This is a follow-up post to last year’s Income Streams and Ramen Numbers, for folks who are interested in the behind-the-scenes thinking and strategy that goes into my writing and publishing endeavors. For those who’d like a point of comparison without having to click back and forth between posts, here’s last year’s breakdown posted below:
While I’ve not included actual dollar amounts here, the actual cash-flow situation is remarkably similar. Both years brought in just shy of $12,000 of writing and publishing revenue, with much the same costs. The actual money I can think of as “mine”, rather than devoted to expenses and maintenance costs, is about $3,000.
This puts me just shy of the percentage of profit/payment I like to aim for, but given the financial year this covers, I’m going to take it as a win.
THE BAD
To say the 2022 financial year didn’t go to plan would be an understatement. My ability to focus on writing and publishing tasks started decreasing when I started with the Writers Festival in October of 2021, then evaporated into the ether around late December. Queensland’s Omnicron wave disrupted things, as did the floods in March and the decision to focus on getting a new job instead of publishing.
So while the income is roughly the same, our expenses and activity have been all over the place. The combination of fewer new releases and increased budgetary pressures led to fewer direct sales, and we’d stocked up on print books to send to events that were ultimately cancelled.
The lack of new releases also hurt us on Jeff Bezos’ big e-commerce river, whose algorithms love new books, and Draft-2-Digital who distributes ebooks to a variety of smaller partners and Apple Books.
But there’s still plenty of good news on the chart, particularly the fact that distributor sales have overtaken Amazon as our second largest source of book income.
We had an increase on one retailer — Kobo — but they don’t affect the charts here because a payment glitch has meant they haven’t paid me royalties since August of 2020 and it doesn’t seem likely to resolve anytime soon. It was a pretty negligible amount back then, but after seeing a 200% increase in sales there over the last two years, I’m eyeing those problems with increasing frustration.
THE GOOD
The saving grace of 2022 was a breif window in which I picked up a lot of freelance work, including some gigs where I quote my “fuck off” number hoping folks would say no, only to have them say yes without blinking.
Patreon and newsletter tip jars, as predicted, had a sizable impact as well, even with my haphazard approach to Patreon over the back half of the financial year. It hasn’t grown much past the initial interest — and I’m still struggling with the psychology of how it interacts with my writing and publishing gigs — but I’m quietly plotting out methods of handling that.
On the books front, I’ll admit there’s a certain comfort in seeing how stable the business can be without relying on Amazon as the primary retailer. While I’d definitely like to build them up a bit, I’m far happier seeing the print sales take up such a percentage.
I’m also, just quietly, quite pleased to see our direct sales with trade stores go down. Counter-intuitive as it is, but dealing with bookstores direct is a terrible strategy for us as a small business; it’s taken us two years to get money for books in some circumstances, and we’ve still got a couple of 2020 invoices overdue. Brain Jar Press just isn’t resourced to do the kind of relationship management and invoice chasing required to make that work, and if we can coax people into using Ingram, it’s usually the better choice.
THE CHALLENGING
Despite being roughly equitable to last year’s income, I’m actually further away from my Ramen Number (aka the point where I can quit a dayjob and do this full time, so long as I live in cheap ramen). This is largely because my spouse’schronic illnesses have grown worse in the last year, with no signs of improving, which means I’m now the primary income earner for two people instead of one.
The uspide is that they’re home to help out with Brain Jar a lot more, taking up some of the admin and shipping that ate into other tasks, but it also means that I need to hit a Ramen Number for two people instead of one (and ensure the other person is on board).
At this stage, I predict we’re about 8% of the way there, which isn’t bad when considered in context, but there’s definitely room to improve.
