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June 2025 Income Report

August 12 2025 – 07:43pm

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June’s revenue was $3,504, down from May’s $3,771. Profits were $1,759, down from May’s $2,173.

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12-month profit low

My profit over the past twelve months is the lowest it’s been in five years. In November 2020, it was $36,243, and this month it’s $37,149.

When will the bleeding stop?

November 2020 was just after Mind Management, Not Time Management had debuted. That’s a comforting reminder that when I’m getting close to a major book, my revenue may tend to dip.

While I’ve released plenty of shorter titles since then, and Digital Zettelkasten was the surprise hit of them all, I’m hoping that releasing my next book will return to livable profits.

On one hand, of course it will. A book on finishing has a clear market, what I’ve written so far has a chance to be big, and finishing the Getting Art Done trilogy should have network effects. As I wrote about in How to Sell a Book, that one additional book would triple potential two-book paths within the series from two, to six.

On the other hand, I’ll be publishing into a different market than before. Amazon and the self-help genre are getting crowded with AI slop, people are reading even less, the media environment is fragmented, and Amazon Ads are getting more expensive and more complicated.

So, as much as I’d like for books like this to be the “secure” side of my barbell, the reality is there are no guarantees.

Sometimes I think my business is totally failing. But I remind myself this general roller-coaster trajectory is the nature of this business.

When I consider other ways I could make some quick money to keep my bank balance from dwindling, a little calculator in my mind usually goes back to “just finish the book.”

The few readers who back me on Patreon help out, but I’m reconsidering that. I’m well aware it’s not a focused offering that maximizes revenue potential, but interest in it is very low – one out of a thousand email subscribers – and what interest there is seems to be more from the charitably-minded than out of interest in the bonuses. This is the crisis quirk that has always bothered me about the model. The few hours a week I spend delivering those bonuses could perhaps be better-spent elsewhere. At some point I will have to “grow up” and commit to the business of selling things, as long and arduous the vast expanses of desert I must cross to create those things.

Advertising ROI re-stabilizing

Things really got bad with the business at the beginning of the year when advertising ROI suddenly went sideways. That situation is improving.

Advertising ROI on books was cruising at a tolerable 100% and 103% in December and January, but then in February dropped to an astounding -5%. Since then, it rebounded from 23% in March, to 340% in April. May it was 71%, and this month it was 186%.

The caveat is that at the end of 2024, that ROI generated book profits with a 6-month trailing average of over $3,600. Now my 6-month trailing average is around $1,000. Admittedly that’s dragged down by a negative month in February – this month book profits were about $1,800.

The rebound was in large part from drastically cutting advertising spend, but now I’m slowly building it back up. I detailed a couple months ago the many ways I discovered Amazon was sneakily draining authors’ pockets. I cut those features out of my campaigns, started experimenting with other levers I could pull, and returned to maintaining the three-campaign system that has always served me decently.

I’m slowly and carefully trying to ramp ad spend back up to see if I can find a new equilibrium of spending and earning. It seems to suddenly be extraordinarily difficult to turn a profit on MMT, but ZET is performing well on relevant keywords/products, HWH ads are suddenly performing well, and HSB is showing some early signs of being able to turn a profit.

Coding for the Amazon Ads API

Managing my Amazon Ads well is labor-intensive and mind-numbing. I used to use a tool called Prestozon to automate the process for me, but they got purchased by Helium 10, which wrapped it into a suite of products that are probably overkill, and – last time I checked – too expensive.

The process I need to follow is pretty simple in practice, so I’m taking advantage of the AI revolution by using ChatGPT to help me write scripts to make my processes go more smoothly.

Right now, I’m just running the scripts through Postman. I’ve gotten only basic scripts to work in tests, and have hit a lot of snags. Maybe I can build up to a library of scripts I can manually initiate to perform my tasks. Maybe – and this is a big maybe – I can build a lightweight SaaS tool to help other authors.

Thanks for having me on your podcasts

Thank you to Atul Raj at The Genius Talks podcast.

Income

Book Sales

Misc. Products

Affiliates / Advertising

Reader Support

Services

Expenses

General

Advertising

Hosting

This post is filed under Income Reports.