Wannabe Press Income Report - Q2 - 2024

The bleeding, won't somebody please stop the bleeding? Not me, though. I'm not a money doctor or whatever. I can sure throw money at it though, as long as you don't mind blood-stained money.

Hi friends,

I can’t believe it’s July already, and you know what that means…oh, probably not because we’ve only done income reports once on The Author Stack. Well, it’s time for the Q2 income report. If you’re a paid member, then you can see all my income reports.

• See the last report from Q1

• See my yearly income reports

If not, you can become one and see all the gory details of my business, including every dollar I’ve made since 2017. It’s funny because it’s not happening to you. Laugh at my pain, or whatever.

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 quarter I had four sources of income. It’s a bit hard to track down the little bits so I might have made a mistake or two, but this is pretty accurate, and the overall number is still the same. It’s just how you allocate it, which I don’t ever have consistency with anyway. One thing you don’t want in accounting is vibes, but I don’t have an SOP for this stuff, so I just try my best.

Consulting - 16.1%

Last quarter consulting accounted for 42% of my income, and this quarter it’s way down. Part of that is because crowdfunding made a nice appearance. I also booked less consulting calls this past quarter, and also my biggest client paid me way less than usual. So, all together it was a bit yipes, but this is why we have multiple sources of revenue. If you have that philosophy, they can level each other from month to month.

Crowdfunding - 58.8%

This quarter we only had two Kickstarter campaigns, but one of them was a monster. Death’s Kiss ended up raising $26,604 while Time is a Flat Circle brought in $5,233. Even though we brought on a publisher for Death’s Kiss in the last month before the campaign launched, since we had already started building hype we kept it as a Russell Nohelty project, so I was paid out, and then turned around and paid out the publisher. It’s not how I prefer to work, but we had a couple hundred followers at that point and the train already left the station. I will never do that again if I can help it.

Publishing - 14.9%

Just like last quarter, all other non-Kickstarter activities are contained in this bit, including Substack. I would love to pull just Substack out of this chart, but Stripe is impossible to navigate easily, so I decided not to do that. Most of this money is from either Backerkit or Substack, and it brought in a healthy chunk of money.

Courses - 10.2%

Unlike last month when I only had Writer MBA revenue, this was made up of those sales and also the ad tests I ran with my growth team, and that revenue was significant. Unfortunately the amount I spent was much more significant. You can catch up on that whole saga right here.

Thoughts

Weirdly, I made about the same in Q2 of 2023 as I did in 2024, probably because my client paid considerably more out to me last year than this year. It was definitely because we sold more on Kickstarter or anything. I made a ton more in Q1 this year, but not more in Q2. Still there’s still a hefty chunk of money since I had a very, very good Q2 last year.

The main problem with this quarter is that I spent gobs of money on a growth team that sucked out every bit of spare revenue I had, so I realized negative gain even though I had a very good Q2, even discounting Writer MBA funds. I also went to a new conference called Craft+Commerce up in Boise which ate up a bunch of money and overall, I just feel like I’ve been lighting money on fire this year. Every dollar I make and then some goes out. I’m used to eeking out a little profit, not being grossly in the red in a way that makes me want to cry most days.

We’ll get into the main course for members right now. If you want to see exactly what these numbers mean, then I invite you to join.