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October 2025 Income Report

December 11 2025 – 07:49pm

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

October’s revenue was $5,370, down from September’s $5,649. Profits were $3,595, down from September’s $4,106.

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Record-low income and profit

Twelve-month income was a record low again this month. My income has been $58,524 over the past year. The previous low was last month’s $61,970.

Profit was an all-time low as well, at $27,020. The previous low was last month’s $28,278.

This has been a pattern, so I won’t go too deep into it this time.

Book profits low

My profit on books was only $250, which isn’t a record low, but is definitely low. Five of ten months this year have been under $1,000 for book profits.

I have to go back to 2020 to consistently see months under $1,000. Other than that, there has only been one month under that mark, May 2023.

Of course, it’s been since 2020 since I released a major book, and I’m hoping to fix that soon.

Mind Management record-low revenu

Mind Management had the lowest-revenue month ever, with only $603. The other two lowest months were $709 in May and $767 in August. It did not pull the lowest profit, however. The $520 it profited after ads was about the middle of the pack for this year.

It’s looking like my 80% confidence forecast that MMT’s KU term would bring in more revenue than the previous 90 days will very likely be in the incorrect direction. I ran my pricing promotion during Black Friday and didn’t really see a bump.

Turn off ads (almost)

After digging deep into Amazon Ads, finding ways the default settings were draining my pockets, and experimenting with vibe-coding some scripts to automate ad-management tasks, I’ve concluded Amazon Ads are just not working for me like they used to.

I’ve shut off almost all of them, which won’t be reflected in my expenses until December’s report. Ad prices get crazy during the holidays anyway.

So, my ads profit margin will probably be increasing. My ROI was 18% in October.

Prices going up

While revenue decreases, prices on many things are going up (not all reflected yet in the reports). ActiveCampaign increased their prices on me by 30%, without enough notice to do anything about it. Quickbooks increased their prices. IngramSpark changed their production prices (probably an increase for my books but haven’t checked), and have started taking a cut for wholesale network orders. Libsyn will be increasing their prices for hosting the Love Your Work archive.

The only vendor who has given me a choice in the matter has been Todoist, who has basically added a pricing tier, for users who want to use their new features.

Future of email and other direct marketing

This month’s revenue is helped along by $3,212 in revenue from ActiveCampaign referrals. They’ve been a great partner over the years, but this revenue stream will be going away soon, too.

When I referred accounts to them, it was under terms that I would receive a referral fee for the “lifetime” of said customer. But they have rescinded their end of that agreement, and will be cutting off those commissions in roughly one year, and any new commissions from my somewhat recent ActiveCampaign review will be limited to 12 months. Accounts I’ve referred to them are currently bringing them $40,000 in revenue.

Add to that that they raised prices with poor communication, and I feel it’s time to move on from AC. However, I have about a year to figure out where, exactly.

Probably some of my email marketing will take place on Kit, so I can take advantage of the growth network (while being careful to warm-up and quarantine these lower-quality leads). But I’m lightly exploring other options.

The cost of email marketing platforms is getting out of control, especially for someone like myself who is primarily trying to keep in touch with his readers, instead of trying to maximize revenue from each contact.

When you consider the availability of vibe-coding, it seems only natural that the somewhat-tech-savvy like myself might roll our own email marketing infrastructure with much cheaper tools such as Amazon SES (low per-email fee) and Sendy (one-time fee). So it may be that at the least the RSS emails that come from my blog will go through something like that. Or, the majority of my email marketing will, and tools such as Kit will be used only for the more sophisticated elements.

I’m sure there are lots of things I’m not considering about how complicated this would be and what features I would miss. I hope to steadily look into what to do over the next year.

As my Instagram following is growing, I’m also considering how I might keep in touch with readers through that channel and other direct ones, such as WhatsApp. I have created an Instagram Broadcast Channel, but my followers were not notified, so there aren’t many on there yet. Join here, and you’ll get a free copy of How to Write a Book.

Finish What Matters alpha (Preview Edition?)

I’ve found a few engaged alpha readers for my chapters of Finish What Matters (if you’d like to help, apply here). So far, the feedback is reassuring me that I am indeed writing a book. That’s helping me through my current sort of “coming up for air” period, where my forward writing progress is a bit slower, but I’m getting acquainted with what I’ve got and correcting course.

I’m also making plans for a Preview Edition, which would give people early access, probably a short-term community to discuss the contents of the book, and maybe offer higher tiers with higher-touch components, such as coaching or group calls. I’m exploring on Shopify if there are any Kickstarter-like plugins that could make the sales period a bit more exciting. I’ve run some projections and it looks like I could get a nice several-thousand-dollar injection of cash that would serve as motivation to make the final push. I made about $4,200 on the Preview Edition for MMT, and that was with just one $20 tier.

More reels success

I continue to publish reels that are pretty successful. The latest hit is a re-publish of a YouTube video I published in 2009, on how to tie a winter scarf. The Instagram Reel has well over 8 million views.

I’m still experimenting with how to turn this attention into anything useful.

Time management changes

To prevent myself from getting too sucked into reels and as part of an end-of-year mental house-cleaning, I’m making some changes to how I manage my time.

One of my more popular reels about how the birthday paradox illustrates why there’s too much to do is helping me think about this. There have been so many little demands for my time that I’ve been piling on over the years, and each new thing is not just one more thing, but a new connection between that and every already-existing thing.

This year I’ve added an hour a day of meditation. I grew a bigger beard and mustache that takes up some extra time. I’ve been growing vegetables in the garden. In my business, I’m taking on reels. Don’t forget in 2021, I also started a writing project aimed at writing a book about golf – I’ve been playing and practicing golf something like ten hours a week for four years now! Those mostly sound like nice relaxing things, but they of course interact with the less-fun stuff like continuing to deal with my chronic health issues and the extra organization and preparation it adds to anything I do.

There’s also the issue that when I started writing, I didn’t have a bunch of books to try to sell and to collect sales data on. My time and attention are victims of my own mild success.

Nothing has been decided fully yet, but I’m experimenting with some new creative systems, developing sloppy operating procedures to try to streamline things. I keep reconsidering these income reports, but have a hard time talking myself out of that they’re useful to create. I’m at least trying to keep them as useful as possible for myself.

I have an excellent system for developing my newsletter, so I’m trying to apply the same principles to developing reels. It amounts to publishing only one reel per week, but that at least gives me a restriction, instead of feeling like I should make a reel each time I have an idea – and having a system will let me do a better job with each reel and better think through how to make making them useful for myself. This includes an Airtable with vibe-coded idea-capture shortcut on my phone.

Thank you for sharing my work!

Thank you to Sagar Soni for having me on the Beyond the Speech podcast. Thank you also to JJ Thelen for having me on The JJ Thelen Show podcast.

Income

Book Sales

Misc. Products

Affiliates / Advertising

Reader Support

Services

Expenses

General

Advertising

Hosting

This post is filed under Income Reports.