Wannabe Press Income Report - Q3 - 2025

Writer MBA, the company I spent the last several years building, has burned to the ground. Can I rise from the ashes? Yes, I can...probably.

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You’re not broken. The model is.

You’re not burned out because you’re bad at this. You’re burned out because you were taught to treat your capacity like a commodity.

Hapitalist is for writers who’ve done all the “right” things and are still stuck, tired, and/or quietly resenting the thing they once loved.

You’ll get live strategy calls, practical training, a brilliant community, and access to my “digital brain”, trained on over 6.5 million words I’ve said or written over the last 15+ years. Plus, you’ll get access to all the powerful courses that have helped hundreds of authors reclaim their momentum without selling out their values.

If you want to build something that lasts, without breaking yourself to do it, then I invite you inside our 🦄Hapitalist community.

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Hi,

This quarter was mainly boring with little drama, and I needed it. That said, I had several dozen launches between retailers, Kickstarter, and my membership. I probably shouldn’t be so blasé about 20 or so launches last quarter, but I’ve done a lot of launches, so it’s hard to rattle me with them. They aren’t drama, they are just Tuesday.

In fact, it was this past quarter I realized that since 2020 I’ve been part of 103 book launches, and my Publishing is Broken Kickstarter campaign ended what seemed like an unbroken streak where I had a new book launch every month. By my count, I had roughly 17 launches per year…for six years. and that doesn’t even include launching books on different platform, relaunching things, launching anything that wasn’t books, etc.

I feel like I’ve been bossed around by my release schedule for the better part of a decade. In 2019, when I made my 2020-2024 schedule, I didn’t account for building Writer MBA, writing a ton of new non-fiction books, or partnering with so many wonderful people.

A whole company rose up and burned down in that stretch of time.

It might seem silly to feel beholden to a release schedule you set yourself, but once I got started writing, it was hard not to keep going with it, especially when I was in the middle of a series. Then, I needed to launch those books to fund their production.

The way my business works is that I have a production fund that I refill once I launch a book. So, every new launch pays for those books to be produced in arrears, which meant I got myself in a bit of a loop.

Then, with the launch of our conference, we were saddled with a $200,000 bill that we needed every dollar to pay for, and so this is the first time in six years that I feel like I have some control over my life and can make new decisions.

Until now, I was making reactive decisions that only worked for me at that moment in time and not necessary what was best for the long term health of my business. That has led, more and more this year, to my launches dropping like a rock as it feels like people are finally sick of me, or at least buying things from me.

Even when I wasn’t launching a book, there was almost always some project launching from one of the facets of my business, and I’m spending Q4 settling a lot of those old debts.

Then, in 2026, I have a much nicer, gentler new plan. I’ve only currently got one scheduled Kickstarter launch for my own projects, and one Hapitalist launch a quarter besides that one.

I’m being very picky about what projects I take on these days, too. I was on the phone with a sponsor of our conference who said “Unless I can make $250k on a partnership, it’s not worth the hassle”, and that resonated. I’m not at that level, but I’m trying not to take on projects until they can either make me $25k or that I don’t have to launch myself.

Plotdrive is a good example of the former. My goal is to grow that into a $10k/mo recurring revenue stream for myself. Even though that’s not where I’m at now, I’m willing to invest in it because it also helps further my aims of expanding my resume in AI and tech.

Working with Laguna Studios is a good example of the latter. Yes, I’m writing projects for them, but not in my universe. I’m playing in other people’s sandbox, which means I’m not wholly responsible for the launch. I can send a couple emails, do a live video or two, and then take my foot off the gas. It’s not all consuming, daily emails for months and months, just trying to grind out breaking even.

Both of them further my secondary goal of raising my profile. The best way to book more contract work is to have contract work that works out, which is what I’m working on doing now with Laguna.

With Plotdrive, it brings me into a whole new market and allows me to talk about craft, which is where most writers are focused, especially at the beginning of their career. I’ve not had much access to those writers until now because I teach mostly on the business side.

I’m less interested in opportunities that don’t raise my profile unless they hit that $25k threshold.

I got stuck in a loop for the last several years where all my responsibilities criss-crossed each other, but moving forward I’m trying to be more intentional in my approach. I’d like to launch no more than five Kickstarter campaigns a year that each bring in at least $25k in revenue, but really closer to $50k.

I envy my friends who can only take on $250k+ projects, so my new goal is to do fewer, more focused things better as I work to build Hapitalist. I’m already committed to Plotdrive and Laguna for at least the near-term future, and hopefully in 2027 I can take those in bigger and better directions. which means I don’t have much room for partnerships unless they come to me.

Before I dig into last quarter’s revenue, I wanted to remind you 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 - 4.0%

This has been my best consulting quarter of the year, mainly because I got paid good money to do a presentation for a conference. Otherwise, I made about what I do from consulting calls this quarter. Now that I’ve pivoted my content somewhat, I seem to be getting more traction on consulting calls. Still not enough to really move the needle, but it’s a little up from previous quarters, and as I pull back more from being so present, I’m hoping that will continue.

Crowdfunding - 12.6%

I only had one Kickstarter that paid out this quarter, and it was a bit of a disaster, honestly. I did less than 50% my goal, which is a huge miss for me. I don’t usually fall below projections. This is the first year it’s happened on multiple projects in a row. Since disbanding Writer MBA, I’ve had three launches and they have all been just dreadfully below projections.

I had a second project end last quarter, but it didn’t pay out until Q4, so it will show up on the next income report, and the end-of-year review.

Publishing - 83.4%

Substack brought in the most revenue from this bucket, and specifically a Hapitalist launch I’ll talk more about with paid members. I’ve been pretty happy with how this quarter turned out with publishing as an entire category. I even made decent money from retailers, though those won’t be paid out until Q4. Decent is, of course, based on perception. There was one other thing that made this significantly higher than I expected, but again I’ll be talking about that with paid subscribers.

Thoughts

Q3 was all about getting my books on retailers. I launched five non-fiction books onto retailers in August and 11 fiction books onto retailers in September. Honestly, since I didn’t do anything special for them, I probably should have just done it months ago., at least the fiction ones.

I couldn’t do the non-fiction books before August because of the simple fact many of them didn’t exist before then. Writer MBA pulled down all our co-written books, which meant I had to write three new books in Q2 that all launched in Q3.

The other two books couldn’t launch until they did because I gave an exclusivity window to Kickstarter backers. So, to keep things lined up correctly, I had to do it that way for the non-fiction, but the fiction books had been delivered to backers a year before, so I could have done them way earlier.

I think that I thought I would do something special for those books, but I kept seeing bad reviews for book one, and it scared me from doing anything big for them. I actually feel more excited now that they’re out.

At the beginning of the year, I had over 20 books to release on retailers, and now I only have three. One will be released this month, one (hopefully) next month, and then we’ll see about the last one.

It means that in 2026, I can stop being led around by my past. As writers, we almost always are at some level because of how writing works. We finish a book, then it goes to an editor, and by the time we launch it we’re onto the next project, but some of these books I released last quarter were written in 2018.

I’m dying to talk about the next thing, and I still haven’t even announced my one book that I’ve been wanting desperately to talk about all year. However, I couldn’t until the rest of this stuff was out. That all changes soon.

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