My sister and I wrote a children's book that is currently being published. We have built a decent following online for the book series and since the publishing process is long and slow we wrote a free Halloween story about bullying.

We have received fantastic feedback on the bullying story and now hope to have it illustrated so that we can make it a free eBook vs. just a text pdf as it is now.

To this point, our writing and the book series has not made us any money. The cost of the website and legal fees have all been out of pocket. We can't afford an illustrator.

So we want to create an IndiGogo campaign to raise money to have the story illustrated. Then we will offer the book for free on our site as well as Amazon and other places where free eBooks can be found.

This is a lot of background to get to the meat of the question which is this: we are a parnertship, but not even legally yet. My sister and I just have a simple written agreement between us. We are not a "Not-For-Profit" company. We intend to earn a profit on the published book. So, if we do the InidiGogo campaign, how do we properly account for any donations we receive from IndieGogo?

We are in the USA.

I sincerely appreciate any help!

The usual definitions of carrying on a business include the intention to make a profit so you have a partial ingredient but you intend to give away product for which you have incurred cost.

Your revenue stream might include some incidential income in the form of donations or what could more correctly be called graturaties and so will be included in your revenue