2024 income report

It’s the end of 2024, and I didn’t go bankrupt. How though?

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.