The. End. (not of this Substack)

This is a very hard post to write, but it has to be done.

Hi,

I am tired. I am sad. I am frustrated. These are three sentences I have been mumbling under my breath a lot in the past few months. Writer MBA has done a lot of awesome things, but it's been a lot to deal with, too. The projects we have launched since I've started working with Monica are some of the most ambitious of my whole career, from books that changed the way the industry thought about platforms like Kickstarter to conferences that redefined how conferences operate, pretty much nothing we have done has been easy.

It has been transformative, but it has never been easy. We've done everything we could to keep the drama from you, but there was a lot of drama. Even the formation of Writer MBA came at a time when we both had companies running full force, and fitting is another company into our lives was difficult. It broke a lot of mechanisms that were working to make it fit. It was never a perfect fit, which led to a lot of tense moments, and a lot of frustration for both of us.

That frustration led to us blowing up a lot of products, and moving in a lot of new directions that pissed off a lot of people, including ourselves. In doing so, we created some truly revolutionary products. but we also ruffled quite a few feathers, which caused even more drama.

Still, we did a lot of really amazing things, and for a while that was worth it...until it wasn't.

The Kickstarter Accelerator literally changed the course of independent publishing. Our Direct Sales Mastery for Authors book redefined the direct sales conversation. Our Author Ecosystems archetyping system gave voice and language to different success paths that have been marginalized for decaded. Our Writer MBA conference proved that connection is the thing authors want from conferences, not information.

Overall, our thesis was that you weren't doing marketing wrong, you were just doing the wrong marketing, and we not only proved that thesis but gave authors winning strategies to take control of their career. Some of those strategies were embraced wholeheartedly from the beginning, and others were constant battles, but we were, largely right on all of them. Doing that for so long meant standing at opposition to the independent publishing industry until it blinked, and we were able to move the window, again and again.

And I am tired.

We won in the end, at least in the marketplace of idea. We got everything we ever asked for and the industry looks vastly different now than it did five years ago, in no small part because we stood up and fought for it to change.

Unfortunately, we destroyed ourselves in the process.

We basically exchanged every bit of our energy to further our argument, and it was financially ruinous. In the last two years, we have each made $14,000 in disbursements from Writer MBA, and each have debt approaching $20,000. That doesn't include the money we should have made from product launches, in conference disbursements, or anything else, which was probably another $50k-$100k each.

We have funneled every dollar we made into this thesis, and more. All those great Kickstarter launched? They went into the company. All those Writer MBA product launches? They were funneling right into the company. We were basically in constant launch mode for the last three years, and we did see any of that money. It all went to vendors and contractors.

And we're tired.

I'm not here to complain about it, but right now, we are in a deep hole, and in order to dig out we would have to double down on a company that took everything from us. If you haven't yet, and you want more of the financial breakdowns behind this, you can ​access all my income reports here​, and ​my debrief of the Writer MBA conference here​

On top of the risk of it still failing even if we gave it another go, we would have to turn away from our own companies even longer. We don't think they would survive if we did that, and they certainly wouldn't thrive.

It has become impossible to continue doing that in any way that makes sense to us. We both thought Writer MBA was going to be THE company, the one that broke out and smashed through seven-figures, but it just never got the traction to do that. We were too far ahead of our time, and too niche for it to work.

We did get traction, but not enough soon enough.

Instead, it got just enough traction for Writer MBA to be the biggest company we had, but then it sucked all the air out of the room before it turned enough of a profit to justify the resources needed to make it work effectively. It couldn't get that final boost to sustain itself. Every time we got it to a good place, something would break and we would have to come back again and nurture it.

Maybe it would succeed to that level if we kept going, but we can't rely on maybes anymore. So, it is with a heavy heart that I have to announce that Writer MBA will no longer continue on past June.

Well, technically it hasn't existed for a while, which is kind of what spurred this whole dissolution process. In a weird twist of fate, a few weeks ago the state of Wyoming emailed us to let us know that due to a clerical error our company was dissolved. So, Writer MBA hasn't officially existed for some time, and we were wrestling between whether to start it again. Perhaps if that didn't happen, we would have kept going, but we couldn't find the resolve to double down and restart it again.

I have learned that when the universe gives you clear signs, you should take them. This was as clear a sign as I have ever seen. We just barely survived putting on this conference, and it felt like the universe was saying "I saved you twice now, and I won't do it again".

So, we're taking the sign and walking away before we do something that does ruin us.

Aside from blood relations, and relations I married into, there is nobody on this planet I love more than Monica, and honestly despite all our disagreements there is nobody in this industry I align with more as to how to succeed as an author.

That said, love is not a good enough reason to continue a partnership.

In a way this is the perfect time to end our partnership because we said everything we needed to say. We came into this wanting to make a case for a new methodology across several axes, and over the last four years we have made them all. It's very rare you get a change to deliver everything you wanted and are able to leave on your terms.

So, in that very small way, it is a win.

If this comes as a shock to you, then it means we've done our job, which was shielding you from any of this for as long as we could, and that itself would be another win.

Looking to the future, we both want to do very different things, and that's okay.

I spent a lot of time and energy in the last couple of years building The Author Stack, and my non-fiction series. I'll keep going with that. Monica has some new, exciting things to announce, and I'm super pumped to support her.

We gave all we could to this company over the years, but in the next couple of months you're going to see us winding down our joint ventures. You'll see most of our books taken off retailers, and our joint courses taken down from sale. If you're a part of our courses, you'll be sent information on how to access our courses.

The Author Ecosystem is the only thing we'll keep working on, but each in our own way. This will become a branching point, with us rebranding the methodology to work for our unique businesses. My branch will look a lot like what exists now, and will probably be under the same name, as I wrote a lot of the content from the book and worked out how I think the ecosystems work through that process. However, it will be branded differently for sure. I hope you like it.

This will hopefully be painless for you.

However, this is very painful for me. I have started seven companies in my life, and I really thought this one was going to make it. Instead, it's gone the way of 5/6 of my other companies before it. I have been like a raw nerve the last couple of months as we wrestled with what that means.

In influence, we succeeded wildly. In money, we failed spectacularly. Whatever the next step is, I need it to fill both buckets without overtaking my life.

I know some of you might be saying "Yay! I no longer have to pay attention to Russell. I was only listening to him because of Monica," and that's fine. I want to know I wish you well, but I hope for most of you it's not an either/or situation. We both have similar ideas, but also vastly different ways to implement them.

I love Monica, and she was a huge influence on my career even before we went into business together.

I felt like the junior partner of this relationship for a long time, but I feel like finally, now, I am on equal footing with my own voice to say it with confidence. I have a book on Kickstarter now about ​how to thrive as a writer in capitalism​, and I'll be double down on that going forward, along with building out the rest of my methodology.

I'm so appreciative for Monica letting me go off on wild tangents and supporting my growth over the years. This is really, really hard for me, but it is not the first time something I love burned to the ground in front of me. It won't be the last.

This is life.

Finally, if you’d like to read Monica’s statement about this whole thing, you can do so here.

Love,

Russell