018 in particular,) their legal work was valued at half a million. There is a risk that they would have to pay that amount out of pocket the same year they plan to bring on a new server upgrade.

Amazon and Audible made it into their policy that you can return ebooks and audiobooks and get a full refund.

They actively promote this, making their book shop into a book lending service, de facto a library you subscribe to. That’s their business plan to encourage subscribtions.

The dirty thing, however, is that Amazon and Audible are making the authors pay for each refunded item. They will detract money, income, royalties, from the authors’ account. They’re not hurting from the refund, the author is.

Look, no-one is saying you’re not allowed to return an item if you’ve read the first 50 pages or listened to the first 45 minutes. Maybe the style is not your thing. Maybe you don’t like the narrator’s voice. Maybe the quality of the writing drops severely after chapter three. Go ahead, if the product is bad, return it.

What I’m talking about is that no one should be able to listen to a ten-hour audiobook or read through nearly an entire novel and still get a refund.

Most of the readers don’t know who’s paying for this business plan. It’s not Amazon and Audible, they’re still keeping your subscription money. It’s the authors.

if you refund the book seven days after purchase, Audible pays the author royalties.

Audible has a return policy, where people can return audiobooks and get a credit refund, within 365 days. Audible then takes back the royalties they paid to the publishers. The Authors Guild has gathered thousands of signatures from publishers and writers. The letter was sent to CEO Bob Carrigan and general counsel member Stas Zakharenko to “immediately cease the practice of deducting royalties from authors’ and narrators’ accounts when a purchased audiobook is returned or exchanged days, weeks, or even months later, regardless of whether or not they have listened to the entire book.”

The authors state: “This policy is in clear breach of the duty of good faith and fair dealing implied in the authors’ agreements with Audible and ACX as it allows books to be purchased and listened to without paying the authors and narrators their royalties.” The guild has also asked the Amazon audiobook subsidiary to display the total number of unit purchases and returns on the author dashboards, rather than just the “net sales” already adjusted for any returns, as is currently the case. It estimates authors could have lost 15%–50% of earnings as a result of the policy.

Audible does not want another legal fight on their hand and bowed to the pressure. Starting January 1st, 2021, the company will pay royalties to authors for any title returned more than seven days following purchase. The company currently deducts royalties from authors’ and narrators’ accounts when a purchased audiobook is returned or exchanged within a year.

I won the 2004 Hugo Award for Best Short Story for an H. P. Lovecraft /Arthur Conan Doyle mashup fiction, so fanfiction had better be legitimate, because I’m not giving the Hugo back.

The Lord of the Rings van Gogh style.

2020: The Year from Hell

Baby Pumpkin figured out the stairs today! 

Some people in the mental health community seem to understand that, a lot of times it explains their own mental illness. But for some reason, they can’t seem to make the connection that they are just as capable of doing the same.

It takes a lot of self awareness to see how you are hurting others, and it sucks once you do, but you have to understand that you’re not always going to be the victim.

And one of the only ways we can stop this cycle is by letting people set their boundaries. All people are just as worthy of setting boundaries like yourself, and you have to understand that. Even if you apologize/over apologize, people are allowed to keep their distance.

- Svetlana Boym, “Estrangement as a Lifestyle: Shklovsky and Brodsky”

“Bilinguals overwhelmingly report that they feel like different people in different languages. It is often assumed that the mother tongue is the language of the true self. (…) But, it first languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed, freeing their speakers to ride different currents.”

My name is Aurel from Indonesia. Currently, I’m on my last year on college and I need to do my thesis to graduate. I need your help!

My thesis will be about “How fan fiction helps non nantive speaker learn English”. To find out, i need to analyze at least 25 people✨ I reallllly need your help to fullfill my target!

What can you do to help?

🌸 If you’re a non native speaker but you feel like fan fiction helps you understand English, please fill this GForm to help;

🌼If you’re native speaker but still want to help, you can reblog this to help spread this.

Here’s the link to the GForm

👉🏼 HERE

If you have any questions regarding this please ask me directly via DM🦋