Wannabe Press Income Report - Q4 - 2024

This was a wild quarter, so this is gonna be a wild income report. I honestly don’t even know how to conceptualize it, but I'm gonna try.

Hi,

This was a pretty boring quarter. I spent so much of Q3 building up the daily newsletter, that I had nothing left when it collapsed spectacularly. I didn’t have anything picked as my focus for Q4, so I decided to lick my wounds. I spent a lot of time disassociating, listening to music, and staring off into the void. I started two non-fiction books last quarter, and got one to the 30k point, which is the furthest I’ve gotten in a book since April.

You can find all our previous income reports here.

I spent a lot of this year trying to partner with people who could “save” me: publishers, co-writers, clients, and yet they all blew up in my face. Now, at the beginning of 2015, I’m only working with one of them still, and only on one tiny project. I don’t count Lee and our

Six Figure Author Experiment

podcast, since that was never meant to save me, but it did completely evolve from the original gimmick.

I had planned to go really deep on fiction last year, but every time I tried to turn my attention there, good things were happening with my non-fiction. So, the original plan for the podcast was the try to build a six-figure name on retailers…and I absolutely failed. Instead, I ended up publishing a ton of books at once, including the whole 12-book Godsverse Chronicles series and 5-book Dragon Strife universe, plus stand alones, in a one month period. I put everything else up on retailers, too, and I honestly haven’t done anything with them. I feel really, really guilty about that, but I just can’t think about them. Even writing this bit freaks me out.

So, mainly I shat the bed on everything I said I would do, and listened to sad music. Weirdly, my income and spending didn’t seem much different from previous quarters even though I wasn’t doing much.

A part of that was because I did end up doing several promotions for TAS, and we ended up getting to 1,150 paid members this year, and $20k in GAR, which is awesome. Plus, the conference is pulling in money still, so those were the only two things I really did. I had a couple of partner launches for books, but not that much for me, and I didn’t do any of the things as well as normal.

Consulting - 15.52%

This was mainly from my one client, which stopped my contract at the end of this year. I’ve made close to $100k on this contract since I started working on it a few years ago, but I thought it would end this year. In fact, a huge reason I went all in on ads last year was because I thought this contract would end and I needed another option. I didn’t find one, but I did look for one, and I expected this to happen.

Crowdfunding - 0%

Even though projects I was a collaborator on raised $23,990 this quarter, this revenue was not captured by Wannabe Press, but other publishers. Getting revenue from a Kickstarter makes your numbers look good, but they also mean you’ll have a lot of expenses coming up. Of course, I’m good at spending money whether money comes in or not.

Publishing - 23.21%

I’m a bit surprised that publishing is such a big category, especially since crowdfunding has zero revenue, because this has never happened before since the pandemic. Despite being a publisher for close to 10 years, I have made almost all my money historically from conventions and crowdfunding. During the pandemic, we moved almost all our revenue to Kickstarter, and it has stayed that way since. I have always wanted to get our revenue more rounded with multiple revenue stream working, but it has never worked before. Yes, I know partner launches made money, but this is something special to me. It shows me that it’s working. I don’t want to lose that Kickstarter funding, but I would like to increase our retailer, royalties, and subscription sources considerably this year.

Courses - 61.27%

This looks like a lot of money, but it was mainly repayment for money I spent on our conference. However, I do capture all of it as income since it has been paid from one company to the other, and as a debit for Writer MBA. It’s a ticky-tacky thing, but it also helps me see that we are making money at Writer MBA, because we don’t have a loan, which means we can only pay the money we have.

Okay, my lovelies, for many of you this is where I leave you. For those with a paid membership, you can get all the juicy details below.

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Did you know you can see all our income reports and access over 900 exclusive articles, interviews, courses, etc in our member area? You should probably do that, because it’s pretty neat. I’ll even give you 20% off as my investment in you.

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