It’s 2026, which means it’s time for another yearly wrapup.

You can find all our previous yearly and quarterly income reports here.

At the end of my 2024 wrap-up report I said:

“As for 2025, I’m sick of worrying about it. Somehow, it will all work out. Maybe it will be a disaster, who knows. I’ve been planning for a disaster for a long time, and yet…”

Well, good news…it did work out, and it was a disaster, and I did survive, and it was okay.

I went into how I burnt it all down in a recent post so I won’t litigate it again, but I will say that if you’re following along with these income reports, I really messed up my categorizations throughout the year.

Even though the total is roughly the same, how I categorized each transaction in this report has changed drastically, which changes the overall tenor of the year.

For instance, my “course” earnings increased 30%, and my publishing income decreased by roughly the same amount. This is because I really don’t take a ton of time to make sure everything is right every quarter before running the report.

However, since this all goes to my accountant after I finish the year, I’m much more diligent about making sure things line up. They didn’t this year. When I started this process, there was a $40k discrepency between my quarterly reports and my final numbers.

It took me several days and multiple attempts to correct all my previous assumptions, but I think it’s finally right in the report below. I can’t tell you how annoying it was, or how tedious, but for now let’s just get to the “good” stuff.

Crowdfunding - 13.6%

Even though the percentage was only down 6%, since total income was down significantly this year, I’m actually in a worse position than it shows right here. If you’re a paid member, I recommend just going down below and seeing how the actual numbers stack up. If you’re not, this is a great time to upgrade.

In total, this year was kind of a crowdfunding nightmare. In 2024, I posted my highest total Kickstarter revenue ever, as I partnered with Claire Venus, Melissa Storm, Laurie Foster, and my ex-business partner on projects throughout the year that put up big numbers.

2025, by comparison, was my lowest total crowdfunding revenue since 2019, when I only ran one project. Last year saw me consistently underperform expectations, which is something that never happened before. I put up 2017 numbers, when I only had two campaigns, even though I ran six of them. That means almost triple the effort for the same results. At this point in my business, that’s brutal.

Courses - 43.5%

If you haven’t been following along, then a couple years ago this category basically became a “repayment fund” to capture the money Writer MBA paid me for monies outlaid.

Think about that for a minute. Almost half my income last year came from Writer MBA repaying monies I outlaid. That is not good.

The biggest single category in my income report saw me mainly using one account to pay another, resulting in a circle jerk for most of my year. Because of the structure of my business, I have to log every debit and credit, even if it evens out, so basically my actual income is about half the total you can see below if you are a paid member.

Consulting - 6.7%

This was easily the biggest shock in 2025, and I include the dissolution of Writer MBA in that mix. In January, my biggest client of the past few years cancelled their contract. This was the contract I relied on to live, and contributed about 80% of the profit in my total business. I was able to make ridiculous investments and try bonkers things because I always had this money to fall back on. In 2025, I basically had to rebuild it from scratch. I got another client in September, but at 1/4th of my old rate.

Publishing - 28%

Before I recallibrated everything, my income reports showed that I made almost 40% more through publishing, and I was stoked. It felt like, for the first time in a while, my publishing business worked.

However, when combing through the numbers before giving them to my accountant, I realized that a ton of money I originally attributed here should have been attributed to Writer MBA repayments, meaning I did…not so great.

Still, between consulting and publishing, combined with not having as many projects in development and running no ads, I was able to have a little fund of profit in my otherwise revenue intensive business. I’m hoping in 2026 to get my profit up significantly from previous years, and do things that are mainly profit heavy, now that I’ve written like 80 books.

Tax Return - 6.9 %

My tax return doubled this year from previous years, which is kind of brutal when you realize how much money I must have spent in 2024 to make that happen. My 2025 taxes showed a loss of over $130k, which meant I effectively paid zero taxes, and received the biggest return of my whole life. While that was a nice boost given the lackluster start to 2026, I would rather not go through last year again to relive it.

Retailers - 1%

Retailer sales almost quadrupled this year, which is great, but I also launched like 30 books on retailers. When you 10x your retailer products and only 4x your revenue, that’s not great. Still, if I can somehow 10x this number, then it would be a nice amount I’m pulling in from this stream. IDK how I’ll do this without ad spend. Right now it’s just nice bonus money.

Royalties - .3%

I generally put a lot of stuff in this category that probably shouldn’t be considered royalties, like affiliate sales, just so this wouldn’t be a fat zero. Two years ago I thought we had entered my royalty age, but instead I ended contracts with many of my partners and publishers, while having several other projects delayed. Eventually, I chose to enter a second coming of the choosing myself era.

Now, we’re going to get to the meat of it. If you’re not a paid member, this post might be worth the price of admission by itself, because you see every dollar I made, and every expense. I don’t break out expenses in my quarterly reports, but I do below.

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I’ll be honest, Q4 went by in a blur. What I do remember of it was that I planned to close out projects toward the end of 2025, and instead I ended up writing two new books that packed into my release calendar for 2026.

I also ended up, instead of slowing my schedule, starting a new publication (Frictionless Growth), with 100+ posts and a 5-day challenge, hosting a virtual conference, and running out of my mind busy for six weeks between November and mid-December.

The good news is that I set up a lot of things at the end of 2025 that should make 2026 easier. Those things are now launched and out into the world. For 2026, my plan is not commit to anything that doesn’t already exist. So, launching books I already wrote, writing for publications that exist, and working with existing clients, plus taking consulting clients, along with strengthening existing brands.

Basically, if it’s a brand I was working on in 2025 after I burned most of my life to the ground, I can keep doing it. Otherwise, I need to carefully consider my next moves. I’ve spent so long gathering the pieces, but now I have time, and need to think about how to deploy them effectively.

Before I dig into last quarter’s revenue, I wanted to remind you that since 2017, I’ve kept a pretty detailed income report of my expenses. It’s an almost unbroken chain reaching back to when I started making real money at Wannabe Press. You can find them all here.

See my income reports

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Consulting - 17.6%

This is my biggest consulting quarter in a while, mainly because I took on a new client in September and spent the quarter onboarding them. I ran a virtual conference for them, and went to Author Nation to promote their brand. This should be something that consistently gives me a decent consulting boost, and I’m looking for a couple new clients, too. Otherwise, I had a few consulting calls, but no more than usual.

Crowdfunding - 29.5%

This is from the Publishing is Broken Kickstarter campaign I ran in September. It paid out through Q4 as the payment plans from a few pledges coming due. This campaign was smaller than I would have liked, but it did make fulfillment easier than I expected. So, that’s something right? I only have two campaigns I’m slated to run in 2026, and both for non-fiction properties. I have several I’m going to support, but I’m trying really hard to ONLY talk about Hapitalist stuff this year and see if I can build up a head of steam with it.

Publishing - 53.9%

Substack again brought in the majority of this bucket, and mainly from Hapitalist subscriptions which are $300/yr instead of the $20/yr average I have without it. I spent many years discounting my paid membership, but I stopped doing that in September.

It’s weird that both my subscriber base and my paid subs are shrinking and yet I’m growing my revenue. This was always the plan, to build a wide base of support and then focus on upgrading people, but it’s so weird to see it working. I need it to work about 10x faster in 2026 than it did in 2025, and that’s my main focus for the rest of the year. I’m not looking for scale until I can get this upgrade process working properly.

Thoughts

Q4 was about closing out projects so they didn’t follow me into 2026. I know it’s weird to think writing to books fits in that process, or starting a new publication, but my overall goal in the new year is to find as many inroads into Hapitalist as possible, while shimming down things that focus attention away from it. So, I think the 6FAE podcast is a great feeder into Hapitalist. I think Frictionless Growth is a great leadin. I think my new happiness book is a great leadin.

Meanwhile, The Author Stack wasn’t a great lead-in. A significant portion of people came expecting craft advice, not business strategy, so it wasn’t really aligned, which is why I converted the site into Hapitalist. Additionally, I heard A LOT is people confused about how to join Hapitalist, how to sign into their Hapitalist account, and a lot of people wondering how this kind of content has anything to do with writing a book, which is why I changed it.

I don’t like confusion, so I am trying to fix that confusion, and giving people better alignment.

Okay, now let’s get to the good stuff. If you’re not a paid member, you can sign up below.

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This quarter was mainly boring with little drama, and I needed it. That said, I had several dozen launches between retailers, Kickstarter, and my membership. I probably shouldn’t be so blasé about 20 or so launches last quarter, but I’ve done a lot of launches, so it’s hard to rattle me with them. They aren’t drama, they are just Tuesday.

In fact, it was this past quarter I realized that since 2020 I’ve been part of 103 book launches, and my Publishing is Broken Kickstarter campaign ended what seemed like an unbroken streak where I had a new book launch every month. By my count, I had roughly 17 launches per year…for six years. and that doesn’t even include launching books on different platform, relaunching things, launching anything that wasn’t books, etc.

I feel like I’ve been bossed around by my release schedule for the better part of a decade. In 2019, when I made my 2020-2024 schedule, I didn’t account for building Writer MBA, writing a ton of new non-fiction books, or partnering with so many wonderful people.

It might seem silly to feel beholden to a release schedule you set yourself, but once I got started writing, it was hard not to keep going with it, especially when I was in the middle of a series. Then, I needed to launch those books to fund their production.

The way my business works is that I have a production fund that I refill once I launch a book. So, every new launch pays for those books to be produced in arrears, which meant I got myself in a bit of a loop.

Then, with the launch of our conference, we were saddled with a $200,000 bill that we needed every dollar to pay for, and so this is the first time in six years that I feel like I have some control over my life and can make new decisions.

Until now, I was making reactive decisions that only worked for me at that moment in time and not necessary what was best for the long term health of my business. That has led, more and more this year, to my launches dropping like a rock as it feels like people are finally sick of me, or at least buying things from me.

Even when I wasn’t launching a book, there was almost always some project launching from one of the facets of my business, and I’m spending Q4 settling a lot of those old debts.

Then, in 2026, I have a much nicer, gentler new plan. I’ve only currently got one scheduled Kickstarter launch for my own projects, and one Hapitalist launch a quarter besides that one.

I’m being very picky about what projects I take on these days, too. I was on the phone with a sponsor of our conference who said “Unless I can make $250k on a partnership, it’s not worth the hassle”, and that resonated. I’m not at that level, but I’m trying not to take on projects until they can either make me $25k or that I don’t have to launch myself.

Plotdrive is a good example of the former. My goal is to grow that into a $10k/mo recurring revenue stream for myself. Even though that’s not where I’m at now, I’m willing to invest in it because it also helps further my aims of expanding my resume in AI and tech.

Working with Laguna Studios is a good example of the latter. Yes, I’m writing projects for them, but not in my universe. I’m playing in other people’s sandbox, which means I’m not wholly responsible for the launch. I can send a couple emails, do a live video or two, and then take my foot off the gas. It’s not all consuming, daily emails for months and months, just trying to grind out breaking even.

Both of them further my secondary goal of raising my profile. The best way to book more contract work is to have contract work that works out, which is what I’m working on doing now with Laguna.

With Plotdrive, it brings me into a whole new market and allows me to talk about craft, which is where most writers are focused, especially at the beginning of their career. I’ve not had much access to those writers until now because I teach mostly on the business side.

I’m less interested in opportunities that don’t raise my profile unless they hit that $25k threshold.

I got stuck in a loop for the last several years where all my responsibilities criss-crossed each other, but moving forward I’m trying to be more intentional in my approach. I’d like to launch no more than five Kickstarter campaigns a year that each bring in at least $25k in revenue, but really closer to $50k.

I envy my friends who can only take on $250k+ projects, so my new goal is to do fewer, more focused things better as I work to build Hapitalist. I’m already committed to Plotdrive and Laguna for at least the near-term future, and hopefully in 2027 I can take those in bigger and better directions. which means I don’t have much room for partnerships unless they come to me.

Before I dig into last quarter’s revenue, I wanted to remind you that since 2017, I’ve kept a pretty detailed income report of my expenses. It’s an almost unbroken chain reaching back to when I started making real money at Wannabe Press. You can find them all here.

See my income reports

If you’re not a paid member, you can get 20% off forever for joining us behind the paywall.

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Consulting - 4.0%

This has been my best consulting quarter of the year, mainly because I got paid good money to do a presentation for a conference. Otherwise, I made about what I do from consulting calls this quarter. Now that I’ve pivoted my content somewhat, I seem to be getting more traction on consulting calls. Still not enough to really move the needle, but it’s a little up from previous quarters, and as I pull back more from being so present, I’m hoping that will continue.

Crowdfunding - 12.6%

I only had one Kickstarter that paid out this quarter, and it was a bit of a disaster, honestly. I did less than 50% my goal, which is a huge miss for me. I don’t usually fall below projections. This is the first year it’s happened on multiple projects in a row. Since disbanding Writer MBA, I’ve had three launches and they have all been just dreadfully below projections.

I had a second project end last quarter, but it didn’t pay out until Q4, so it will show up on the next income report, and the end-of-year review.

Publishing - 83.4%

Substack brought in the most revenue from this bucket, and specifically a Hapitalist launch I’ll talk more about with paid members. I’ve been pretty happy with how this quarter turned out with publishing as an entire category. I even made decent money from retailers, though those won’t be paid out until Q4. Decent is, of course, based on perception. There was one other thing that made this significantly higher than I expected, but again I’ll be talking about that with paid subscribers.

Thoughts

Q3 was all about getting my books on retailers. I launched five non-fiction books onto retailers in August and 11 fiction books onto retailers in September. Honestly, since I didn’t do anything special for them, I probably should have just done it months ago., at least the fiction ones.

I couldn’t do the non-fiction books before August because of the simple fact many of them didn’t exist before then. Writer MBA pulled down all our co-written books, which meant I had to write three new books in Q2 that all launched in Q3.

The other two books couldn’t launch until they did because I gave an exclusivity window to Kickstarter backers. So, to keep things lined up correctly, I had to do it that way for the non-fiction, but the fiction books had been delivered to backers a year before, so I could have done them way earlier.

At the beginning of the year, I had over 20 books to release on retailers, and now I only have three. One will be released this month, one (hopefully) next month, and then we’ll see about the last one.

It means that in 2026, I can stop being led around by my past. As writers, we almost always are at some level because of how writing works. We finish a book, then it goes to an editor, and by the time we launch it we’re onto the next project, but some of these books I released last quarter were written in 2018.

I’m dying to talk about the next thing, and I still haven’t even announced my one book that I’ve been wanting desperately to talk about all year. However, I couldn’t until the rest of this stuff was out. That all changes soon.

Okay, now let’s get to the good stuff. If you’re not a paid member, you can sign up below.

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Writer MBA is officially dead and buried, and I have a lot of feelings about it. I have gone in depth about those feelings before, so I won’t be doing it again.

It’s worth nothing, though, that this will likely be the last time we’ll be talking about Writer MBA in these reports, except for maybe the end of year revenue recap.

Moving forward we should be able to see all my revenue and expenses.

Remember, our spending and revenue was much higher for Writer MBA, but we never had a full transparency policy, so I’ve only ever shared the money that passed through to my solo creative businesses. If you want to read more about how my company(ies) are/were structured, I explain it here.

Along with ending that partnership, last quarter also saw a collab with for our $10k Secrets project.

Earlier this week I went into depth about the good, the bad, and the ugly. To sum up, we met about it in January, launched it in April, brought in a little money, and built both our lists by about 1,000 people each. Even though it was small, it was a bear to do this while closing out Writer MBA at the same time,

Between those two events, that about sums up how I spent my Q2, save for a two week research trip to Prague/Vienna/Bratislava at the end of it.

Before I dig into it, I wanted to remind you know that since 2017, I’ve kept a pretty detailed income report of my expenses. It’s an almost unbroken chain reaching back to when I started making real money at Wannabe Press. You can find them all here.

See my income reports

If you’re not a paid member, you can get 20% off forever for joining us behind the paywall.

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Consulting - 1.43%

Just like last quarter, people only booked one off consulting calls, nothing long term or big ticket. I could have really used one of those two things this quarter, especially since there has been nothing but chaos and businesses burning down.

I’ve been able to survive alright without a big client bringing in lots of profit for me, but it’s been really stressful. This Substack really helps.

I’ve had to shift my business around quite a bit to make this new normal work for me, and now with the dissolution of Writer MBA I have to do it again, but I think it’s for the best. I never loved the consulting work I was doing before, but it was so lucrative I couldn’t stop doing it. Writer MBA was a great company and I loved it, but it never did more than break even while cannibalizing both of our solo businesses.

So, it’s been a tough year, and I would like it if next quarter I didn’t lose another huge bit of business, but yeah, it’s okay, I guess.

Crowdfunding - 36.67%

This is a little more in line with how much I make from crowdfunding every quarter than last quarter. However, in 2026 I’m moving more to a model that doesn’t have me using crowdfunding 8-10 times a year.

I’m moving back to the 4-5 campaigns (or fewer) I’ve run prior to starting Writer MBA, and that will be inclusive of partner launches. Plus, they will almost exclusively be for fiction projects and partnerships, with my non-fiction being run through The Author Stack, and the new Hapitalist membership I launched this month.

I went through a massive productivity boom in the last five years, and a lot of my life has been about funding those books, finishing them, and getting them on retailers.

Prior to 2020, I had been involved in 19 books.

Now, I have been involved in 110 publishing projects from card games to comics to guest editing a magazine, and it’s exhausting, you know? Like not just to me, but to my audience.

So, my hope is that starting next year I can settle down. I have my methodologies down, and I can now funnel people to all sorts of places.

The good news is that I’ve never lost money on a book, which means everything out there is an asset for me hopefully gathering money over time, even if little by little.

Publishing - 29.6%

For years, my straight publishing income has been lackluster. Before the pandemic, I made a lot of publishing income from conventions. After that part of my business blew up, I’ve been struggling to expand beyond crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding is great for frontlist titles, but publishers generally make 50% of their revenue off their backlist. The goal for me has always been to use crowdfunding as the first step in my publishing journey, then transition that success into the rest of my business.

In an ideal world, publishing would be 50-60% of my income, 20% from crowdfunding, 10% from consulting, and then 10% from miscellaneous things.

I’m still woefully terrible at making money on retailers, but my subscription revenue is making up for it, along with some website and retailer sales that help smooth it out.

This would be a lot easier if I still could do conventions, but I’m making progress, and that is progress.

Courses - 32.3%

I received a final payout from Writer MBA this quarter, and I also got some repayment for funds I spent on our last Kickstarter, but I’m probably closing out this section next quarter, as it’s become a catch-all for “money I made from Writer MBA”, and not really from courses. Without Writer MBA, there’s not much need for it.

Since my big courses are all inside of the new Hapitalist membership, there won’t be much need for it going forward.

Thoughts

For the whole of my career, I’ve been searching for happiness and contentment. I have built so many businesses thinking they would give me what I needed, only to find that nothing filled that hole inside me.

Every business would teach me a little bit more about what I needed, but the truth was that perhaps there is no such thing as a dream job. Perhaps we should not dream of labor, as James Baldwin said.

I know the thing I like doing most is tinkering with lots of projects, working with many partners, and not focusing too much on one thing or another. One of the things I love about The Author Stack is I can basically talk about anything while Wannabe Press lets me basically write about anything.

If I want to plan a collab with somebody cool, there’s almost always something we can do through the lens of this publication.

I like lots of little projects that let me test things out without committing to something specific and narrow. While I loved our conference, having to push everyone and everything to one week a year in one city didn’t give me a lot of freedom. It put a ton of pressure on 1/52 of the year.

I let myself be pulled away from that happy place in the past couple of years, mainly because I committed to things before I even knew what my happy place really was, and now I have to shed a lot of the weight that built up over the years.

I’m hoping now that I’ve burned so much of my life down yet again, I can build back better.

By the end of 2025, I want to have all my solo fiction books on retailers. I should also have 9 of my 10 non-fiction books on retailers, and be laser-focused on Hapitalist.

My goal in 2026 is to be putting maximum effort on Hapitalist, with one non-fiction book launch a year. Then, I’d like to develop more partnerships and be working with people to expand the brand outside of Wannabe Press and The Author Stack.

By having fewer of my own books launching, it gives me space for those partnerships to happen, and that’s where I thrive.

Okay, now let’s get to the good stuff. If you’re not a paid member, you can sign up below.

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First income report of 2025, and the last one to wrap up our 2025 conference, which happened last month. I paid the last invoice on the last day of this month, so everything should now be contained in this report.

One thing I will say upfront is that the amount of money we spent this quarter was wild. I have never seen so much money flow in and out of my businesses in a month. Of course, the conference is a Writer MBA project and this is only about Wannabe Press income, including income Wannabe Press has received from Writer MBA. Since most of the bills for our conference flowed through Wannabe Press, you’ll get a pretty good picture of the expenses for this event, but it’s not 100% accurate.

In general, we would receive a bill, I would put it on my Wannabe Press credit card (for triple points, of course), and then be reimbursed through Writer MBA. We’ve tried it multiple ways, and our Writer MBA cards often won’t push through that much money, while my Wannabe Press cards have been dealing with that kind of monetary traffic for years. It’s an imperfect system, but it did pay for flights to Europe and hotels for our upcoming European vacation, so it wasn’t all bad, either.

Our spending and revenue is much higher for Writer MBA, but we don’t have a full transparency policy for Writer MBA, so you’re only getting my solo creative businesses. If you want to read more about how my company(ies) are structured, I explain it here.

Before I dig into it, I wanted to let you know that since 2017, I’ve kept a pretty detailed income report of my expenses. It’s an almost unbroken chain reaching back to when I started making real money at Wannabe Press. You can find them all here.

See my income reports

If you’re not a paid member, you can get 20% off forever for joining us behind the paywall.

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Consulting - 1%

I haven’t made this little consulting in a long time. In January, my biggest client basically said they were shuttering the line of business I helped them with and moving in another direction. I had been making $40k-$50k for the last couple of years working with them, so that hurt. However, it wasn’t unexpected. I spent last year dumping all the money I made with them into ads to grow something new since I saw this coming. It’s not that I’m happy about it, but their money was spent last year already trying (and failing) to make something else work. So, I wasn’t relying on it and haven’t been for over a year.

Of course, I expected to have found another line of business by now to replace this income and I just haven’t. This is mainly due to the fact that our conference literally took all my energy and though I launched some books, I haven’t put together a big launch for a course, membership, or anything else like that for a long time. It has been just enough money to pay my bills, but my accounts have not been this low for a long, long time.

Now, I might just be screwed, but I couldn’t even look at that until now.

Crowdfunding - 5.32%

I only ran one campaign this year through Wannabe Press, and it made not very much comparably to what I’m used to making through our campaigns. In one respect, I’m not that concerned about it, since it was for a cyberpunk and a contemporary thriller, which aren’t my genres, but in another respect I am absolutely petrified that maybe I am not relevant as a fiction writer anymore, not that I was ever very relevant in the first place. I have a new book in my most popular universe launching later this year, so I should be okay, but I am still reeling at the massive underperformance of my campaign from last January to close out the Obsidian Spindle Saga.

I’ve run two additional campaigns this year, but they were both through Writer MBA, which as I mentioned above doesn’t have a full transparency policy. You can see the campaigns here and here. Almost all the money we’ve raised through Writer MBA Kickstarters has gone back into the conference. I did get paid out on the Substack book but it was used to buffer our expenses for a couple months before I finally got paid out on it. Basically, for the last two years all our non-fiction book money went to this conference.

Publishing - 14.52%

I actually did better than I thought with this category, which is nice. I have usually thought of publishing as the profit margin for my publishing ventures, as most of the crowdfunding is invested in making new products. When combined with my consulting income, it mostly makes the money I live on day-to-day. Now that everything else in my business has cratered, I’m not sure what will become of this breakdown, but it’s how I think about my money even now. I’ll probably do an audit after we get back from Europe in July, but until then I’m so in my head about the conference it’s hard to think about anything else.

Courses - 79.16%

Okay, so true talk, all this money is repayment for paying off our conference on my Wannabe Press work card. That should tell you just how brutal this year has been so far, since almost 80% of the money I made was spent before I even made it.

Thoughts

I don’t think I have many thoughts on this right now. I’m kind of shellshocked, frankly. If you want to hear more about what I think about the conference, I wrote about them all here. I feel like this is the end of a two year gauntlet, and I’m frankly bereft of ideas, and energy. It’s everything not to crawl in a hole and die right now.

Okay, now I’m going to spill all the tea for paid members. If you want to read more, you can get 20% off an annual membership, and that continues forever. This is where I give you the numbers behind the percentages.

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Hi,

It’s 2025, which means it’s time for another yearly wrapup.

You can find all our previous yearly and quarterly income reports here.

I ended 2024 working going bankrupt, which is the main goal I have with any year but, like every year, what felt like a nightmare during it actually ended up…pretty good? Our new investments grew 16.22% this year and by the third highest number all time. We moved to a new financial advisor this year and they made us more in six months than we made at our previous advisor the whole time we worked with them.

I’m not going to give you the name, because they have a minimum investment requirement that will give away a bit of my personal finances, and I am not comfortable doing that to my wife. So, you’ll just have to speculate wildly.

As always, the percentages are available to everyone, but if you want to dig into the actual numbers and the expenses (since I already had to do it for taxes and we all deserve a treat) you can keep scrolling.

This was my biggest year ever by a wide margin, so let’s get into it.

Crowdfunding - 19.31%

Even though my combined projects raised $127k on Kickstarter, most of them were run by other companies, which means I didn’t gross most of that money in my income. Remember, I’m only sharing Wannabe Press revenue, not Writer MBA, and a lot of that money is captured by that company. This was just about what I projected. I only missed this projection by about 13%

Courses - 31.08%

This is a bit of a misnomer, because I paid a lot of expenses and recouped those expenses through Writer MBA this year. Since you have to log it as revenue for the IRAS, I count both the expense and deduction. This was about 50% more than I thought, but I also didn’t expect to put as much of this conference on my Wannabe Press cards.

Consulting - 19.77%

I worked mainly for one company this year, that ended up not continuing my contract into 2025, so this is gonna drop like a rock unless I can find a way to make up that income. I did more consultations with authors than I ever have before, and I’m interested to keep that going at a deeper level this year. This is all profit for me, so I often use this money as my slush fund. It hurts to lose it, but I actually thought I would lose it in June, so I got six more months out of it than I thought. This one was 2x more than I projected

Publishing - 22.67%

I pull our crowdfunding because it’s always been such a big part of my company, but everything else goes into this line item, which was one of my biggest categories for the first time since 2019. I know that sounds weird coming from a publishing company, but that’s just because I pull out crowdfunding, royalties, and retailers into their own categories, which left this historically with just conference income and anything I made from my websites. With the introduction of Substack, it’s become a much more powerful category. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was my #1 category in 2025. This one came in significantly bigger than I projected.

Tax Return - 2.7%

Last year I operated at a loss, so I got a decent return. I have about 2x the loss this year with all the ads stuff, so I expect to get a decent return, which will hopefully help heal some of the bruises from this year. Now that it’s over, I can maybe make some money on my suffering. This was double what I anticipated, which is nice.

Retailers - .28%

Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Yeah. I’m putting 15 more novels onto retailers this year, so I’m hoping this will be a bigger part of my business moving forward. I predicted this category to be almost 2x bigger this year than it was, but even if I doubled this income, it’s still pretty insignificant.

Royalties - .44%

Would you believe that I predicted this category to be over 10x bigger than it ended up being? It was one of my biggest misses. So, I would like to change that, but if our investments still go up 10%+ every year, it’s hard not to be happy with that.

If you’re a paid member, I’ll see you below the break. Otherwise, feel free to subscribe now to see the actual numbers and expenses from this year, with numbers to go along with all these percentages. This post alone is literally worth the price of admission for the whole year.

Other - 3.75%

Your guess is as good at mine about this category. I finished categorizing everything and there was a big disparity between the income I tracked in Quickbooks and the income credit item I made. I would guess it’s from returns from retailers and other things where it’s technically a debit/credit situation, but it does come up as income, technically. I’m so so tired, y’all. I can’t look at this for another second, and there’s not a clear category, so I’m just leaving it hear. This is a good problem to have, though, so I’ll take it. More accounting errors in my favor, please!

Okay, if you aren’t a paid member, this is where I leave you, but I think you should like, definitely subscribe because I’m going into the actual numbers and expenses. Plus, I’ll finally tell you how I can lose a ton of money every year and still end up in the green at the end of it (or at least give you my most satisfying answer.

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This was a pretty boring quarter. I spent so much of Q3 building up the daily newsletter, that I had nothing left when it collapsed spectacularly. I didn’t have anything picked as my focus for Q4, so I decided to lick my wounds. I spent a lot of time disassociating, listening to music, and staring off into the void. I started two non-fiction books last quarter, and got one to the 30k point, which is the furthest I’ve gotten in a book since April.

You can find all our previous income reports here.

I spent a lot of this year trying to partner with people who could “save” me: publishers, co-writers, clients, and yet they all blew up in my face. Now, at the beginning of 2015, I’m only working with one of them still, and only on one tiny project. I don’t count Lee and our podcast, since that was never meant to save me, but it did completely evolve from the original gimmick.

I had planned to go really deep on fiction last year, but every time I tried to turn my attention there, good things were happening with my non-fiction. So, the original plan for the podcast was the try to build a six-figure name on retailers…and I absolutely failed. Instead, I ended up publishing a ton of books at once, including the whole 12-book Godsverse Chronicles series and 5-book Dragon Strife universe, plus stand alones, in a one month period. I put everything else up on retailers, too, and I honestly haven’t done anything with them. I feel really, really guilty about that, but I just can’t think about them. Even writing this bit freaks me out.

So, mainly I shat the bed on everything I said I would do, and listened to sad music. Weirdly, my income and spending didn’t seem much different from previous quarters even though I wasn’t doing much.

A part of that was because I did end up doing several promotions for TAS, and we ended up getting to 1,150 paid members this year, and $20k in GAR, which is awesome. Plus, the conference is pulling in money still, so those were the only two things I really did. I had a couple of partner launches for books, but not that much for me, and I didn’t do any of the things as well as normal.

Consulting - 15.52%

This was mainly from my one client, which stopped my contract at the end of this year. I’ve made close to $100k on this contract since I started working on it a few years ago, but I thought it would end this year. In fact, a huge reason I went all in on ads last year was because I thought this contract would end and I needed another option. I didn’t find one, but I did look for one, and I expected this to happen.

Crowdfunding - 0%

Even though projects I was a collaborator on raised $23,990 this quarter, this revenue was not captured by Wannabe Press, but other publishers. Getting revenue from a Kickstarter makes your numbers look good, but they also mean you’ll have a lot of expenses coming up. Of course, I’m good at spending money whether money comes in or not.

Publishing - 23.21%

I’m a bit surprised that publishing is such a big category, especially since crowdfunding has zero revenue, because this has never happened before since the pandemic. Despite being a publisher for close to 10 years, I have made almost all my money historically from conventions and crowdfunding. During the pandemic, we moved almost all our revenue to Kickstarter, and it has stayed that way since. I have always wanted to get our revenue more rounded with multiple revenue stream working, but it has never worked before. Yes, I know partner launches made money, but this is something special to me. It shows me that it’s working. I don’t want to lose that Kickstarter funding, but I would like to increase our retailer, royalties, and subscription sources considerably this year.

Courses - 61.27%

This looks like a lot of money, but it was mainly repayment for money I spent on our conference. However, I do capture all of it as income since it has been paid from one company to the other, and as a debit for Writer MBA. It’s a ticky-tacky thing, but it also helps me see that we are making money at Writer MBA, because we don’t have a loan, which means we can only pay the money we have.

Okay, my lovelies, for many of you this is where I leave you. For those with a paid membership, you can get all the juicy details below.

Did you know you can see all our income reports and access over 900 exclusive articles, interviews, courses, etc in our member area? You should probably do that, because it’s pretty neat. I’ll even give you 20% off as my investment in you.

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Today, I've put together what I consider the wildest chart detailing the revenue in my various businesses across the past nine years to date. Some notes before you dive in:

• The total MRR (Monthly Run Rate) in the bottom row is an average across my 9 years doing this work full-time.

• I also took the average P/L (Profit and Loss) across my nine years i…

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This was a wild quarter, so this is gonna be a wild income report. I honestly don’t even know how to conceptualize it except in charts. So, this is the quarter I went hard on a daily email and sent over 3.3 million emails in the past 90 days.

You can find all our previous income reports here.

Our plan was to find a willing ad strategy and brand strategy to keep churning people through out ecosystem and allow for the high churn that comes with a daily. You can’t keep a daily going unless you can create a repeatable ad strategy that brings in more subscribers than you burn every day.

Instead, this happened.

We started the quarter with 54,388 in Convertkit and ended it with 42,097 a decrease of over 12,000 emails…but at least we didn’t make any money for the privilege.

No, that’s not true. We made about $1,200…and it only cost us about $1,200 to be on Convertkit, not including ad spend, so I guess that’s something. Looking at this graph makes me want to cry, but then I look at our Substack graph…and WTF is happening here?

So, what the universe is trying to tell me is that even with losing 12,000 subscribers in Convertkit, I gained almost 7,000 in Substack? What is even happening here. That’s a differential of 19,000 subscribers!

I have built whole business on fewer subscribers than that differential. On top of that, I gained more than 300 paid members in the last quarter.

So, it’s actually been a good quarter? According to these two charts it certainly seems that way.

But wait, before you get too optimistic, we still turned a loss this quarter…

But it’s down from a $36,000 loss in Q2…

It’s almost like you made $25,000, right? Except you literally can’t pay bills with a smaller negative differential because it means you still have less money than you did three months ago.

But if that’s true, then why is there more money in my accounts than there was three months ago!

What is even happening here?! Was this a good quarter? A bad quarter? An absurdist mathetician’s wet dream?

The only answer I have is yes…it’s all of those things.

I thought I would become more like Lord Business as I got more successful, but instead I’ve become much more like Princess Unikitty.

Everything is fine. 

Everything is chaos. 

There is a burning, festering rage right below the surface. 

Overall, I was reminded how much I dislike advertising this quarter. I thought it would save us in the long run, but it just added more stress as I had to become a brand ambassador and clip my wings to make sure I didn’t offend anyone.

I’m happy to talk about things I like, but when I have to justify my excitement monetarily, well that’s not something I love. I don’t even like affiliate marketing for that reason. I’m probably not going to keep going much with advertising past the third quarter unless I can find a way to make it make sense to an advertiser even if nobody clicks on it.

I do think there’s something to be said for brand advertising, and getting seen by 20,000+ eyes every week has some value, right? I’m not sure, but if I have to be yoked to metrics, I’m not interested in doing advertising right now, which is probably a problem, what with advertising behind such a good source of revenue for publishers.

I feel like all this year has taught me is exactly what I knew, yet forgot, before this year, and puts me in a place where I am just as confused as I was at the end of 2023, which sucks and feels like a hollow victory.

For paid members, I’ll get into the nitty gritty below. If you want to see exactly what these numbers mean, then I invite you to join.

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I can’t believe it’s July already, and you know what that means…oh, probably not because we’ve only done income reports once on The Author Stack. Well, it’s time for the Q2 income report. If you’re a paid member, then you can see all my income reports.

• See the last report from Q1

• See my yearly income reports

If not, you can become one and see all the gory details of my business, including every dollar I’ve made since 2017. It’s funny because it’s not happening to you. Laugh at my pain, or whatever.

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I should note that this is only Wannabe Press income, including income Wannabe Press has received from Writer MBA.

Our spending and revenue is much higher for that company, but we don’t have a full transparency policy for Writer MBA, so you’re only getting my solo creative businesses. If you want to read more about how my company(ies) are structured, I explain it here.

This quarter I had four sources of income. It’s a bit hard to track down the little bits so I might have made a mistake or two, but this is pretty accurate, and the overall number is still the same. It’s just how you allocate it, which I don’t ever have consistency with anyway. One thing you don’t want in accounting is vibes, but I don’t have an SOP for this stuff, so I just try my best.

Consulting - 16.1%

Last quarter consulting accounted for 42% of my income, and this quarter it’s way down. Part of that is because crowdfunding made a nice appearance. I also booked less consulting calls this past quarter, and also my biggest client paid me way less than usual. So, all together it was a bit yipes, but this is why we have multiple sources of revenue. If you have that philosophy, they can level each other from month to month.

Crowdfunding - 58.8%

This quarter we only had two Kickstarter campaigns, but one of them was a monster. Death’s Kiss ended up raising $26,604 while Time is a Flat Circle brought in $5,233. Even though we brought on a publisher for Death’s Kiss in the last month before the campaign launched, since we had already started building hype we kept it as a Russell Nohelty project, so I was paid out, and then turned around and paid out the publisher. It’s not how I prefer to work, but we had a couple hundred followers at that point and the train already left the station. I will never do that again if I can help it.

Publishing - 14.9%

Just like last quarter, all other non-Kickstarter activities are contained in this bit, including Substack. I would love to pull just Substack out of this chart, but Stripe is impossible to navigate easily, so I decided not to do that. Most of this money is from either Backerkit or Substack, and it brought in a healthy chunk of money.

Courses - 10.2%

Unlike last month when I only had Writer MBA revenue, this was made up of those sales and also the ad tests I ran with my growth team, and that revenue was significant. Unfortunately the amount I spent was much more significant. You can catch up on that whole saga right here.

Thoughts

Weirdly, I made about the same in Q2 of 2023 as I did in 2024, probably because my client paid considerably more out to me last year than this year. It was definitely because we sold more on Kickstarter or anything. I made a ton more in Q1 this year, but not more in Q2. Still there’s still a hefty chunk of money since I had a very, very good Q2 last year.

The main problem with this quarter is that I spent gobs of money on a growth team that sucked out every bit of spare revenue I had, so I realized negative gain even though I had a very good Q2, even discounting Writer MBA funds. I also went to a new conference called Craft+Commerce up in Boise which ate up a bunch of money and overall, I just feel like I’ve been lighting money on fire this year. Every dollar I make and then some goes out. I’m used to eeking out a little profit, not being grossly in the red in a way that makes me want to cry most days.

We’ll get into the main course for members right now. If you want to see exactly what these numbers mean, then I invite you to join.

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Since 2017, I’ve kept a pretty detailed income report of my expenses. It’s an almost unbroken chain reaching back to when I started making real money at Wannabe Press.

2017 was my first six-figure year, and paid members can get all of that goodness behind the paywall.

See my income reports

I believe in complete transparency. If you’re going to learn from me, I have a responsibility to be honest with you about how I make my money. Sometimes, I have really good news to share. Other times, wow is the news bad. I’ve never have a year that looked the same from one to the next. However, I do have enough revenue streams that things seem to even out over the course of a year.

These reports are going to be broken down into two stages. In the first, all subscribers will be able to see my general income categories, including how much of my total income comes from each.

In the second, paid members will get to see all the juicy details of that that means. They will also see an overall expenses breakdown, which I’m not offering to free subscribers. I took the general idea from because I think both they, and this process, is brilliant. I want to deliver value to everyone, but if you want to see the grimy details, you have to pay for it.

I should note that this is only Wannabe Press income, including income Wannabe Press has received from Writer MBA.

Our spending and revenue is much higher for that company, but we don’t have a full transparency policy for Writer MBA, so you’re only getting my solo creative businesses. If you want to read more about how my company(ies) are structured, I explain it here.

Consulting - 42%

Last year, consulting was my second highest revenue category, after only courses. However, the courses only overtook consulting in the last few months of the year. Throughout the year, consulting mostly paid for me to keep running the rest of my company. I have a resource intensive company, and we burn a lot of money. Consulting allows me to take a highly profitable category and shovel that money into keeping the lights on for the rest of my company.

This year, that basically means ads. We have added more than 10,000 new subscribers to The Author Stack since the beginning of the year, and that growth is mainly fueled by ads. Consulting pays for those ads, along with overhead for future projects. I’ve been trying to find a way to make money and grow subscribers at the same time, but in general I believe in shoveling money at growth, and then worry about monetization later. That’s what’s always worked for us in the past. We’re currently in a high growth phase, which means burning through a lot of money.

I started January 1st with 21,965 subscribers. By the end of the first quarter, that grew to 30,698 subscribers. I talk about the exact amount I spent to get there in the paid section, and I’m not sure it was worth it, but it was significant growth, and we are still growing. Something had to change this year, and this was one of the things I changed direction on the hardest.

Crowdfunding - 20%

Even though I’ve been part of three campaigns that ended this year, only the third and final Obsidian Spindle Saga campaign actually paid out into my personal account. Death’s Kiss pays out in Q2, and our Direct Sales Mastery campaign paid out into our Writer MBA account.

For paid members, I broke down both The Obsidian Spindle Saga and Death’s Kiss campaigns, including my feelings about both of them.

Publishing - 15%

All other publishing activities are contained in this bit, including Substack revenue. Membership revenue is also high margin and we’ve been shoveling it into ads pretty heavily this quarter. My days of owing $30k to creators after a book launch might be over, but we’re still funneling just as much money into growth.

This also includes any money we paid post campaign through Backerkit, selling at conventions, etc. It also includes retailer sales. I do generally have a different category for retailers and royalties, but they combined were 0% of my income so I combined everything here.

Taxes - 12%

I had a pretty decent tax return this year. I pay taxes on my personal income from Wannabe Press, and pay myself a salary to make sure I don’t owe a huge tax bill at the end of the year. I also throw as much money as I can into expenses to lower my tax bill, including ads and such. Usually I run at a loss, which combined with the personal texes I pay allows me to get a return.

Courses - 11%

This is an easy one because it only includes one bit, which is the payout I received for the Direct Sales Mastery for Authors campaign. Monica and I have a profit first strategy, so we take money every month from our total revenue and disburse it to ourselves.

Thoughts

The income I made in the Q1 of 2024 was more than double the amount I made in Q1 of 2023, which makes me pretty happy. My expenses are also considerably higher as we entered a high growth phase of The Author Stack, trying to grow it to 50,000 subscribers by the end of the year, which is taking every resource I have to make happen and we’re not even close to hitting it.

At the same time, Google is destroying email deliverability. So, even though we have more than 32,000 subscribers, our open rates have dropped from 40% to 30% on a good day. Some days I see that we are actually hitting inboxes, and our open rates spike, but usually it feels like all the money and time we have spent has been wasted.

What’s worse is that every time I have ever tried to scale my email list, this exact thing has happened. We’re getting the same or lower opens than we did at the beginning of the year, despite having more than 10,000 new subscribers on our list. It’s very depressing and I’m increasingly frustrated with each passing day.

If you’re interested in getting the nitty-gritty, then now is the point I’m going to ask you to pay for it. If you like to see all the tea, this is where I’m going to spill it all for you.

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I try to have good accounting for every year of my career, at least since I got successful enough that it wasn’t super depressing…and yet, it is often super depressing to look at these numbers. Every one of these reports is a bit different as I place things in different categories and can’t remember exactly what…

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Here is where you can find all my reports.

I know I did an income report earlier this year, but for the life of me I can’t find it. I think I did it on Facebook, which was taken away from me in March of this year so I can’t search for it.

Crowdfunding - $93,472.92

Easily the most I’ve ever made from Crowdfunding, anchored by a killer of Dragon Strife…

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Here is where you can find all my reports.

I’m writing this in 2023, with data from 2021, because I don’t have much info except for the numbers I gave and wanted to make all the reports look relatively similar. So, this is my recollections from two years ago, with hard numbers from that time since I’ve been tracking it forever.

Crowdfunding - $60,347…

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Here is where you can find all my reports.

I've been putting off writing this for a long time. I think I mentioned I wanted to have this done in February, but every time I went to write it, I just couldn't. Well, luckily you guys are dogged in asking me about my income report for last year and kept reminding me until I had a free moment to think about…

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Here is where you can find all my reports.

This is the last thing I feel the need to post from my year of transparency, which is the income breakdown from Quickbooks from my end of year earnings.

Income - $120,254.94

The first thing in this to notice is that if you were following along every month I reported $126,242 in total earnings compared to $120,…

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Here is where you can find all my reports.

Closing my books from last year, I thought you would like to see how my revenue numbers and income report differed from 2017 to 2018. I always spend some time at the end of the year going through what worked and what didn't work in my business, which is a practice I recommend you doing as well. Sometimes, yo…

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