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August 2025 Income Report

October 03 2025 – 04:44pm

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August’s revenue was $3,493, down from July’s $4,176. Profits were $942, down from July’s $2,405.

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All-time low yearly profit

12-month profits are at an all-time low in the nearly eight-year history of these reports. I’ve profited $29,917 in the past year. The previous low was in September 2020, of $32,213.

That was just a couple months before launching Mind Management, Not Time Management, so it shouldn’t be surprising my profits are low again, as I continue to work on Finish What Matters. This, I tell myself, is life in Extremistan.

Sub-$1,000 month

This is the third month this year I’ve profited less than $1,000. In February I lost nearly $1,000. Before this year, the last time I profited less than $1,000 in a month was June 2020. My only other sub-$1,000 month, I lost $773 in December 2018.

Ad spend not scaling

The main culprit dragging down profits was increased ad spend. This was my first month spending more than $2,000 on ads since March this year. I spent only $588 in April, and have been scaling up as I’ve dug into how the Amazon Ads platform has changed, and made targeted changes to improve ROI.

Thanks to a slingshot effect, April had a 340% ROI in book sales, May 71%, June 186%, July 107%, and this month I was back down to 8% – a profit of only $157 on books, after spending $2,034 on ads.

Even after writing scripts to interface with the Amazon Ads API and streamline some ad-management tasks, the fact remains that most of my books can no longer turn a profit on Amazon Ads. 100-Word Writing Habit is currently easiest to sell through ads, but still it takes more spend than it makes.

Mind Management crosses 50,000 sales!

Amidst these dismal book-sale numbers, Mind Management, Not Time Management crossed a huge milestone: 50,000 copies sold!

And so I updated the wheat-flanked words on the cover.

This breakthrough came when my India foreign-rights deal reported its sales thus far, of over 1,600 copies. I’ve made other foreign-rights deals, none of which have reported their sales yet, so the actual number is definitely higher.

When I set projections in my September 2020 income report, I was 50% confident MMT would sell between 20,000 and 50,000 within the first three years. I nearly split the middle on that prediction, selling just over 36,000.

But, I didn’t make a projection for five years – that just seemed too far out.

50,000 copies is pretty amazing. If I could guarantee the same performance from Finish What Matters, surrendering any chance to sell more, I think I’d take it. I might predict about a 50% chance I’d sell 50k in five years.

Kindle Unlimited term in the works

I’m putting wheels in motion to add Mind Management to Kindle Unlimited for a 90-day term, pulling the ebook from other retailers.

I’m surprised I’m making this move, given all I’ve sacrificed to be a “wide” author over the years. But, the performance of the book on Amazon suddenly began sucking in late 2024, and I’ve tried many things to revive it, with little success. It will be interesting to see if it leads to a noticeable algorithm boost.

This seems like an appropriate time to make a prediction. If all goes well, my KU term will span the holiday season, so that increases the odds I’ll make more in that term than the previous 90 days. However, I’ve also turned off most Amazon Ads for the book, which increases the odds I’ll make less.

So, I’m 80% sure MMT will make more Kindle revenue during its KU term than the previous 90 days.

Now, what about major impacts? At this moment, MMT has made $669 on Kindle in the previous 90 days. What are the chances the results will be overwhelming, such as a doubling or tripling of revenue (which, in the history of the book, would look kind of normal!)

I’m 10% sure MMT will make triple or more Kindle revenue during its KU term than the previous 90 days.

If that happened, I’d have to give some serious thought to my status as a “wide” author, and whether or not my other ebooks should be in KU.

I’ve written in these reports before about how my decision to be wide came before good direct options. Now that I sell direct, perhaps the variety of “barbell wide” I’d want to try would be ebooks in KU, with hard copies available direct.

Reels

Last month I wrote about how I was reluctantly re-publishing my TikTok reels from a couple years ago on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.

The YouTube Shorts are performing relatively poorly. The most popular over the past two months has a bit over 6,000 views, and most have under 1,000.

The Instagram Reels are a different story. One has over one-million views, another is getting close, and even the poorly-performing ones are getting more than 2,000 views.

I also managed to finally get my TikTok account accepted for the Creator Rewards program, and I’m re-posting some of my top-performing reels, and using TT as a testing ground for new reel ideas. I’ve only been in the program a few days and have earned just several dollars, but none of my reels have really taken off in there yet.

On Instagram, I’ve gone from having fewer than 5,000 followers, to over 17,000. My account is reaching some interesting people – musician John Mayer, with 5.7M followers – liked one of my reels.

To try to capture some of the attention, I placed a download link for a free copy of How to Write a Book in my IG and TT bio pages. I’ve had about 70 email sign-ups through IG, 1 of which bought a book through Shopify. I’ve had no email sign-ups through TT – with 26 landing-page views, a 0% conversion rate, versus IG’s 38%!

All this reach has had no noticeable impact on my book sales, though I did notice that branded search spiked on the day that I published a reel about MMT.

On a day with 48 impressions, I made 2 sales. Better than nothing? and maybe some of those folks are reading the sample.

I’m also seeing improved ROAS on my evergreen Facebook Ads, which may be related.

As I say, I’m taking on reels reluctantly because I’m skeptical of the quality of attention I receive through them, and I’m wary of being distracted from writing the book. However, it’s the highest-ceiling/lowest-barrier growth channel out there, I am apparently okay at it, and it does give me a chance to atomize some of the concepts I’m writing about and see how they resonate with people.

A major and lamentable mindset shift that has enabled me to post reels this time has been in how I view commenters. I try my best to not pay attention to comments at all, and have grown callous over what anyone has to say about one of my reels. I just focus on the views generated and engagement metrics. I will sometimes look at a reel’s comments if I’m curious how the idea lands, or if it’s one designed for comment interaction, but I mostly ignore the incoming notifications.

This was a hard shift to make, because I came up in Silicon Valley in the Web 2.0 era of the mid-aughts, when these technologies were all about connecting with like-minded people. But now I just have to view it as a media channel – I’m only interested in the overall vibe. Like I say, it’s a lamentable mindset shift, but it’s a huge improvement in how publishing reels affects my mental health.

My top reels have hundreds of comments and it’s not even worth looking. Sure, the social media gurus would tell me responding to my comments would boost my reels in the algorithm, but I know I can use that same energy to instead make better reels, which is far more important and relevant to my core skills as a writer.

New on Clarity: Reels coaching

I’ve added to my Clarity profile expertise in Reels. I can’t guarantee virality, but I do consistently produce reels in the tens-of-thousands on up to the millions of views. You don’t need a big budget or slick production, but even if you have something interesting to say, there are subtle psychological factors that make a big difference in reels engagement, and I consistently see reels producers missing these.

If you’re interested in how to improve your reels, book a call on Clarity (or, for a video call, directly on my shop)

Income

Book Sales

Misc. Products

Affiliates / Advertising

Reader Support

Services

Expenses

General

Advertising

Hosting

This post is filed under Income Reports.