Sime~Gen System Administrator's Report
- by Patric Michael, Webmaster

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Sime~Gen Reviews Department Report
- by Midge Baker, Reviews Department Manager

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SimeCenter Report
- by Kaíres Tévesu, Simecenter Editor

In hopes of handing this task off in the future, I've been documenting the process of producing each issue, and also updating the templates. It gets a bit easier each time...as long as I don't make dumb mistakes.

We got 2 new authors: Rochelle Campbell and Austin Camacho. I'm trying to get a new artist: Bernie Lee. I write to her every month when I'm getting ready to start the new edition, but our timing hasn't meshed so far.

I guess the most exciting thing is the issue I just finally finished last night.
We have a story from a Holiday anthology, which was published to raise money for charity. We did something similar in December 2005: featuring a story from a romance anthology, produced to raise money for Heifer International. This one is a crime anthology, designed to raise money for the Toys for Tots program.

I owe special thanks to several people this year:
- Lois - donating 3 lovely stories that kept SimeCenter going these last few months
- Jean - letting me serialize Savage Empire (giving me an excuse to read it again)
- Patric - putting up with the flakiness my computer keeps foisting on me
- and especially Shelly - offering to help, donating a story, and introducing me to Austin Camacho.

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Sime~Gen Financial Report
- by Jean Lorrah, Treasurer

2007 was both a good and a bad year for finances.
On the good side we increased our income by approximately 40%.
On the bad side, we increased our expenses by about 60%, with more to come. 
Because we had to purchase a new server, we will have a couple of years of installment payments. And because it is a larger, faster server, we will be paying more for space and bandwidth. So in 2008 we have to make a concerted effort to increase our income. The more Patric can automate things like site building, the easier it will be to get more people to host their domains with us--one of our steadiest income streams.
Advertising is also an important income stream. Banner ads continue to be a good source of income.
<JL`> As Patric reported, we should soon be able to offer the most modern banner formats.
<jean> We have a number of advertising packages, but most people choose the simplest ones.
Plans for 2008 include putting Google Adsense on simegen.com. I've researched it, and it's not very difficult to do. What we don't know is how much income we can generate using their plainest, least intrusive ads.
We also keep talking about creating and selling some kind of "how-to" book ourselves, but the problem is always time to write it, and then market it. Not to mention the problem of exactly WHAT kind of how-to book it should be!
To sum up, within the next few months we MUST increase our income or simegen.com will not be able to continue supporting itself. We would like to increase the number of people hosting their domains with us, one of our easiest to maintain income streams. We would like to increase the number of people advertising with us. And we would like to create a piece of information that we can sell.
That ends the treasurer's report.

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Sime~Gen President's Report
- by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, President

The year dawned full of hope and plans but we soon ran into turbulence.
Several spam-caused outages reduced our traffic again and again, without recovery afterward. Patric fought as hard as he could, but there was no denying we were going down repeatedly from bad sectors on a failing hard drive. Once fully analyzed, the problem revealed the necessity to replace the hardware we are running the Unity server on, which also houses all our hosted clients.
We took some weeks to investigate options and to compare renting new/used hardware or buying it. It was a really close judgement call, and finally we opted to buy. More weeks were lost as Patric was distracted by other work, but finally over Thanksgiving weekend we were fully moved onto our new hardware.
With new capabilities and software upgrades, a RAID server's backup abilities, we are now working on restoring traffic.
But our personnel roster is shifting. This summer, long time head of the Reviews Department, Laurraine Tutihasi resigned in good order to devote herself to her husband's retirement move to Arizona. We owe much to Laurraine's hard work on Reviews and her smooth handover is an example to all others. Marjorie Baker stepped into Laurraine's shoes and with the help of Karen MacLeod and Patric Michael is gradually learning the necessary skills, but seems to have a natural talent at management.
Unfortunately, due to our various outages and bad sectors on disks, the List Laurraine used to present books to our Reviewers died in the middle of the summer. They stopped hearing from us, and drifted away. Now we have a multitude of new books to review but of the dozens and dozens who have signed up to review for us, only 5 or 6 are currently posting reviews. Those reviews are mostly books they have found for themselves.

In December 2007, Patric restored full service to our Lists, running smoothly on the new hardware. We still struggle against spam, though. Recruiting and rebuilding the Reviews department will be a big effort for 2008. The Romance Department went totally dormant several years ago, and during the move to the new server, Patric cleaned out that section and we are now rebuilding it as a major gateway. He hopes to use that department to showcase some flash based banners and possibly book trailer videos and other newer high-tech presentations. Once Patric has it set up, we should be able to offer to make book trailers (i.e. videos about their books) for authors at reasonable fees.
Kaires is also looking to hand off Sime Center, but we haven't found an editor for that department. It does require considerable html skills to manage, as well as the ability to find donated stories and worthy causes.
Bruce Gray has been ill this year and seldom updated his /fandom/ department and Keybooks bookshelves.
My Keybooks book shelves are not up to date, though my Review column is -- all of which provide Amazon links as does Reviews. Likewise, after futilely repairing our Webring I have been devoting time I normally devote to page maintenance and domain business to writing. I have one completed script ready for de-bugging, and one very rough draft of a Sime~Gen action script ready to rework, and meanwhile I'm exploring another script project.
Fall 2007, I finished the rough draft of the Tarot nonfiction book, "The Not So Minor Arcana" which is way too long for one volume (over 200,000 words). It's aimed at Intermediate Students of Tarot, not beginners or advanced. The last 20 weeks of 2007 I posted one Tarot chapter a week, every Tuesday, to http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/ about World Building. It's the equivalent of 2 short books in length. So together, "Never Cross a Palm With Silver" and the "Not So Minor Arcana" is at least 4 volumes. I have no idea if anyone (editor, publisher, or (except for a few) reader) is the least bit interested in this topic, but it's a project I started more than 10 years ago, and I just wanted it FINISHED. I haven't even thought about a market for it yet. It needs huge amounts of editing and fiddling with Microsoft Word formatting.
My review column is filed through June 2008 and you can see what the reviewed books will be at http://www.simegen.com/reviews/rereadablebooks/2008/
<JL`> I've done more writing in 2007 than 2006, but expect to do even more in 2008. However, I will also be busy. I'm teaching at the following con in Maryland in March: http://www.ecumenicon.org/conference/details/ I used to teach at this esoteric con when I lived in New York. I expect to be at Westercon (Las Vegas) and Worldcon (Denver) this year but plans haven't been sketched in for that yet. End President's Report

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Stock Awards

We can't give salaries or bonuses to the people who work so hard keeping simegen.com going.
However, what we can do is share Sime~Gen Inc. with them. Therefore each year we give shares of preferred stock in Sime~Gen Inc. to the people who have been with us at least a year, and have worked for our success. We've been keeping the corporation's head above water for years, so that the stock you own is worth a little more than when we first began giving it out. But as I reported earlier, we need to find a way to earn more--and our goal is to eventually earn ENOUGH more that not only will the stock be worth more, but we will be able to give actual cash bonuses. Salaries? Well, that one's off in the future somewhere at the time when we have enough income to hire a bookkeeper. Why is that? Once a company has even one employee, the paperwork is utterly incredible--it requires time and expertise. But bonuses are a possibility, even if right at this moment they are just a goal. Meanwhile, though, we will share the company with those who do the work via stock. Not options--this is actual stock: pieces of the company that the recipients own. Jacqueline will now post the list of stock recipients--all of them are people who have been with us for at least one full year.
Kaires 4
Doreen Dabinett 1
Eric Berlin 1
Karen MacLeod 4
Laurraine Tutihasi 1
Lisa Saunders 2
Lois Wickstron 4
Patric Michael 6
Ronnie Bob Whitaker 2
Wendy Fisher 1
Total 26 shares

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