2023 income breakdown
Wherein I break down all the good and bad from the year that was and plan for 2024, and maybe have a bit of a breakdown in the process.
Hello Friends!
I’ve been doing end-of-year wrap-ups for a while, but every year it takes longer to put them together since my business only gets more and more complications. This one is easily the most complicated one I’ve ever done… 🧐
I recommend reading How to fall in love with book marketing, Setting up your direct sales environment, and Growth, or something like it to help round out this article.
If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.
If you’ve only started following my work since 2023, then you probably don’t know that I’ve been releasing income reports since 2018, with data going all the way back to 2016.
I’ve always believed in transparency.
As a teacher who helps authors grow, it’s important that you know exactly how successful I have been in order to decide whether to trust me or not.
That said, while I do believe in transparency, I have been burned several times for my beliefs, so I’ve decided that while I’m going to keep these reports, I’m going to offer the full breakdowns only to paid members.
If you are a paid member, here is where you can find all my reports dating back to 2018.
One additional note, while I will be talking about income received from me by WriterMBA, I will not be breaking down the revenue from that company. While Wannabe Press has a full transparency policy, that policy does not extend to my partnership with Monica, and thus, all I can reasonably state is the money I received from that company along with my general thoughts. If you’re looking for me to spill the tea on that company, then you’re SOL, but otherwise, I’ll be an open book to (most) anything you want to know.
I also won’t be discussing why we don’t have a full transparency policy. It just is a thing.
*** Please note that if you are reading this via email, Substack only sent out a partial version and the article will eventually stop without notice. If you want to read the whole article, then go to this website. ***
Action Fantasy Book Club
While The Author Stack is my main driver of growth for my non-fiction business, the biggest driver of my fiction growth comes from the Action Fantasy Book Club I co-own and co-run with indie fantasy author Andy Peloquin. This was an idea I got from a mastermind within a bunch of amazing authors, and when I brought it to Andy he loved the idea.
We started gathering a group of killer fantasy authors to take part in the book club in about July 2022 and officially launched it this January with our first slate of authors including the two of us plus Ben Galley, JDL Rosell, Robert and Dan Zangari, ML Spencer, Eileen Mueller, Angel Haze, Zamil Akhtar, Tao Wong, Eric Knight, and JA Andrews.
Every month subscribers get a new free fantasy book delivered to them from one of our featured authors. So far this year we’ve collected over 4,000 emails that have been distributed to our authors at the end of every month.
💡 This started very, very slow. It was a bit of a nightmare at the beginning, but recently we’ve been sponsoring giveaways with Bookdoggy, Written Word Media, and Booksweeps to much greater effect. It’s way easier for us to manage without dealing with Facebook ads every day, so we decided to do it again in 2024.
This year’s crop of talent 👀 includes Sarra Cannon, Jamie Davis, JDL Rosell, Tao Wong, Luna Ryder, Ben Galley, Megan Haskell, Andrew Givler, Jamie Thornton, and Eileen Mueller. Last year also featured Robert and Dan Zangari, ML Spencer, Eileen Mueller, Angel Haze, Zamil Akhtar, Eric Knight, and JA Andrews.
Even more than the emails, the thing I love about the book club is being able to grow a deeper bond with authors I love and who write incredible books.
The most powerful thing I’ve used to grow my author business is cross-promotion and collaborations. The biggest drivers for my growth have always been partnerships, and I love to be able to nurture that in a new way while helping everyone grow their author business together.
Inclusive of all sources, I’ve added 9102 emails to my Flodesk account this year, which allows for unlimited email subscribers and sends for one price. This is considerably more than last year when I uploaded 1,579 subscribers. However, this is significantly down from 2021, when I uploaded 29,761 subscribers.
I’ve not been in a high growth stage for a while, but I’m ready to enter one again, as I’ve finished most of my major projects that required significant investment. The last time I went into high growth mode, I collected 175,000 emails to find 20,000 active users. I’m expecting it might take that much scale again to double my growth, but I’m hoping there is another way.
Let me know if you have any ideas!
Currently, I have 35,013 active subscribers in my account, with 22,037 on my main author list. That list has a 28.2% open rate. Since starting my account I have sent 10,973,667 individual emails across 684 emails with a 23.4% open rate and a .4% click-through rate. My lifetime unsubscribe rate is .2%.
By contrast, my open rate on The Author Stack is 43.42%. I wish I had similar metrics, but Substack doesn’t go into that granular detail.
Writer MBA
As I mentioned, I cannot be fully transparent about WriterMBA, or any of the things we have planned, but there are several things we did this year that are public knowledge, so I can comment on those.
Future of Publishing Mastermind
In February we launched our most ambitious project of the year, The Future of Publishing Mastermind. Though many people have imitated it since, when we launched it there was a HUGE gap in the indie community for a place where successful authors could gather and create a brain trust to swap ideas in a safe environment.
We brought in the killer organizing team behind NINC, Mel Jolly and Tawdra Kandle, to help us make a premiere event, and I’m so, so, so proud of what we’ve accomplished this year. We always knew it wouldn’t be a huge moneymaker, especially in the first year, but I can’t believe some of the talent we’ve been able to gather in one place at one time.
On top of that, we’ve been able to attract some of the best vendors in the industry, including Kobo, Draft2Digital, Kickstarter, Plottr, Barnes and Noble, Ream, Written Word Media, Writing Wives, Reedsy, Book Brush, and more to join us in this wild experiment.
Plus, we’ve almost sold out! We thought we could pretty easily attract 50 people to join us, but we set an ambitious target of 100 and we’ve almost hit it. If you’d like to join us, then there are still a few spots left so I recommend you apply today, especially since it’s only a month away!
Author Ecosystems
I’ll be honest, we didn’t expect The Author Ecosystems to take off the way it did! Originally, we were looking for a container to sell our suite of courses (The Kickstarter Accelerator, The Direct Sales Accelerator, Go Wide, Grow Wide, etc), and we thought the name sounded cool.
Once we had the container, we started to look back at our students to find ways to speak to their successes and failures to attract more like them and help them better. We tried to model nearly every other archetyping system onto our students to explain what we found, but nothing worked.
When we finished our analysis, we were really excited with what we found, but we had no idea how to sell it because it was really just a methodology. It was a way to talk about author success in a new and fun way, but without mapping it to our courses it was hard to find a way to make it all work together.
I think we’re still working on that, but we decided that the Author Ecosystem is a lens through which to view your career, and our coursework and books are the guides to help you reach your true potential.
✨The most gratifying part is hearing how it’s helped so many writers get clarity in their businesses.✨
I feel like we’re still learning so much about the ecosystems every week. We’re currently going through a weekly course with our students focused where we focus on a different ecosystem every week and we’re learning so much more even now.
I’m super excited about what we’ve got planned for 2024, including an enormous announcement in March (watch this space! We also have a Substack where we release all our new research for free.
Direct Sales Mastery for Authors
We expected this Kickstarter to hit $50,000, and we created a lot of structures to make that happen, but honestly, we were so burnt out on 2023 that we didn’t have the energy needed to push it like we thought it needed. Plus, it was the holiday season. Still, I’m happy with it.
We ended up raising over $30,000 and with 700+ backers. By any metric that is a win.
The honest truth is that we launched this campaign as a buffer so that if we were short on the conference we would have enough cash on hand to make up for any deficit so we didn’t have to come out of pocket on it. We’ve mostly been living at the whim of the conference with everything this year, and this campaign was no exception.
That said, I’m very proud of the methodology we developed for these books. We’ve been saying for years that the way that people talk about direct sales is wrong, and this was our chance to get out in front of our words and tell our own narrative. You might not like it, but this is everything we’ve been talking about for over a decade condensed into one two-book set.
I feel like now we have a starting place to open a dialog, and it can only build from here.
Indie Author Magazine
Monica and I were guest editors of the Future of Publishing issue of Indie Author Magazine that launched in October. It was a ton of work. We called in a lot of favors to get this issue off the ground and deliver a 5,000-issue print run, but it was pretty incredible to walk around NINC and 20books with hundreds of the magazines in people's hands. We included an article on our Author Ecosystem methodology, as well as interviews with dozens of thought leaders about the future of publishing.
I’m so proud of how it turned out. It directly influenced what I do on The Author Stack, especially my desire to expand beyond my own work and feature other authors and writers to help round out what we provide here. I don’t think I ever would have considered doing that without working on this issue. If you’re interested in checking it out, you can get your copy below.
Wannabe Press Kickstarter launches
Aside from Direct Sales Mastery for Authors, I was involved in 5 Kickstarter launches for Wannabe Press books and three partner launches, which all had varying degrees of success.
The Obsidian Spindle Saga books 1-8
This campaign raised $13,000 even from 284 backed, which was more money from fewer backers. That makes sense because we now have eight books instead of the four we launched in 2021.
I was a bit disappointed that we couldn’t get to 300 backers. After all, I think this is my best, and favorite series, and I think it just gets better and better the more you read. If somebody wants one series that encapsulates everything I am as a writer, then I point them to this series.
The third and final arc of the series launched this month. You can pick up the complete series right here and read all twelve books.
This is NOT a Book
I had no expectations for this book. It shouldn’t have even existed, but after Facebook disappeared me I needed a way to encapsulate my work until until that point, so I created this book filled with my old writings from Facebook, my blog, and across the internet. When people ask me whether something like this can work, I always point back to this campaign. There is nothing new in it. All I did was curate my best work into some sort of loose narrative, and it raised $5282 from 278 backers.
It’s not enough to retire or anything, but it was a nice ROI on stuff I wrote for free. Members can read this book for free.
Wicked Witch Academy
This campaign shouldn’t have existed. I had a big partner launch planned for July, but it got scrapped at the last minute, forcing me to plug something into the hole. I was planning to launch this campaign in November or January, but it ended up being pulled forward.
One of the nice things about having so much content done and a process to release it is that it wasn’t much effort to swap out one launch with another.
I wasn’t expecting to pack this campaign, but otherwise, it was simple and effective. It raised $6,259 from 214 backers.
The reason this one was able to raise so much more from fewer backers is because it was the conclusion of my Dragon Strife universe. So, this was really a five-book series, not a duology. Paid members can read all five books behind the paywall.
One Damned Good Thing
Another campaign I wasn’t supposed to run, but at least it wasn’t pushed or pulled to a different date. The publisher pulled out at the last minute, and we couldn’t move the date, so I just went forward with it. Had I more time, I would have done more prelaunch work for it, but as it stood this was my most disappointing launch of the year. It raised $4,651 from 291 backers, which wasn’t too bad, but it only accounted for a $17 profit, my lowest of the year.
Additionally, it was one of my most complicated packing jobs of the year because comics need to be bagged and boarded along with being signed and packed. Since comics are roughly 50/50 digital to physical backers compared to 25/75 in prose, it also just meant more packing and less profit margin.
This was part of a whole Hospice shared universe that mainly fizzled. We had one campaign go really well, but I doubt it was because of the universe as much as the subject matter and the strength of the team.
Still, I loved working with Lane Lloyd and the team of creators.
Sometimes, you blow up and sometimes you blow it. This one was definitely more on the latter side, but at least I broke even, so I can’t complain. In publishing, if you can live to see another day, that’s usually a win.
I know the art style I chose wasn’t mainstream so I isolated a large segment of the audience, but I absolutely love what we came up with as a concept. Paid members can read this for free behind the paywall.
Still with me? Good…there is more to come.
Wonderland Duology
After the struggle of One Damned Good Thing, this was my biggest surprise of the year. This is a new series, in a new genre, and has nothing to do with fantasy except the overall premise. I was expecting this to hit $3,000 on the high end, and it raised $5357 from 239 backers.
This book was torture to write because it didn’t have any magic in it, but I really love how it all came together in the end. I pretty much only did this campaign because the One Damned Good Thing campaign went so poorly and I needed some cashflow at the end of the year. I was really surprised about the outpouring of support for this thriller. I don’t think I’ll be writing more in this universe any time soon, but I appreciated how much people came out for this book. This look will be coming behind the paywall in February for members to read for free.
Overall
Overall, what this year taught me was that the high end of Kickstarter projects has dropped for me considerably. Gone were the $20k campaigns, but at the same time the low-end raised higher than ever before. It seems most things I launch will raise $5,000 or above, which is amazing compared to where I was a couple of years ago.
In many ways, it’s just as good to raise the low end than to raise the high end because at least you know what kinds of money you can invest in a book.
Here is the profit breakdown for each campaign:
Obsidian Spindle Saga - $3,233.54
This is NOT a Book - $3,271.38
Wicked Witch - $2,800.39
One Damned Good Thing - $17.76
Wonderland - $3,038.09
Total profit - $12,361.15
It’s not a lot to write home about, but every book I’ve launched for years has been profitable, if only barely, and helped me build my war chest for the next launch. Most publishers are lucky if 10% of their books are profitable, so I’m good with that part.
Honestly, most of these books are not part of my core brand identity and I still make money from them, which is amazing.
Partner Kickstarter launches
Before this year, the only partner launches I did were as a part of an anthology project, a coffee brand co-collaboration that I really didn’t do much with at all, or the books I’ve released with Monica.
This year, I did a ton of partner launches and had more plans that fell through. Overall, I wasn’t hugely thrilled with how the partner launches turned out. There were a lot of issues, scheduling delays, changed platforms, and other logistics which took a lot of my time. ⏰
I like supporting launches, but I felt like these launches took away from the core brand of my work and left me with a lot of customer support issues that I dealt with, or blew back on me. And these were the good ones, the ones that fell apart left me with months and months of meetings that amounted to nothing.
The good news is that the actual partners were fantastic.
I loved working with Laurie and Oliver putting these books together, and I’m glad that we put out work we could be proud of, even if the projects didn’t blow up like we thought they would.
Most of the issues I had were things that were out of our control, or decisions we made that ended up not working out. I don’t blame them for these launches. It just turns out that supporting a Kickstarter is almost as much work as running one.
At least I didn’t have to fulfill them, though.
Ichabod Jones Card Game
We’ve been working on this card game since 2020, and I was excited to finally launch this card game in May. However, the company told me they had to move the launch to March, which conflicted with another launch I was doing.
So, I ended up supporting two campaigns at the same time, taking away from both of them. I didn’t love that, but I did love how the game turned out. I was able to get a demo into people’s hands at Wondercon, and people flipped out. Probably the best part of Wondercon was watching people play the game and get excited about it. Still, it only raised 5,469 euros from 158 backers, my lowest total of the year.
If we had the time we needed to prep, it might have been different, but life happens. One of the things I got very good at this year was going with the flow, especially when I had no control.
Cthulhu is Hard to Spell
This launch ended up being two launches.
The publisher decided, with my consent, to launch this book on Backerkit, which honestly sucked. Backerkit was supposed to support the launch with ads, but they didn’t. Instead, they shut off ads after day one, leaving us with no support on a platform with little organic reach. We raised $16,255 from 227 backers, which was less than 30% of our expected raise. This forced us onto Kickstarter, where we raised another $5,348 from 89 backers. Even my mother called and asked if we could just launch on Kickstarter because she didn’t like Backerkit, which should tell you something about how jank it was over there.
It destroyed our whole momentum. I wonder what we could have done if we just did it all on Kickstarter. I think we probably could have doubled what we raised, and I blame that wholly on Backerkit.
Lucifer Licorice #1
Looking back, it’s hard to see how raising $8,089 from 280 backers on a weird kid’s comic was a failure, but it sure felt that way at the time. I think it was because it took so long to fund, and we had to keep going back into our bag of tricks to make the magic happen. Like I said at the top, I expected these launches to be easier than my own launches, and these three were the hardest ones all year. I spent more time supporting this launch than just about anything else I did all year.
This project was dead in the water and would have never seen the light of day without Laurie breathing life into it.
I guess what I am sad about is that this is the type of this that would have killed on Kickstarter in 2018, but that was a different time in the history of Kickstarter, and backers was things that are edgy, with more nudity, in general. I wish there was still a place to blow up with a weird little comic about a licorice monster and a tea towel ghost.
Client work
I don’t have a ton of clients, but I do a lot of client work. It’s the majority of the profit margin generated by my company. I plow a lot of the funds they pay me into other projects, and it bridges gaps in my other fundraising efforts. Whenever somebody is late on payments, or I have to defer paying myself for some reason, I can always rely on client work to help me fill the gap.
The best part is that it’s behind the scenes, so I don’t have to be front and center. So much of my work is out in the open, it’s nice to never have to talk to anyone as I run ads for clients or consult with them on how to grow their business.
One thing that’s hilarious about becoming a “brand” is that the money usually comes from behind-the-scenes stuff, not the things that give you the most exposure. The exposure brings in clients and other paying opportunities. People want you to show them how to have your success, but they want you to work behind the scenes for them so it looks like they did it by magic.
And I’m cool with that, honestly. 😎 I used to find client work draining, but now I kind of love just doing a thing and getting paid without having to work how it will affect my overall brand.
Wavelength
If you’ve followed my career for a while, you probably know I had owned a Verizon dealership for years. Before striking out on my own, I was the B2B sales manager at a Sprint reseller. When I left, I founded a Verizon dealership that served me for years but has slowly been bleeding money until it barely did any business this year.
This was the year I officially shuttered this business. It used to account for 50% or more of my revenue. This year it wasn’t even 1%.
Website sales
While I have a web store, I don’t focus any attention on it. Payhip helped me migrate from Gumroad, which I frankly like better except that it’s ugly as heck. Gumroad’s discoverability is better, but I love aesthetics, and Payhip is more aesthetically pleasing, so I made the switch.
Where I make most of my money is from landing pages set up for my series. While I have one for Ichabod, too, the only one that really makes me money is the sales page I have set up for The Godsverse Chronicles.
I’ve made a few dozen sales from that one over the year and I do nothing but put people into the top of my funnel and watch money come out the bottom. The email sequence is not even good, at all. I keep meaning to fix it, but then I don’t.
I also did a one-time sales event for a free + shipping offer of Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter volume 1 which brought in over $1,000 in sales. I should really do more of those, but I have so many book launches it’s hard to plan anything else between them.
In 2024, I hope to be able to add an Obsidian Spindle sales page since that series will wrap up this month.
Conventions
I basically have two “convention seasons”. From March to July, I do comic conventions. Then, from September to November, I do writer conferences. They are both equally draining, and with my Long COVID, it’s really hard to do them. In fact, when I’ve done them alone, it’s been close to impossible. It only makes sense when I have partners, which has been a theme of this whole piece.
If you’re interested, I kept a con sheet of all the cons I went to from 2016-2022. I stopped this year mostly because it got depressing how little money I was making. I don’t know if it’s just the industry or my ability to put up with it, but this was easily the worst con year I’ve ever had as a whole, and individually. I think it’s probably a bit of both.
This year, my friends
and Matt Harry started exhibiting as AHH! Real Indie Authors, and some combination of us did most of these shows, except for the writer conferences, together.
Wondercon
Wondercon is an Anaheim tradition, and it’s the closest big convention to my house, so I have been doing it as long as it’s been here. It moved down from Northern California several years ago, and I never did it while it was up there, but I’ve done it every year since it moved.
It’s the sister conference to San Diego Comic-Con, and I do both every year. They are almost the only ones I do anymore. Still, it was a lot to do this show, and there were long periods where nobody was in the hall and I didn’t see anyone I recognized. This is uncommon. Since I’ve been doing it for so long, I usually have regulars stop by my table all the time.
Los Angeles Festival of Books
The only show I actively enjoy doing is the LA Festival of Books because it’s outside and always pleasant weather, save for the one year it rained. We thought it might rain this year, but it didn’t. Not a great story, but a good encapsulation of the weather questions.
This was a fun show, but mostly I just gave away copies of books. I ended up doing that a lot this year because I was trying to get space in our garage.
San Diego Comic-Con
The biggest one of the year. We put a lot of effort into this show. Last year we didn’t even come close to breaking even. This year we did better than break even and had some fun in the process. We also tested out a digital email collection device, which netted us over 1,000 new subscribers, which was awesome.
Honestly, without the emails, I don’t think this one would be worth it, but I’d paid more for few emails, so it really worked out for us. They called it a lead retreival device, and I had to rent it from the show for $500, but it was way worth it in the end, especially because we split the cost between the two of us exhibiting.
Orange County Kid’s Book Festival
I thought this show was for kids, but it was for kiiiiiiiids. We have stuff for YA, middle grade, and even early readers, but we have nothing for picture book kids, which was about 90% of the audience. So, this was a big bust, especially since the food wasn’t good and neither was the coffee.
NINC
I have been rejected from joining NINC more times than I can count. First, it was because I didn’t write novels, only GRAPHIC novels, and then it was because even though my Kickstarters would have qualified, but because I offered other books along with my releases, they didn’t count.
So, when we started working with Mel and Tawdra this year, I was thrilled to be able to sponsor the event. It turns out that if you just pay enough money, then most places will let you skip the line. That’s a crass oversimplification since we clearly qualify as sponsors, but just like RAM last year, if you can sponsor an event, you don’t have to qualify as an attendee. A lot of life is about finding an end-around for the things blocking you.
20books
Funny story. I’m still banned from the 20books Facebook group for reasons unknown, but I have been a speaker and sponsor of the event since 2021. The first year my friends went to the mattresses to get me in, but since then we’ve been vendors and sponsors in good standing at the event. I had four talks this time, and it was a lot.
We launched our Direct Sales Mastery for Authors Kickstarter at the event this year, so I was mostly there to support that and our issue of Indie Author Magazine. Sponsoring events is weird because you don’t make any money at the event. All the money comes in the months after the event.
When you’re selling books, you always know how you’re doing, but with sponsoring you don’t really have that much to sell there. You aren’t signing people up that day. You’re doing follow-up work to track it down.
We closed tens of thousands of dollars in sponsorship money from NINC and 20books, but you would never know that until well after the event happened.
On Friday of 20books, they have an event called RAVE which is their version of a mini-convention. Authors set up their books and sell them (mostly to other authors).
After 4 days when I met hundreds of authors, had 4 talks, and met with a dozen or so vendors, I spent all day until I had to leave for my flight handing out cards and pins to people.
And guess what…even after all that marketing I did throughout the convention, most people hadn’t met me yet. Even fewer heard me speak.
Even though I’ve been on over 130 podcasts and spoken at over 50 unique events in my career (many of them more than once)…
…most people didn’t know me.
I’ve been doing this work for over a decade and STILL most people had no idea who I was at an event where I was constantly present every day.
So, I handed out business cards, pins, and went to every single table and said hello. That work is never done. You have to do it forever, knowing that each person you meet is another chance to make a fan, and another person who knows you exist.
It amazes me that even after nearly 15 years of doing this work, I still have to get up every day and keep pounding the pavement to meet new people, but that is the work we get to do.
Novel writing
I only finished one book last year. This is a big deal for me, as I thought I might never write a book again.
In 2020, I wrote 9 books.
In 2021, I wrote 13 books.
In 2022, I wrote 6 books.
Then, I burned out hard. I really burned out in November of 2021, but I had a bunch of books I needed to finish before I got a break.
If I didn’t write them at that point in my life, I probably wouldn’t have ever written them. I’m really glad I have them now. They are some of my favorite stories, but it just exasperated my torturous burnout when it hit.
I basically didn’t write anything between June 2022 and June 2023, except for one single issue comic, and then I also compiled This is NOT a Book, which was just a bunch of the non-fiction I’ve written over the years.
So, going a whole year without writing any novels would have been the first time I didn’t write a book since 2011.
I’m really happy I could get at least one done, even though it might be another year before I write another one.
The Author Stack
Since you’re here reading this article, I will assume you have at least a passing interest in this publication, which started in earnest this year. I’m counting on you caring enough to read the rest of the article to find it.
I started on Substack back in 2021, after being told it was the place to be, but I didn’t have the energy to devote to it back then.
I’m kicking myself for that now, but as they say “The best time to join was at the beginning. The second best time is right now”. Back in 2021, I was busy starting my own app (that failed) and didn’t have time to try another subscription platform. Then, in 2022, I was licking my wounds from continually failing at building a subscription platform. For context, even though I have been successful at conventions and on Kickstarter, I’ve never quite got the hang of retailer sales or subscriptions. I certainly tried everything from Patreon to Ko-fi to Buy Me a Coffee and even Kickstarter’s disaster of a subscription platform, Drip, but nothing worked for me.
So, needless to say, I was skeptical of Substack.
I mainly came here as an audience growth mechanic, not expecting much revenue at all. Even though I didn’t pay any attention to Substack, I had gotten a few dozen subscribers organically over the years, so I thought I would give it a shot.
At the beginning of the year, I was testing out Circle, which went so badly that I decided to shutter it in April. However, I thought before then I should start building the platform up. Monica and I decided this was the best platform to grow our thought leadership for WriterMBA, so we both went pretty hard on Substack in Q2 of this year.
I opened paid subscriptions on a whim in February, expecting nothing, and immediately started receiving paid members. How cool is that? This is why I tell people to just do it, even if you’re not ready. I wasn’t publishing regularly at that point, and I certainly didn’t have the platform I do now, but I still got a few paid members from the jump.
From there, I created a detailed plan of action to bring over subscribers from our other mailing lists. If you want to read more about that, I made a whole post about my journey to 100 paid subscribers right here.
I passed 100 paid subscribers in August. Right now, I have over 300 paid subscribers paying an average of $28/yr. My goal is to keep growing it by an average of $1,000-$2,000 in Annualized Gross Revenue a month through 2024, and hopefully double readership by then. My goal is 20,000 engaged readers in 2024. Right now we have an engaged readership base of 10,000 who read every post, and 13,000 who read at least one post a week.
My pie-in-the-sky goal is 50,000 subscribers and 25,000 engaged readers by the end of 2024. I have a pretty aggressive advertising plan for 2024 to get there, but every time I’ve tried to scale my readership beyond 20,000 in my career, it has been an epic failure.
Want to see more of this type of article? Consider becoming a paid member.
Since I have so many balls in the air, I tend to focus on the ones that consistently deliver revenue. This is crass capitalism, I know, but even without needing to eat and keep a roof over my head, I hire dozens of creators a year for projects and need revenue to pay them for their work.
I’ve probably spent 25-30% of my time building this Substack in 2023, even though it only accounts for less than 8% of my revenue.
I understand investment is necessary for things to grow, but eventually, there is only so much attention I can give when I have $8,000-$10,000 in bills every month to keep my other companies going.
I believe in this publication, but it has to grow exponentially this year for me to continue spending such an outmoded amount of time on it. I give almost all my best work away for free because wonderful supporters help fund my in-depth articles.
Much of the work you have read so far on The Author Stack is from tranches of information I’ve collected over my career. All I had to do was write it, but I’ve built the underlying case now. The future is bright, but it is also difficult. New reporting will require extensive research, bringing in new voices to tell their stories, expanding into new formats, and spending even more time working with sources.
That is not to say I will suddenly fold this publication, but growth comes from intentional action. As new projects force my attention elsewhere, love alone does not pay the bills. So, if you like what I’m doing here, consider supporting it by becoming a paid member.
Final Thoughts
This is a complicated web I’ve built. It took forever to put this article together, but it’s also how I have succeeded for so long. I created a complex ecosystem with tons of redundancy so that when one fails, I can still survive.
Why do you need more than one line of business? Because they have different functions.
💵 Kickstarter brings in large infusions of cash in short bursts. Substack brings predictable income every month.
Then there are conventions, webstore, and landing pages, which add even more income to your bottom line.
Focusing solely on one platform could lead to lots of success, but you might have more success growing on other platforms in conjunction with each other.
Or you might find your style is more suited to how another platform works.
If I only had Substack sales, it would paint a bleak picture of my writing business, but I have lots of success on many different platforms.
This is likely true for you as well. I’m not saying that you should abandon Substack. Far from it. Subscriptions are a huge part of direct sales, but they are only a part of it, and direct sales is just a part of my ecosystem.
It’s also just getting harder to do this work. It gets harder every year to keep up. I think one of the things that comes with age is just…not caring as much about how people interact with me as much.
Do you read my work legally? Do you pay for everything? Do you pirate my work? Do you steal it from my table at a show? I don’t care, as long as you are reading. Things seem to work out alright, as long as people are reading.
That is your karma.
Do you unsubscribe from my work? Do you block me? Do you talk about me behind my back? Do you steal and copy my work? Do you not think about me at all? I don’t care, as long as I don’t have to see it.
That is your karma.
I just…can’t care. I appreciate if you pay for my work, but I can’t influence that any more than I can influence the weather.
I can move to better weather. I can stay inside. I can wait out the weather. I can choose to bask in it…but I can’t stop the weather from weathering in a certain place in time.
I hope you love my work. I hope you decide to pay for it. I hope you support my work. I hope you don’t hate me…
…but I just can’t care whether you do…and it all works out in the end.
It’s not just that I don’t care. I can’t care, because it is all nonsense. None of it makes sense.
I’ve helped people for hours who end up hating me. I’ve never talked to people who buy all my work.
I know if I do my thing, some people will support my work, and I will be able to do my thing. That’s the only thing I can control. It’s the only thing I can care about, because otherwise it will destroy me. It has destroyed me before. I can control the actions I take. I can control my own karma. I can’t do anything about yours.
I love you, but I can’t care about whether you like me or not. I just can’t care about whether you steal from me. I can’t care about whether you hate me.
I will focus on those who do resonate, whether for a season or a year, and keep doing my thing.
What I learned most this year is to examine things with intention and deliberate practice at every stage of the process.
In the past, I’ve started businesses on a whim and worked on new projects without thinking about the lost opportunity costs of not working on something else.
Every time I’ve had the bandwidth for something new, I’ve been a little scramble man to fill that space.
Because of that, I have a lot of successful projects that didn’t go anywhere after they were done.
I learned a lot and they made a little money, but they didn’t build on anything or toward anywhere.
That was fine at 31 when I was on the come-up. At 41, and with chronic conditions, doing things for the sake of doing them has lost its appeal. Unless it helps me build toward the future, I have to say no to almost everything.
I’ve been getting better at that, but I’m still pretty terrible at saying no. I’m working hard in the next year to bring deliberate focus into my business and only do things that are a “heck yes”.
I have done a lot in my career and had a lot of success, but to move forward into 2024, I need to get sharper and more deliberate about where I’ve been and where I’m going.
I need to stop jumping from project to project and focus on things for the long haul.
One of the things I love about The Author Stack is that every week I have a new project to launch in the form of a new article, but I’m building the overall brand at the same time. Every little project builds on the big project of the publication.
That kind of thing works really well for me. I understand that process. That’s why you can find almost all my work as either a free or paid member perk.
I think I grew more in the past couple of years than at any time in my career, but I am tired of growing pains.
It feels like every year I burn my life down and rebuild it with complete uncertainty as to how it will work out. While I get where I need to go in the end, I often wonder what would have happened if I built the structure in place to use the previous year as a base to grow higher instead of imploding everything and starting from zero again.
This is the first year in a long time that I feel like I’ve done that in any sense, and I’m excited to see what happens when I focus on building on this foundation in the future.
I recommend reading How to fall in love with book marketing, Setting up your direct sales environment, and Growth, or something like it to help round out this article.
If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.
a truly impressive (and slightly insane!) amount of output. nice work! can i ask how many hours a day you usually work?