Wannabe Press Income Report - Q1 - 2025

If you want to burn money, then have I got an income report for you.

Hi,

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.

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.