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July 2025 Income Report

September 05 2025 – 09:32pm

To listen to an audio version of this report, join the Patreon »

July’s revenue was $4,176, up from June’s $3,504. Profits were $2,405, up from June’s $1,759.

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Record lows continue

Revenues and profits continue to be low, historically speaking.

Income over the past twelve months has been $70,457, which is the lowest since $70,177 June of 2024.

That doesn’t sound so bad, but profits are lower than they’ve been for a much longer time, at $34,003, the lowest since $32,213, in September 2020.

The average monthly profit of $2,834 is very close to the record low of $2,684, which was also in September 2020.

Book revenues over the past twelve months are $50,931, which is the lowest since August 2021, when they were $48,095. The peak was $89,630, in January 2023.

Book profits over the past twelve months are $28,046, which is the lowest since November 2021, when they were $27,914. The peak was $56,519, also in January 2023.

Some perspective

Looking back at my old income reports provides some perspective on these low numbers. The low point of profits in September 2020 was right before I launched Mind Management. I called it “an average-ish month, historically speaking.”

Here’s what my graph looked like back then.

It’s easy to forget that I then wanted what I’ve had for the past several years, and that I’m preparing a wicked brew of a book that I’m getting increasingly excited to unleash.

Will the new book bring years of record income and profits as did the previous? The way things have been going in the books business this year, I fear it won’t. But it very well might.

Finish What Matters progress

I’m still working hard every day on Finish What Matters. The strange thing about this book is I feel as if I validated much of its contents years ago with the essays I was publishing on the podcast. Yet each time I embark upon a new chapter, I end up immersed in a weeks’ long deep-dive into a specific realm of finishing.

I have nine chapters planned and am mostly satisfied with my drafts of the first three chapters. I have about 20%-depth barf drafts of the rest of the chapters, and have spent the past weeks immersed in “Hills to Die On,” a chapter all about seeking, implementing, and ignoring or vehemently resisting feedback.

I chose to take on this chapter because it was the topic I felt I had explored the least in my previous writing. There really have been moments when I wasn’t sure I could pull through on this one, but I have learned a lot and I think grown a lot as a creative by exploring this topic.

The main question is, Sometimes negative feedback means you should listen, other times it means you should lean in – how do you know the difference?

On Fatebook at the beginning of the year, I said I was 70% sure I would finish the manuscript by the end of 2025. Fatebook doesn’t have a confidence-update feature, but I currently feel less confident about that.

There are about four months left in the year. I started getting serious about writing the book about the beginning of March. So that’s seven months in, and I have three, almost four chapters.

Granted, some of that early work was a matter of finding my footing in the book and sort of self-hypnotizing back into book-writing mode. And I spent maybe a month writing the 20% barf drafts of all the chapters, which will hopefully make those go more smoothly.

So it seems unlikely I’ll finish five chapters, the one I’m working on, and the introduction within the next four months. Especially because I have a couple trips planned after five months firmly at home.

More likely it will be about March 2026 before I have a finished manuscript.

But, I would not be surprised if I’ve released a Preview Edition by the end of the year. That would hopefully provide a nice injection of cash and confidence.

Re-publishing reels

With all the time and energy I’ve been putting into writing, I haven’t had much left over to remain active publishing content on social media. So, I’ve been digging into the archive of video reels that I created back when I experimented with TikTok for a couple months in 2023.

I had almost forgotten how much content I had created! I have at least 60 reels, and some are bangers. At the time, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels had much shorter time limits – they both allow up to three minutes.

So, I’ve been scheduling roughly a reel a day on Instagram and YouTube. Actually, I initially decided I would just publish on YouTube, and decided to publish on IG as an afterthought, and good thing I did! The YouTube Shorts are performing underwhelmingly. My best reel, in drastically-edited form, about the Leonardo/Raphael dichotomy got pretty killer engagement with 64 likes from 1,000 views, but about 1,000 views is all its gotten.

Meanwhile, on Instagram, that reel is approaching 200,000 views. My reel on pseudo-events has attracted over 750,000 views, on Shorts it has gotten about 400 views.

So, my Instagram following has grown rapidly, from about 4,000 a couple weeks ago, to over 13,000 as I write this.

Again, I’m finding I have some kind of talent for reels, which I do not have for tweets.

Has this resulted in anything? Not much. I haven’t seen a noticeable uptick in book sales. For right now, I’ve put a link to download WAB free and get on the email list. That’s bringing in some new subscribers, but only a modest amount.

New YouTube video: 12 Life-Changing Books You Haven’t Read

As I consider what creative outlets might expand my reach in an impactful way, I’ve published another YouTube video.

I noticed a pattern of authors in my genre sharing video recommendation books. I’ve read a lot of books! So this is a “low lift” way for me to create relevant content.

In my video, I’ve tried to share books that genuinely have had an impact on my life, but that aren’t amongst the usual dozen-or-so books that it seems everyone recommends (many of which I haven’t found personally impactful).

I’m currently keeping production as simple as possible while still decent quality. I write a script, and try to have something interesting and useful to say, with a natural delivery, and solid lighting, camera, and sound. This time around I stayed away from zooming in and out, using complex motion graphics, or stock or even custom B-roll.

The impact of this video so far has been…not great! But, it’s only been out a week, and I have done nothing to promote it, aside from posting. I can cut it up into Shorts, Reels, and TikToks, and send it to my email list.

I predicted on Fatebook at the beginning of the year that I was only 60% sure I’d publish at least an hour of public content on YouTube (aside from Shorts). I’m at about half an hour, so it still looks like I won’t publish that much.

Amazon Ads still a struggle

I’m still struggling to turn much of a profit on Amazon Ads, even after digging deep into some of the new features. My ROI this month on book ad spend was 107%, which is not bad, but not great, considering the work I’ve put in.

I have some help from the API scripts I’ve created, which I can run in Postman, to help process ASINs I’m bidding on. But it’s still tough to beat the automatic campaigns. The only titles that currently stand a chance of turning a profit are HWH and ZET, but that has its ups and downs.

Amazon algorithm hacking

It seems no matter what I do, Amazon sales don’t budge by much. One tactic I’ve been using is watching books in my genre for pricing promotions – there have been a lot lately! If I get a chance, I send out an email alert to my readers, the thinking being that if my readers buy these books, it will signal to Amazon that those books are related.

This can affect the algorithm in the more obvious ways, such as by causing my book to show up in those books’ “Customers also bought” section, but there are likely many hidden ways that influences Amazon’s recommendation engine, such as displaying my book on the order confirmation page after purchasing one of these titles, or sending recommendations through email.

I can see in my Amazon Affiliates dashboard how many copies I refer for these book. Here are my results so far:

• The Creative Act: 42 sales generated. HTS from no visibility to page 12/25 “Also Bought”
• The 4-Hour Work Week: 21 sales generated. No impact.
• How to Be Everything: 45 sales generated. MMT from no visibility to page 2/13
• Tiny Experiments & Clear Thinking: 49 sales generated each. No impact.
• Deep Work: 26 sales generated. No impact.
• Ultralearning: 56 sales generated. No impact (only been a few days)

So, it seems my books are facing some fierce algorithmic headwinds. This tactic apparently works, as evinced by the impact from The Creative Act and How to Be Everything, but it blows my mind that I could generate 49 sales each of both Tiny Experiments and Clear Thinking and see no visible impact on my book’s ranking.

But as I said this probably has an influence on the recommendation engine in invisible ways. For example, I have no other explanation for this spike in sales other than that it came immediately after generating those sales for Tiny Experiments and Clear Thinking.

This is the only potential visible impact I’ve seen on sales related to this tactic, by the way. If this did impact it, perhaps there’s a lesson in here about generating sales for two books at the same time to which my books are related. Though, if that does work, then it seems like all these recently-generated sales of related books should create a rising algorithmic tide for my own.

Well, if you squint, you could conclude it’s done just that.

But, you should also consider that my ad spend has fluctuated during that same period.

Maybe I should pivot to reading tea leaves professionally.

Income

Book Sales

Misc. Products

Affiliates / Advertising

Reader Support

Services

Expenses

General

Advertising

Hosting

This post is filed under Income Reports.