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2nd Quarter 2026 Income Report

July 29 2026 – 05:02pm

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Revenue for the second quarter of 2026 was:

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• April: $2,152
• May: $2,016
• June: $2,436
• Q2 Total: $6,604

Q1’s revenue was $11,155.

Q2 profits were:

• April: $707
• May: $770
• June: $1,734
• Q2 Total: $3,211

Q1’s profit was $8,081.

Looking at these numbers it feels like it was a good idea to stop doing monthly income reports, yet still continue doing income reports at all. On the one hand, I’m glad I wasn’t focused on these numbers over the past few months as I’ve prepared Finish What Matters for publish. On the other hand, these numbers are alarming, and I appreciate becoming aware of them so I can find some motivation to reverse this trend.

This marks ten straight months that 12-month income is at an all-time low. I’ve earned $42,961 top-line revenue over the past year. Before this streak began, my previous low had been $63,351, ending in November 2020.

My profits are not at a record-low, though barely. I’ve earned $26,469 profit in the last year, which is slightly more than the all-time low of $25,773, ending in December 2025.

This is mostly because 12-month ad spend is on a 6-month streak of all-time lows. I’ve spent only $9,418 on ads over the past year. Before starting this streak, my all-time low had been $15,453, ending November 2020. (The all-time high was $39,901, in the year ending November 2019).

Amazon gives authors the first “raise,” ever

If I could profitably spend more money on ads, I would definitely do so. That has proved impossible lately, but the latest development with Amazon royalties might improve my chances.

For the first time ever, Amazon has given authors a raise. To earn a 70% royalty on Kindle books, the maximum an author has been able to charge has been $9.99. As of July 7, 2026, authors can now make 70% on Kindle books priced as high as $12.99. So the potential earnings per-book have risen from about $7, to about $9.

Given that KDP has been around since 2007, it’s technically not a raise. Adjusting for inflation, the price ceiling should be around $16. Traditional publishers are routinely charging this and more. Based upon what little inside information I have, they’re still only earning the 35% royalty at that price, but I suspect there’s much more going on in terms of backroom deals with Amazon, price fixing across the industry, and pushing readers to higher-margin hardcopy books.

In any case, this price increase makes it a little more feasible to turn a profit on Amazon Ads. I’ve just recently raised MMT to $12.99 and nudged my ad spend a little higher, so it’s too soon to know for sure.

As much as I’d like to raise the price of Finish What Matters from $9.99 to $12.99, I can see I have close to 100 pre-orders, and countries with weird laws (I’m looking at you, Germany) will force orders within those countries to be cancelled if I change the price in any direction. So to prevent screwing over my German readers, I’ll hold it at $9.99 for everyone, until launch.

So just one reason to pre-order Finish What Matters at the low price of $9.99.

KDP Select experiment update

A short update on the experiment of putting MMT into KDP Select for a 90-day term. When I originally embarked on this experiment, I was 80% MMT would earn more on Kindle in the 90-day term than the previous 90 days. I was wrong.

To add insult to injury, the ebook has now sold one copy on a retailer outside of Kindle since September 2025 – just straight up zeroes. One copy sold in December – must have been to a library or something? The first nine months of 2025, MMT earned $388 on wide ebook sales. It has earned $8 since.

Working on FWM, it hasn’t been a major priority to try to fix that. The best candidate would be a BookBub Featured Deal, but MMT has been rejected the last nine attempts, which in retrospect was one motivation for trying KDP Select.

When I consider trying another, or running BookBub Ads, I also consider that returns have been diminishing on those deals, and I’m not in a position financially to be throwing money down the drain. Perhaps the introduction of FWM will help revive wide sales of MMT.

It certainly didn’t help that a few months after the term ended, I found that I had somehow failed to re-submit MMT through PublishDrive. But by now it’s been long enough some sales should have happened.

Manuscript of Finish What Matters sold for $200!

I feel like these income reports have been so bleak lately, it’s a relief to have a positive story. Recently, I drove down to Medellín to have dinner with some friends. On the way, I printed a spiral-bound copy of the FWM manuscript, with my final round of edits (though not proofreads).

I was reviewing my manuscript at the restaurant before the dinner, and one of my friends grabbed it while the rest of us talked. Two pages in, he said, “I want this. I’ll give you $50 for it.”

I told him I was flattered. I could send him an ebook or even send him a PDF to get it printed out, but this manuscript was not for sale. It had my edits on it, after all. It turned out that was exactly why he wanted it.

Once he offered me $200, I realized I could take photos of my edits. So I did that and booked $200 pre-launch revenue on FWM.

This helped me realize that maybe I should actually try to sell my progress manuscripts. I usually just throw them away, but they are full of my mark-ups, thoughts, and dog-eared pages. Some people are really into that kind of thing.

So, perhaps I’ll auction off the couple other manuscripts I have from the process. Something I’m still thinking about.

Finish What Matters audiobook recorded!

I have completed recording of the Finish What Matters audiobook. This brings closure not only to the massive project of the book – the news within the news is that the contents of the book are now frozen – but also to my home audiobook recording studio.

I worked with Joel Block of The Block House, who has done audiobooks for Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferriss, and Paul Millerd. At first I had imagined going to Austin to record, but Joel convinced me that I could make a good studio and actually end up with a better audiobook, since I could perform better at home, one hour at a time, instead of trying to cram recording into a couple days of expensive studio sessions, not to mention while on the road.

So I spent what felt like an inordinate amount of time planning and constructing a PVC audio booth to go in my bathroom. It turned out to be a fantastic recording setup.

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I’m thrilled with how the audiobook turned out. I think my audiobooks are getting better and better. Preview Edition readers should watch out in coming weeks for their chance to download the audiobook I promised them for meeting the campaign’s stretch goal.

I hope to publish a YouTube video demonstrating how I built my booth soon.

Spotify earnings are solid

I mentioned briefly in the previous report that Spotify had switched to quarterly reporting. The $500 payment I got for my audiobooks at the beginning of Q2 is finally reflected in the revenue in this report. MMT dominates that at about $482.

Peeking right now, I can see that I should receive a payment of about $700 for Q2 listens, soon. This is pretty solid, especially considering I’m still making about $30 a month from InAudio (InAudio/Findaway Voices has been split out from Spotify after Spotify acquired it).

I have no idea to what I can attribute this modest increase in earnings. Claude doesn’t seem to think trying Spotify ads would be worth it. It’s a pay-per-listen model with ridiculously low payout per-listen when you crunch the numbers. So, I’m also kinda waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Finish What Matters sales predictions

Given that by the time the next quarterly report comes out, Finish What Matters will be live (debuts on September 14th, the fifteen-year anniversary of Design for Hackers), it’s time to make some predictions on the sales of the book.

I’m not going to go into all of the detail I did predicting MMT sales, but I’ll use them as a baseline. But here are some of the parameters I’m thinking of.

Mind Management as a baseline

The sales of MMT are the most obvious baseline to start. My sales were:

• After 1 month: 879 copies
• After 6 months: 2,804 copies
• After 1 year: 8,950 copies
• After 3 years: 36,387 copies

Sales kinda leveled out after 50,000 copies. I’m currently at 51,890.

Compounding

Will my sales continue to compound, have they reached a plateau, or given the publishing-industry headwinds, will they be even lower? My total sales for my three prior major books are:

• Design for Hackers: ~18,000 copies
• The Heart to Start: ~30,000 copies
• Mind Management: ~50,000 copies

This compounding could be from more name-recognition amongst readers, better writing, and/or wider addressable markets for my books. That’s a nice trend upward. Can it keep going upward? If it does, by what degree?

Each additional book thus far has sold about 2/3 more copies than the previous. If that continued, then FWM would sell about 67,000 copies. But that’s an admittedly crude and arbitrary way of making a projection.

Addressable market

Is the addressable market of this book bigger or smaller than, say, Mind Management? The market for Time Management books is proven and pretty huge, with some books selling millions of copies.

There are a few books about finishing, specifically, such as John Acuff’s Finish, Charlie Gilkey’s Start Finishing, and Peter Hollins’s Finish What You Start.

I don’t have sales data on any of those, but I can at least look at ratings. Acuff has 2.6k Amazon ratings and nearly 13k Goodreads ratings. Gilkey has exactly 972 on both. Hollins has about 3.4k on both.

By comparison, MMT just passed 1,000, and The Heart to Start has 1.5k (HTS is shorter, which is what I attribute the lower sales/ratings ratio to).

I need to keep in mind that FWM is not just about finishing at large, but finishing creative projects. There are definitely some books with millions of copies sold in that market, such as The War of Art, Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic, and Austin Kleon. But, those are all with authors with larger platforms.

Platform size

Lots of email subscribers have come and gone over the years, and I’ve recently done a big purge of my email list doing a migration, so I don’t feel that my email list has changed materially in size.

I had an active podcast when I launched MMT, and while I still plan to put some promotional things in the feed, that podcast is now dormant.

On the other hand, I have a much larger following on Instagram – about 30k followers versus probably around 1,500 previously. It’s been difficult to reliably drive sales through that channel. But, my skills have been improving and the delta between mild and wild success on social media is bigger than ever.

je ne sais quoi

I don’t know what to call this last category, but it’s what the French call je ne sais quoi, or I don’t know what. While none of the above points to a dramatic difference from previous books, there are some je ne sais quoi elements that could help breed a black swan.

I think this is my most marketable and memorable title yet. I don’t think it will get butchered as badly in the memories of people as HTS and MMT did. HTS while well-received has always been hard to sell, in part because I don’t think the title really passed the cocktail party test I talked about in HSB. The title just feels a bit, I dunno…“gay?” Not good when no matter what I do the majority of my audience is men.

I’ve been told as much in different words by some readers, and when it came out heard over and over, “starting is easy – I need a book on finishing.” (As another point of comparison, John Acuff experienced something similar when his book on starting came out. It has 1.3k Amazon and 7.8k Goodreads ratings, so that bodes for a doubling of sales.)

Then there’s the writing. I have some stuff in here that is certified crack for some people. The Leonardo/Raphael TikTok has 1.4M views. The Birthday Paradox has 1.2M. Those suggest the content is shareable and that track record might convince higher-order podcast hosts to have me on.

Something that may have limited Mind Management was the focus on personal stories. I explain why in FWM, but some people weren’t into it – alas, it was the best I could do at the time and really fit how I learned the content. This one has that more generally-appealing historical stuff, though there’s still some personal stuff in there, which might be good since I’m really sharing decades of wisdom in getting creative projects done.

As I read the book myself, I vacillate between thinking, Holy shit, this is my best work, and Hmm, I’m not sure whether I found my footing, but definitely not This is dogshit, so that’s a good sign. I think some of the stories and examples I got from interviewing dozens of readers and just simply being a part of other people’s creative careers for decades are gems.

There’s also the fact that this book caps off a trilogy, ten years in the making. I could see how that might be a sticky story and the network effects of a trilogy could drive more sales.

Ad spend

As I mentioned above, it’s been very difficult to buy ads profitably, and ads have been a big driver of sales in the past. With the new pricing, maybe that will improve, but maybe it will not. BookBub has always been a big driver of sales, but I don’t know if it still works as well.

Mild success lower, wild success higher

With all that, and the uncertainty of book market in general, I think the height of my mild success scenario feels lower, but my wild success scenario seems higher.

In the style of “coin flips” and “floors and ceilings,” I’ll only make predictions for 50% and 90% confidence this time around. Given that all of my predictions split the middle on MMT, I should try to be even more precise. I’m supposed to be “wrong” 50% of the time.

My 50% predictions for MMT were:

• 1 month: 750–1,500
• 6 months: 2,000–7,500
• 1 year: 5,000–15,000
• 3 years: 20,000–50,000

I should keep in mind that I was starting MMT with 210 Preview Edition sales and 54 Amazon pre-orders. For FWM I have 124 Preview Edition sales, the 1 $200 manuscript sale, and currently 96 Amazon pre-orders (and a pre-order campaign in the works).

I want to consider that I should choose tighter ranges this time around. The size of my range, relative to the low end of the range, for MMT were: 100%, 275%, 200%, and 150%. My ranges should be tighter, but should probably get a little wider as the first year goes on, and a little tighter again, as time goes on and randomness smooths out.

(For simplicity, launch date will be treated as October 1st, so 1 month after will be November 1st. All predictions link to my public Fatebook prediction. Play along!)

My 50% predictions for FWM are:

• 1 month: 500–750
• 6 months: 1,500–2,500
• 1 year: 4,000–7,000
• 3 years: 22,000–35,000
• 5 years: 35,000–50,000

Here’s what those look like (on a logarithmic scale this time).

I actually think my floor and ceilings (equivalent to a 90% confidence prediction) will vary more widely. I see more uncertainty in what could happen, but if things do happen, they will be more extreme.

My floor/ceiling predictions for MMT were:

• 1 month: 300–20,000
• 6 months: 1,000–50,000
• 1 year: 2,000–100,000
• 3 years: 5,000–250,000

My floor/ceiling predictions for FWM are:

• 1 month: 350–5,000
• 6 months: 750–20,000
• 1 year: 1,000–100,000
• 3 years: 2,000–400,000
• 5 years: 3,000–900,000

Really need the logarithmic scale with that 5-year ceiling.

My ceiling turned out much lower early on because I don’t foresee many opportunities for something wild to happen so quickly, but quite a bit higher as time goes on, due to more potential for compounding and more impactful black swans.

Maximum Reverie Substack, now in phase II

I threw a Substack publication up – separate from my Love Mondays syndication – over a year ago. I called it Maximum Reverie because…I don’t know I guess I wanted to remind myself to just do things and not know why because that’s often what art is.

I put up a couple articles and let it sit. As the FWM launch has approached, I’ve put up a few more articles. Thus, the publication has entered phase II of an undefined number of phases in my process of R&D before I decide I’m officially doing something.

I’ve been toying around with how I might grow a Substack. What would perform well there that I’d want to write and that would help me grow in a direction I want to grow? I’ve had inklings of success with longer articles, which perform much better than my short LM newsletters, and with adapting those articles into Instagram carousels and reels that at least bring over some traffic.

So it shows some promise as a potential Next Thing to Focus On. If I could earn some revenue over there while thinking and writing hard about some ideas that might build into a book, I might actually be able to write another book someday – because I sure as hell can’t survive again what I’ve gone through to get FWM out there.

If you’d like to see me publishing articles again on a regular basis, please subscribe to Maximum Reverie on Substack. If you’d like to see me find an economically-sustainable way of doing that towards writing another book someday, pay for a membership while you’re at it!

Novella published!

One of the personal transformations I made while writing Finish What Matters was thinking a lot about what “matters” to me, creatively. As I result, I started writing fiction.

I’m excited to report that I’ve now published a novella under my secret pen name. Given my focus on FWM at the beginning of 2026, I was only 30% sure I would publish a fiction work over 30k words. How exciting to be 70% wrong!

I sold like three copies at 99¢ then learned very quickly that it’s very hard to sell fiction for even 99¢ when you have virtually no readers nor advertising budget. So it’s now free. Each download sends me over the moon. So far, 11 copies are out there in the aether, and I eagerly await my first Amazon ratings so I might be able to one day charge for it and buy a few effective clicks toward selling it.

I’m not totally against someday sharing this pen name’s work with my “David Kadavy” readers, but not for now. I am enjoying the creative freedom.

BigMailer + Kit migration complete

I’ve now completed my migration to a combination of BigMailer and Kit, for my email marketing. I no longer have an active account with ActiveCampaign.

You’ll start seeing a $39 a month charge to Kit, beginning in April, and my first $3 charge for Amazon SES in June. I’m getting a few months free of BigMailer as a part of their influencer program, but it will be quite inexpensive once I’ve paid for it.

It’s such a relief to have this migration done. AC was exhibiting behavior that was very…corporate – dangerous for my little business to be exposed to. I love Kit’s automations, and I love having more control over my sender reputation with the majority of my emails going through BigMailer + Amazon SES.

Oh, and I love saving a lot of money. I’m currently working on getting some of my money back from AC, which may be reflected in a future report.

I hope to one day soon tell more of the story and explain my new setup in YouTube videos and/or blog articles.

In the Kit creator recommendation network

One benefit of being on Kit is the creator recommendation network. If you’re interested in recommending the Love Mondays newsletter, just search for “kadavy” under “Discover.”

Libsyn automated advertising revenue

I was pretty bummed that Libsyn increased their hosting fees for my dormant Love Your Work podcast. But that prompted me to discover their automated advertising.

The earnings aren’t outrageous – the first earnings are $24, recorded in June. But I’m surprised to even earn enough to cover my hosting. I definitely need to think through whether this is a way to make a rebirth of the podcast economically sustainable.

Thank you for having me on your podcast!

Thank you to Kate Volman at the Create for no Reason podcast.

I would like to emphasize that I am very interested in being on podcasts as the Finish What Matters launch approaches. Let me know if you’d like to have me, or please recommend me as a guest to your favorite hosts.

April Income

Book Sales

Misc. Products

Affiliates / Advertising

Reader Support

Services

April Expenses

General

Advertising

Hosting

May Income

Book Sales

Misc. Products

Affiliates / Advertising

Reader Support

Services

May Expenses

General

Advertising

Hosting

June Income

Book Sales

Misc. Products

Affiliates / Advertising

Reader Support

Services

June Expenses

General

Advertising

Hosting

This post is filed under Income Reports.