How severe is your fluctuation of income over the year usually?

ValKalinic

In your experience, how drastic can the typical change be depending on the month?

Mark Simonson

For me, I don't see any obvious patterns. I have about a dozen different vendors and they each vary independently, some vary more, some vary less, but not following the same patterns. I also don't see any overall patterns that repeat from year to year. The range of variation (with each vendor and overall during the year) seems to be the only thing that is relatively predictable, which can be up a 4x variance or more with individual vendors and 2x or more overall variance from month to month. Some of the overall variance in my income has to do with different payment schedules of vendors--some monthly, some quarterly, etc..

I suspect that there are few consistent patterns among different font makers. Yes, we are all selling fonts, but we are not selling the same fonts.

I also imagine that the vendors may see overall patterns over their entire library and from year to year, but I doubt that they would have much relationship to the variations that individual font makes see.

Nick Shinn

My experience is very similar to Mark’s.

Jess McCarty

Complex Latin display script designer checking in. Summer months (June - August) are the slowest time of year and are generally about 40% less than peak sales months (December - February).

For those selling to stationery markets, weddings in particular, most design happens in the winter & spring; those are typically peak sales quarters.

But every market is different, as is every foundry's experience in all honesty. There are larger industry trends but when it comes to type, I'm of the mind that sales patterns are like fingerprints. We all have them, but each of us is unique.

JoyceKetterer

Indie foundry with very few vendors checking in.  

The only really consistent thing is that we make more than half of our non-royalty income (our only real vendor of note is adobe and their business model is closer to subscription so not relevant here) in the first half of the year.  Not by a huge amount but always more than half.

For many years summer was totally dead but that's not been true for the past few years.  I can't really figure out what's changed but part of the change is that some of the autumnal sales have reallocated to summer because the "first half more than half" rule has held steady. 

I have a year over year comparison chart up and I can see that November is usually the best month in the second half of the year but not by so much that its noticeable without a table (and I had in fact forgotten till I looked again).  I know for certain that December looks artificially low because we usually have a bunch of activity in December that leads to deferred payment in January (which looks artificially high).  

ValKalinic

@JoyceKetterer @Jess McCarty @Nick Shinn @Mark Simonson
Thanks for taking the time and sharing your insights!

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JoyceKetterer

@james montalbano - any idea why?  

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