2022 Financial Year Income Breakdown

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja
2022 Financial Year Income Breakdown

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. 

Indie Publishing and Business To Business Thinking

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

A general frustration I’m having with self-publishing/indy publishing circles right now

Indies are, by and large, a business-to-business endeavour that primarily exist to provide ebooks to distributors and retailers who then sell them to the customer.

Many of those distributors and retailers give an extraordinary level of control to the authors around pricing and promotion, convincing them they’re actually business-to-consumer. It’s become a foundational assumption in the rhetoric around indie publishing, even if it’s not true.

So many people’s frustrations stem from this misunderstanding once they’re past the initial learning curve. The idea that you adjust some part of your product to make it appealing *to the business that actually sells it* is frequently met with all kids of denial, particularly when the suggestion involves increasing your prices beyond the just-barely-making-a-profit baseline.

Indie authors have been trained to focus on the customer above all else, and have stuck to the strategy that undercutting traditional publishing’s prices is the only viable path to success. Frequently, the argument seems to be, “readers won’t pay that” or “I don’t want to pay that for a book”, despite the fact that traditional publishing has made it clear readers will pay decent money for a good book they really want to read.

(My rule a thumb, back when I first indie published in 2005, was “figure out how much you think a book is worth, then add a buck because you’re incredibly bad at gauging the value of your work”. These days, I’d probably add two).

At the same time everyone’s ignoring the business-to-business aspect of their business, there’s a low-level hostility to the work required to set up direct sales channels where you’re *actually* a business-to-consumer business, and can really capitalise on the increased margins on every sale.

And many of those who do take the plunge of selling direct immediately look for ways to hand the logistics back to the businesses they’re already dealing with, because they don’t actually want to have a direct relationship with their consumers.

I like to think this is frustrating because these conversations are happening ore often and we’re heading towards a pivot point, a place where folks are developing a more mature understanding of the business strategies and how to engage with the players involved.

But there are days when I definitely have to pull myself away from the keyboard, lets I find myself trapped in one of those “someone is wrong on the internet” conversations that keeps me awake until 3:00 AM mounting an argument I can’t win…

(originally posted on the book of face, 23 June, 2022)

WIP and Series Spreadsheets

PETERMBALL GenrePunk Ninja

A little proof-of-progress excerpt on the current work-in-progress, The Secret Gig:

Matt spotted the boss waited in a black sedan, parked near the entrance of the Airport’s short-term parking block. Balding, moon-faced, with wire-framed glasses, the straggling remnants of his graying hair a stark contrast to the dark, bushy eyebrows that retained a hint of youth. Nobody knew exactly how old Ryan Benson truly was, but the office pool had him pushing sixty, and Matt would have gone a decade older without breaking a sweat. He tapped Jenny Seven’s shoulder and pointed, and the tall woman pulled their own black sedan into an empty spot three down. She killed the engine and they both sat, taking a moment to get in the mindset. On the far side of the airport, past the terminal building and the departure lounges, a 747 achieved take-off and arced into the sky. It was 0400 on a Tuesday. A cold, wet midwinter. A bad day to be flying.

“Alright,” Jenny said. “Let’s get this over with.”

The Secret Gig is one of those projects I’ve been overthinking for for the better half of a year and a half, a September release from 2020 whose original strategy got washed away by Brain Jar rapidly iterating into a small press rather than a self-publishing company.

Like most of the projects of this ilk, I’m preparing to pull it over to Eclectic Projects in the near future, and it’s suffered because I’m trying to do too many things at once. I actually built a visual spreadsheet to help me visualise all the things I’ve started and left unfinished and plan out how and when to progress them in the coming years.

It’s very much a work in progress, but it’s useful to have a visual system for tracking the build-up of a series (and, it has to be said, the end-point for them).