I have the receipts…

Honest accounting from an extensive self audit of my publishing business from 2020-2025

Hi,

I've been trying for months to get a proper accounting of my publishing journey between 2020-2025. With the Kickstarter launch of Publishing is Broken, But It Doesn’t Have to Break Us, it seems like a good time to show you what I’ve found doing an extensive self audit.

This is the kind of thing I usually only share with paid members, but I thought I would share it with all of you today in honor of the campaign.

Please note, this is not as tightly structured as my normal articles. It’s a bit of chaos, which is hopefully instructive, instead of a dose of instruction, tinged with chaotic energy, like the rest of my work.

It's a lot easier to keep track of everything prior to 2020 because I wasn't nearly as well-known, so I didn't have as much complexity to my business as I do now. I didn’t have much of a non-fiction career, I hadn't published so many fiction books, I didn't get invited to many anthologies, I wasn't working with clients, etc.

Prior to 2020, I had about 30 launches in my whole 15+ year career. There were a bunch of books in there, but I also directed a movie, and did some other miscellaneous product launches. I even executive produced an internet television company in 2007, and we launched beta on that platform at some point during the year and change I worked there.

As best I can tell, not including podcasts, courses, summits, games, or any of the other weird side quests I’ve taken, since January 2020 I’ve been involved in 103 books.

Here’s how they break down.

• 45 anthologies – I contributed stories or comics, usually one of a dozen people in the book, but a few I edited.

• 11 co-written books – including fiction, comics, and non-fiction.

• 1 publisher launch (comics) – not an anthology, or a group project.

• 1 publisher translation release – I sold the Argentinian rights to the first Ichabod volume to a publishing company down there.

• 9 nonfiction solo books – The vast majority of the Author Stack series, plus a couple more.

• 6 comics I created and published - Ichabod Jones, et al, including one I drew myself.

• 30 solo fiction books – Mainly Cosmic Weave (my big 40+ book universe) books, with some others thrown in for good measure, from thriller to romance.

It’s gotten so complicated recently now that there are out-of-print books, projects that only launched on Kickstarter, or as a lead magnet, and every time I think I have a complete list, I find another project or eight I forgot about that messes everything up.

I also worked with a company to turn one of my series into a card game during that time, wrote an audio drama, and am currently working with a game designer to turn my book into a TTRPG. Plus, I’m helping authors transition their books into comics, so it’s only going to get more confusing over time, as is the way of life.

It also doesn’t include:

• 12+ courses

• 300+ podcast episodes across:

  • The Complete Creative

  • Kickstart Your Book Sales

  • The Six-Figure Author Experiment

• Any of the conferences or summits I ran, hosted, and/or owned.

• Any of the 100+ podcasts, blogs, and conferences that I spoke at or gave interviews to over the years.

I also had a company, Writer MBA, that folded this year, and products like The Author Ecosystems that splintered out beyond me in ways I’ve yet to fully grasp. At least I have a pretty good handle on the books I’ve written, and the money that Wannabe Press has earned during that time.

Since January 1st 2020, a total of $946,000 in revenue passed through my Wannabe Press business accounts.

This includes consulting, coaching, courses, done-for-you services, contract work, and monies Wannabe Press received from Writer MBA, but not the totality of Writer MBA revenue, which would make that number significantly higher than I’m listing here. At its peak, Writer MBA accounted for 50% of my total business portfolio’s revenue, including several co-written books released through that company.

(Now, it accounts for zero, because that’s how closing a company works. Fun story, I actually lost 75% of my revenue sources from last year and it almost destroyed me, but that’s a tale for another day. Did I say fun? I meant horrific.)

$475,000 of that Wannabe Press revenue came specifically from publishing-related revenue. That’s about half my revenue coming from books, and includes everything I classify under the six pillars of my integrated publishing ecosystem:

(BTW, I talk about all of these, and how to integrate them into a thriving system in my new book.)

• Retailers

• Subscriptions

• Crowdfunding

• Conventions

• Webstores

• Landing Pages

There are other things like translations, royalties, etc. that are part of a successful writer’s business, but since publishers make the overwhelming majority of their money from one of these six pillars, that’s my focus, too.

It is my belief that the more your book sells in these six channels, combined with writing better books, the more other publishing entities will be interested in working with you to bring your books to their readers in other mediums, formats, and/or languages.

Basically, the more your book sells, the more other ways your books can sell.

The scale of my last few years is pretty incredible to contextualize. As I mentioned above, from 2005-2019, I had about 30 launches across 15 years, about 2 a year. Since 2020, I've had more like 17 a year, and that doesn't include any course, or other, launches aside from books.

And what's wild is that I don't even think this is that unique to my career.

When I talk to my friends, the most successful ones often have 20+ launches a year when they account for audio, translations, etc...

...and remember I didn't even break-out most of those kinds of things in my accounting. This is the kind of chaos I think we all dream of having, even if we don’t know it.

You might be asking at this point “That’s great, Russell, but did you actually make any money?” Which is a great question, and I would direct you to my income reports for that kind of answer, though if you think this is chaotic, digging through those is…woof.

The short answer is yes, but also kind of no, but also it depends on what your definitition of “make” and “money” are, along with your definition of “did” and “you”, and even “Russell”.

Really there are a lot of things I take umbridge with in that question, though I do appreciate that you spelled my name right. (It’s the little things, right?)

It’s hard because much of the money I make from my business goes into operational expenses like my mortgage (since I work from home), repairs and maintenance, taxes, research trips, meals, books, gas, travel, my salary, etc. Because of the way I structured Wannabe Press, and the fact that we are set up as an LLC filing as an S-Corp, I have to debit and credit every purchase, even if I’m paying myself.

These are all very complex accounting things that I don’t even begin to understand. My CPA tells me what I can do and what I can’t, and I’ve been working with them for decades at this point. So, I don’t argue.

All that complexity isn’t even counting the money I reinvest to finance new projects and growth.

Last year, for instance, I invested $50k into growth, which accounted for a $26,000 loss in 2024, but I’ve slowly been seeing the fruits of that this year, as some of those subscribers are becoming paid members and buying my books now, and more likely will in the future.

To make it even more complicated, most of the money I invest this year won’t be recouped for 2+ years as projects finish and I’m able to launch them.

Money going out today pays for money coming in tomorrow, which makes all this accounting even more opaque.

When you run a publishing-based business, you spend money with the hope that whatever you invest this year multiplies significantly in future years.

Unfortunately, more often than not it turns out to be a wash. After all, publishing is a war of attrition. If you can break even on most projects, then you’re happy to stay alive and fight another day. If you can average 2x your investment across all your projects, you’re doing pretty well for yourself. Any more than that would be a windfall.

If you just look at my P&L, then I’ve lost over $200k between 2020-2025, but if you look at our investments and savings, then those have more than doubled in that same time. So, which is true?

I can say with significantly more certainty than I’ve demonstrated so far in this article that I’ve put money into 75 books during my career and every single one of them made a profit. Some barely and some blew past expectations, but none lost money.

(One literally made a $20 profit, but that’s still a profit.)

Compared to most publishers who lose money on 90%+ of their books, I find that pretty amazing and wear it like a badge of honor. I’ve never found a monster hit, but I’ve also never lost my shirt, which is how I keep doing this work.

So across 103 book launches, my $475k in publishing specific revenue averages out to $4,620 per book, and I wasn’t paid much, or anything, for most of them. The ones that hit bigger than the others smoothed out the ones that didn’t, which is a consistent theme among almost every publisher I have ever met.

During this time, I also built out four long-running IPs:

• The Godsverse Chronicles (13 books)

• The Obsidian Spindle Saga (12 books)

• Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter (16 comic issues)

• The Author Stack (9 nonfiction books... and counting. Plus, it’s a blog with 40,000+ subscribers.)

Though I’m not done yet, I should be able to keep going back to those four series for the rest of my life without adding new stuff to my catalog, and still carve out a decent living for myself. That is the dream of publishing, right? Make things that keep selling and bringing in new fans forever.

In short, I’m pretty good at this publishing game. So, when I say the system is broken, I speak from a tiny bit of experience. I’ve been doing this a long time at a high level, and even though I’m thriving right now, it’s only because I know how to avoid the rickety bits that will send me plummeting through a hole with even the slightest pressure.

I’ve watched the same structural rot creep across every industry I’ve worked in. It comes slowly, then all at once.

We are quickly reaching the “all at once” stage, if we aren’t already deeply inside it.

Platforms shift, algorithms implode, retailers squeeze tighter, crowdfunding gets more crowded, costs rise, margins shrink, the people who “made it” two years ago vanish without a trace, and we stay calm and carry on with a stiff upper lip, or whatever britishism you use to mask our utter denial of the truth staring us right in the face.

We patch the holes. Then patch the patches. Then run out of wall to patch. And still, we keep building as if the roof doesn’t teeter on the verge of collapse. Finally, when it crashes down under the weight of it all, we write think pieces about how nobody could have foretold its collapse.

Except that lots of people are trying to shine light on the problem. They’re doing everything from whispering to screaming that something is wrong.

It’s an entire creative universe of Cassandras.

I have experienced the same system breaking down in fiction, non-fiction, podcasts, courses, comics, games, and film from the inside, along with watching it happen in music from the outside. It's all the same problem.

Each industry is watching different parts of their business sag under the weight of itself and break down in their own unique way, but the infrastructure cannot withstand what we’re doing to it across the board.

Which is why we need something better, and why I wrote a whole book identifying the problems and showing you how to build a better publishing ecosystem for your own career.

Maybe we cannot fix the industry at large (though that shouldn’t preclude us from trying), but we can create a better one for ourselves, and each of us can do our little bit to buttress everyone else.

If you want to learn how to prevent falling victim of the same headwinds we all face, and/or maybe want to build something better for yourself, then check out the Kickstarter. It’s only got a few days left on it.

What do you think?

• Where have you seen “the system” break down in your corner of publishing (or creative work in general)? Are you seeing it in platform changes? Audience fatigue? Creator burnout? Something else entirely?

• What channels make up your publishing ecosystem? Are you heavily reliant on one pillar (like retailers or crowdfunding), or do you have a more diversified approach?

• If you had to choose just one metric to track your success — what would it be, and why? Is it money, joy, reach, impact, sustainability, growth, freedom, or something less tangible?

Let us know in the comments.

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