Wannabe Press Income Report - Q2 - 2025

If you want to burn down your company, then do I have an income report for you.

Hi,

Writer MBA is officially dead and buried, and I have a lot of feelings about it. I have gone in depth about those feelings before, so I won’t be doing it again.

It’s worth nothing, though, that this will likely be the last time we’ll be talking about Writer MBA in these reports, except for maybe the end of year revenue recap.

Moving forward we should be able to see all my revenue and expenses.

Remember, our spending and revenue was much higher for Writer MBA, but we never had a full transparency policy, so I’ve only ever shared the money that passed through to my solo creative businesses. If you want to read more about how my company(ies) are/were structured, I explain it here.

Along with ending that partnership, last quarter also saw a collab with

Write • Build • Scale

for our $10k Secrets project.

Earlier this week I went into depth about the good, the bad, and the ugly. To sum up, we met about it in January, launched it in April, brought in a little money, and built both our lists by about 1,000 people each. Even though it was small, it was a bear to do this while closing out Writer MBA at the same time,

Between those two events, that about sums up how I spent my Q2, save for a two week research trip to Prague/Vienna/Bratislava at the end of it.

Before I dig into it, I wanted to remind 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 - 1.43%

Just like last quarter, people only booked one off consulting calls, nothing long term or big ticket. I could have really used one of those two things this quarter, especially since there has been nothing but chaos and businesses burning down.

I’ve been able to survive alright without a big client bringing in lots of profit for me, but it’s been really stressful. This Substack really helps.

I’ve had to shift my business around quite a bit to make this new normal work for me, and now with the dissolution of Writer MBA I have to do it again, but I think it’s for the best. I never loved the consulting work I was doing before, but it was so lucrative I couldn’t stop doing it. Writer MBA was a great company and I loved it, but it never did more than break even while cannibalizing both of our solo businesses.

So, it’s been a tough year, and I would like it if next quarter I didn’t lose another huge bit of business, but yeah, it’s okay, I guess.

Crowdfunding - 36.67%

This is a little more in line with how much I make from crowdfunding every quarter than last quarter. However, in 2026 I’m moving more to a model that doesn’t have me using crowdfunding 8-10 times a year.

I’m moving back to the 4-5 campaigns (or fewer) I’ve run prior to starting Writer MBA, and that will be inclusive of partner launches. Plus, they will almost exclusively be for fiction projects and partnerships, with my non-fiction being run through The Author Stack, and the new Hapitalist membership I launched this month.

I went through a massive productivity boom in the last five years, and a lot of my life has been about funding those books, finishing them, and getting them on retailers.

Prior to 2020, I had been involved in 19 books.

Now, I have been involved in 110 publishing projects from card games to comics to guest editing a magazine, and it’s exhausting, you know? Like not just to me, but to my audience.

So, my hope is that starting next year I can settle down. I have my methodologies down, and I can now funnel people to all sorts of places.

The good news is that I’ve never lost money on a book, which means everything out there is an asset for me hopefully gathering money over time, even if little by little.

Publishing - 29.6%

For years, my straight publishing income has been lackluster. Before the pandemic, I made a lot of publishing income from conventions. After that part of my business blew up, I’ve been struggling to expand beyond crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding is great for frontlist titles, but publishers generally make 50% of their revenue off their backlist. The goal for me has always been to use crowdfunding as the first step in my publishing journey, then transition that success into the rest of my business.

In an ideal world, publishing would be 50-60% of my income, 20% from crowdfunding, 10% from consulting, and then 10% from miscellaneous things.

I’m still woefully terrible at making money on retailers, but my subscription revenue is making up for it, along with some website and retailer sales that help smooth it out.

This would be a lot easier if I still could do conventions, but I’m making progress, and that is progress.

Courses - 32.3%

I received a final payout from Writer MBA this quarter, and I also got some repayment for funds I spent on our last Kickstarter, but I’m probably closing out this section next quarter, as it’s become a catch-all for “money I made from Writer MBA”, and not really from courses. Without Writer MBA, there’s not much need for it.

Since my big courses are all inside of the new Hapitalist membership, there won’t be much need for it going forward.

Thoughts

For the whole of my career, I’ve been searching for happiness and contentment. I have built so many businesses thinking they would give me what I needed, only to find that nothing filled that hole inside me.

Every business would teach me a little bit more about what I needed, but the truth was that perhaps there is no such thing as a dream job. Perhaps we should not dream of labor, as James Baldwin said.

I know the thing I like doing most is tinkering with lots of projects, working with many partners, and not focusing too much on one thing or another. One of the things I love about The Author Stack is I can basically talk about anything while Wannabe Press lets me basically write about anything.

If I want to plan a collab with somebody cool, there’s almost always something we can do through the lens of this publication.

I like lots of little projects that let me test things out without committing to something specific and narrow. While I loved our conference, having to push everyone and everything to one week a year in one city didn’t give me a lot of freedom. It put a ton of pressure on 1/52 of the year.

I let myself be pulled away from that happy place in the past couple of years, mainly because I committed to things before I even knew what my happy place really was, and now I have to shed a lot of the weight that built up over the years.

I’m hoping now that I’ve burned so much of my life down yet again, I can build back better.

By the end of 2025, I want to have all my solo fiction books on retailers. I should also have 9 of my 10 non-fiction books on retailers, and be laser-focused on Hapitalist.

My goal in 2026 is to be putting maximum effort on Hapitalist, with one non-fiction book launch a year. Then, I’d like to develop more partnerships and be working with people to expand the brand outside of Wannabe Press and The Author Stack.

By having fewer of my own books launching, it gives me space for those partnerships to happen, and that’s where I thrive.

Okay, now let’s get to the good stuff. If you’re not a paid member, you can sign up below.