2025 income report
It's time for another full year income report. Thanks, I hate it.
Hi,
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.
