Wannabe Press Income Report - Q1 - 2024

Who needs a publishing company when you can consult and make more money? Me, I do.

Hi friends,

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

Anna Codrea-Rado

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.

This is how my company looks as of May 2024

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.