Essay: LB Economics
Sep. 30th, 2025 04:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeLB Economics
Series: Essay
Summary: How the sausage gets made. I hope y’all like color-coded numerical tables!
Word Count: 3634
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month. Also, since it’s not covered in the essay itself, if you’re a generous sort and wondering, “LB, what’s the best way to give you money?” the answer is: LiberaPay or a recurring check through the mail (yes, people do this), followed by Patreon, followed by buying an Ebook Megapack. Regarding buying individual books… paper books require more printing and shipping, but ebooks deal with more robo-bans and crackdowns, so we consider them about equal on our end.
Money is considered one of the forbidden public subjects, along with sex and religion. It’s one thing to say what you do, another to admit how much you make at it. However, we’re one of the only people doing what we do, and we want people to know the financial aspects of our job, so as to puncture some rosy illusions and defuse envy. So let’s talk about money.
Series: Essay
Summary: How the sausage gets made. I hope y’all like color-coded numerical tables!
Word Count: 3634
Notes: Winner of the fan poll this month. Also, since it’s not covered in the essay itself, if you’re a generous sort and wondering, “LB, what’s the best way to give you money?” the answer is: LiberaPay or a recurring check through the mail (yes, people do this), followed by Patreon, followed by buying an Ebook Megapack. Regarding buying individual books… paper books require more printing and shipping, but ebooks deal with more robo-bans and crackdowns, so we consider them about equal on our end.
Money is considered one of the forbidden public subjects, along with sex and religion. It’s one thing to say what you do, another to admit how much you make at it. However, we’re one of the only people doing what we do, and we want people to know the financial aspects of our job, so as to puncture some rosy illusions and defuse envy. So let’s talk about money.
First, some quick terms:
• Gross income, or revenue, is every buck we make, from everything business-wise we do, before expenses.
• Expenses are everything business-related that costs us money: printing comics, postage, convention tabling costs, etc.
• Net income, or profit, is revenue minus expenses—what’s left for things like shampoo and pants.
So when you buy a $20 paperback from me online, we make $20 gross, but the net income is more like $10, after the cost of printing the book, stamps, envelope, payment processor fees (like Paypal) and website fees (like BigCartel).
Finally, to give folks context for the following numbers, the poverty line for a one-vessel household like us in the lower 48 United States is $15,060.
The Bottom Line for 2024
2024 was the most lucrative year of our life:
• $11,146.00 in disability benefits
• $11,336.95 in gross art income
• $01,710.55 in business expenses, leaving…
• $09,626.40 net art income, which plus disability benefits equals…
• $20,772.40 net total income ($22,482.85 gross).
Super respectable, by our standards! If we hadn’t had to pay double rent for seven months, we would’ve been rolling in dough! As it was, rent devoured everything. It always does.
We can’t afford rent without our disability payments. We can’t afford much anything else without our job. We need both.
Disability Payments
We get money from SSDI (AKA “disability”) and/or SSI (AKA welfare). At present, SSDI pays us $971 a month; SSI pays us zero but still exists for health insurance purposes.
The most important thing to know about SSI is we get punished if we have more than $2000. If we go over that, we get angry letters from the government, and if we don’t rectify things quickly, they will cut us off completely. There are ABLE accounts that allow disabled people to save money, but we have chosen not to have one, because different accounts have different rules about how much you’re allowed to take out and how often, and all require the money be used for disability or work purposes, the exact definitions of which have yet to be written up. We just don’t trust it, especially now, but other disabled friends do and speak highly of the accounts.
SSI and SSDI get small cost of living adjustments every year. They also go up as you pay into them, so the more you work, the better your disability payments… even though disability makes employment hard. Such is life.
Being on disability makes moving over state lines extremely difficult. Despite high rent, we will never leave Massachusetts because our friends, colleagues, and events—our wealth—are overwhelmingly here. We tried moving to the cheap Midwest in 2014, and we were unable to get our offline social or professional life off the ground, plus social services made returning a rolling paperwork disaster for four months—never again, we swore.
Finally, disability benefits entail earnings limits. If we make too much we get cut off. I’m just gonna quote the Social Security Administration worksheet: “If you work while you receive disability benefits, you must tell us about your earnings no matter how little you earn. You may have unlimited earnings during a trial work period of up to 9 months (not necessarily in a row) and still receive full benefits. Once you have completed your 9-month trial work period, we will determine if you are still entitled to disability benefits.” In 2024, a month counted as a “trial work period month” if we earned $1,110, and the hard cut-off number was $1,550.
Here’s a quick table of our yearly disability payments:
Non-Disability Money
Our non-disability money comes from a bunch of different places:
• Patreon
• Cons (comic cons, zine fairs, craft markets, etc.)
• “Flat Events” (events with set pay rates, like lectures)
• Paper book sales (“retail” when I sell it to you, “wholesale” when I sell it in bulk to a comic book shop, library, or therapist’s office)
• Ebook sales
• Donations (includes LiberaPay and windfalls both)
• Work for hire (commissions, sensitivity reads, pet care, cleaning houses…)
• Also once in 2018 I split a table cost with someone. That’s what that random $54 is.
This wide array of moneymakers is normal for people like us; never keep all the eggs in one basket, especially when sites and cons pop up like mushrooms and disappear just as quickly. In case you want to see the breakdown, here’s the table summing it up (all numbers are gross):
Blue is the #1 moneymaker, green #2, yellow #3.
As you can see, Patreon has held the top spot for a long time; second and third place are a toss-up between cons, ebooks, and donations, depending on circumstance. (The COVID-19 pandemic crippled the offline con scene, thus why income from them plummets in 2020 and 2021. Meanwhile, ebook sales surged when we joined itch.io and also when the pandemic made ebooks more desirable).
The donations are a humbling symbol to us of how many people put their backs into helping us through the hard times—it’s no coincidence that all three times that column got colored, it was during the early years of the pandemic and the “double rent” situation of 2024.
What Sells Best?
Tiny $1 one-pagers reliably top sales charts by volume, because they’re cheap and get bought in bulk. However, if we go by revenue brought in, rather than number of copies moved, we get this. (All sales numbers are retail, approximate, and gross.) In this case, we color-coded the three most recurring titles, using the colors of their covers.
Trade paperbacks unsurprisingly top the list; they’re beefy, with a nice profit margin. The Ebook Megapack sells rarely, but it’s so expensive that it’s managed to place anyway (and its profit margin is amazing, since there are no printing, shipping, or con costs). And there are a couple times when a floppy proves so shockingly popular that it scrabbles onto the table! (Multi, Orgasmic and Madgic #1 are the only times this has happened.)
All in the Family originally got finished in 2015, and for a few years it moldered near the bottom of the sales ranks, only to suddenly blast to the top after Josephine Riesman gave it a stunning write-up in Vulture magazine in 2019. All of you who own the 2021 paperback, thank Josie Riesman. It got made because of her. (And then Olivia Li went and ran the Kickstarter and published it, so thank her too. We can never run a Kickstarter campaign ourself without risking total financial ruin.)
Some books sell better on paper, others as ebook. The Homeless Year sells respectably on paper even after nine years, but it has never done well as an ebook, probably due to the rough artwork. (We credit the paper version of Homeless Year’s staying power to Jack of Plures House’s amazing work on the cover colors.) Multi, Orgasmic is our #2 best ebook seller of all time, but it sells crummy on paper, probably due to how niche the subject matter is.
Cultiples #2 was a flash in the pan, and we are forever grateful. That series felt like carrying a dead body up Mt. Everest. Thank goodness it didn’t become what we’re famous for.
Also, in case you’re wondering, after expenses, ebooks and paper books are roughly equally profitable, so we sell both. Ebooks are better for blind and overseas readers, while paper books don’t require electricity and are banned less.
Expenses: Where does the money go?
Rent. Housing is the all-devouring dragon of our universe:
But rent doesn’t count as a business expense unless you’re rich/lucky enough to have an independent space purely for business, like a studio. Real business expenses:
• Print costs
• “Commissions/fees” (Olivia Li’s portion of AllFam sales, but mostly the cost of con tables)
• Contract labor (paying other people for work—sensitivity reads, OCR jobs)
• Office expenses (envelopes, stamps, paper, toner, staples…)
• Art supplies
• Travel (back when we did out-of-state cons)
• Meals (see above; only 50% can be a business expense)
• Advertising (Dreamwidth paid account)
Here’s the table:
Blue is #1 expense, green #2, yellow #3. If you ignore the effects of the early pandemic (that zero in the “print cost” column of 2020 is a tragedy), print costs, cons, and office expenses are the big dogs.
Print costs often reflect how well cons are going. The more books we sell, the more we print! And books with spines (like the Homeless Year or All in the Family) are much more expensive to print than short stapled floppies like Multi, Orgasmic or LB Goes to Alaska. Floppies, we can do short runs of 10 or 20, a whopping expense of $40 tops, but books with spines have to be done in runs of at least 100 to be even sort of cost-effective. (Ever wondered why our trade paperbacks are so expensive? It’s because we can’t save up for a bigger, more cost-effective run! Sorry guys, blame the welfare system!)
Anyone who has ever sold merch is familiar with the “eternal unsellable box o’ shit” curse, the product you just cannot move. (We will be selling Flights of Reality until we die.) As a result, we print a trial run of 20 for every paperback and just eat the cost. We can sell 20 copies of anything (see Cultiples #2), and if it sells well, then we purchase the big run. If not… rest in peace, tiny print run. (I love you, Infinity Smashed: Found Wanting. You’ll always be a bestseller in my heart!)
Cons can be expensive. A local library fair may be free, but an event like Flamecon or the Small Press Expo can cost well over a hundred dollars, not including travel, board, meals, etc. (It’s easy to tell when we did a bunch of cons out of state; those are the years where the “travel” column ranks.) Common wisdom says that the bigger (more expensive) the event is, the more lucrative it is, but this isn’t necessarily true… at least, not for our weird niche market ass. Our most lucrative events for 2024? The Boston Anarchist Book Fair, the Massachusetts Indy Comics Expo, and the local Dyke March. MICE is a pretty well reputed comics con (and for many years, our “crown jewel” of cons), but the BABF and the Dyke March are cheap local events that people outside their respective milieus don’t pay much attention to. People who go to Boston Comic Con aren’t necessarily interested in our work… and neither are the people at a Dissociative Identity Disorder conference, we’ve discovered. It’s tempting to get obsessive over trying to predict which events will be the golden tickets, but often, the only way to find out is try. These days, we stick to local cons; it’s way cheaper.
Office expenses are boring necessities: stamps, envelopes, paper, staples, printer toner, ledgers, receipt books… and post office boxes. (Seriously, if you are a hate-able demographic with a couple cults in your rear view mirror and a tendency to become homeless, get a PO box).
Art supplies are mostly self-explanatory… and also include reference material, like photo books or Chuatico and Cibowo’s Comic Creator’s Guide to Literary Agents.
By working artist standards, our expenses are absurdly low. We have no studio or employees. We work cheap, use our tech til it dies, and then buy secondhand or refurbished. This is overwhelmingly a product of the savings limit. Damn near any question that starts with, “Why do you…?” can be answered with “because money/housing.”
“Why do you work in black and white?” Because it’s cheap and reliable.
“Why do you draw at 100% size in 8.5" x 5.5" hardback sketchbooks?” Because they’re cheap and durable, plus easily survive months in a homeless go-bag.
To be an oil painter, we’d need paints, canvas, brushes, a place where canvases can dry for days. To be a writer, we need a pencil, a spiral, a twenty-year-old laptop, and a USB drive. To be a cartoonist, we need all that, plus a paperback-sized sketchbook, our pencil pouch, an old-ass secondhand scanner, and an old-ass secondhand drawing tablet. Except for the scanner, we can (and do) lug that in our travel/homelessness pack.
How Do You Keep Track of All This?
We track income and outgo with a “con book” (for convention sales), a receipt book (for books mailed out), a ledger (which keeps track of everything, every expense, every tithe, every quarter we find in the couch cushions), and a spreadsheet file that condenses the ledger stuff for tax purposes (and also digital checking when we don’t have our ledger). Really, the ledger and the spreadsheet are the biggies.
Taxes
We pay federal and state income taxes every year, and sales tax (6.75% on buttons and books with spines) every three months. We paid more in 2024 income tax than Elon Musk in 2018 combined with Jeff Bezos in 2007 and 2011. (That’s because they paid zero.)
We learned to do our taxes thanks to a 2016 workshop with E. J. Barnes, “Taxes for Working Cartoonists,” and still use the guide she gave us, along with a text file keeping track of things we learned the hard way (and the adjustments after Trump changed the forms). We don’t feel okay giving a whole lecture on how to do your taxes because we are not an accountant and only know how to do our own.
Tithing/Tzedakah
This is not directly related to our work, but if we owe no debts and aren’t scraping for survival, we donate 10% of our income monthly to good purpose. If said purpose is not an individual in need, we choose the cause based on how little they badger or spam us. (Through trial and error, we have found that archive.org, the Bail Fund, and the Mashpee Wampanoag are good for this.)
We consider such tithing a religious/ethical obligation and do not take tax deductions for this, because it morally offends us that helping a starving friend (i.e., what poor folks do) is rewarded less than donating to some ritzy philanthropic organization (that is, charity practiced by the rich).
Harassment & Bans
If you make a work that honks somebody off, odds are good you’ll get slapped with a DMCA, plagiarism, or libel claim. Many sites delete first and ask questions never; it’s how we got shadow-banned from Gumroad. Cons may refuse to let you table with them, ban certain works of yours from being sold, or put you through an ethics investigation. It’s one of the reasons we stick with local cons; it lets us get to know the con staff, who are more likely to talk to us.
When we can reach someone, we always challenge the DMCAs, respond to the claims, try to stay reasonable and polite. We don’t want to teach people (including ourself) to win via tantrums. Part of why we’re still on Patreon is, they were willing to work with us over Cultiples #2. Gumroad weren’t; they would only say, “you know what you did.”
If possible, inform con staff in advance. As embarrassing as it was, we found con staff generally receptive and understanding. Most cons of size have dealt with this, especially if they are queer or have other “hate-able” demographics. Flamecon, Dyke March, and Arisia had security teams in place; the Boston Anarchist Bookfair has been attacked by neo-Nazis multiple times and has the most hardcore security plan of any event we’ve been to. Overwhelmingly, people were supportive and the show went on.
The one time we were banned from selling titles at an event (the Cultiples books at Arisia 2019), we were able to harness the notoriety, throw a banned book sale, and sell more of those books than we would’ve at the con!
Harassment comes from human beings. Robo-bans are more institutional. They may have nothing to do with the work itself, only some fluke of code or government decision or payment processor, and there is no recourse because all communications go down a black hole. (This is familiar to anyone in the disability or welfare system.) All in the Family, as far as I can tell, got robo-banned from itch.io, for having “incest” as a tag/content warning, which lumped it under child pornography. We threw another banned book sale, and once again, it seemed to work, but it’s been months, and none of our emails to itch.io have been answered. We can’t find a human being to talk to and the robot says no, so now we are on ebook site #3: Payhip.
Always have a site ready in advance for when you are forced to move. Banned from Amazon? Have Smashwords ready. Kicked from Patreon? Have SubscribeStar in your back pocket. Always have a plan to leave every site you’re on, because when the time comes, you’ll likely be too stressed to research. Assume everything is temporary, much like life itself.
Soft Costs
A lot of our work is not easy to put a price tag on. Scanning old, out-of-print books, or digging through old website archives, all the assorted research and donkey labor we do, how do you quantify that? LiberaPay and Patreon provide a tiny salary, allowing us to focus on slow-blooming but valuable projects; everything takes longer than people think, and a lot of that work is invisible.
Take that 1791 German medical multi case that papierfliegerfalter so kindly translated. That was the end-product of so much work:
• Our trawling the BPL archives for old multi books
• Discovering Goettmann and Greaves’s bibliography
• Requesting it days in advance because it was stored off-site and otherwise impossible to procure
• Arranging our schedule so we could go see the book
• Book-scanning the damn thing
• Sending it to Orion Scribner for OCRing so we could finally…
• Ctrl+F and find the citation for that 1791 case in the first place
• Post about it, which is trivial but led to…
• Erinptah finding a digitized copy of the work in German
• papierfliegerfalter offering to translate the work
• Bartering a box of our works and shipping them to Europe in exchange
• papierfliegerfalter translating the 1791 case and sending us the files
• Us uploading the files
That’s four different bodies directly involved, not including library, technical, and postal staff. None of us got directly paid in money for any of that. None of that work would’ve happened if I’d been chained to my drafting table, constantly cranking out sausage to feed the rent-dragon. When people pay or donate to us, they buy us breathing room to do all the stuff that leads to our best work. Our plural history essays/video wouldn’t exist without the research we had the leisure to do. Even books like All in the Family, which focus far more on our interior experiences, wouldn’t get made if we didn’t have room in our life to deal with those things in the first place.
What we’re saying is, blessings on every one of you who’ve ever tossed us a buck. Thank you.
• Gross income, or revenue, is every buck we make, from everything business-wise we do, before expenses.
• Expenses are everything business-related that costs us money: printing comics, postage, convention tabling costs, etc.
• Net income, or profit, is revenue minus expenses—what’s left for things like shampoo and pants.
So when you buy a $20 paperback from me online, we make $20 gross, but the net income is more like $10, after the cost of printing the book, stamps, envelope, payment processor fees (like Paypal) and website fees (like BigCartel).
Finally, to give folks context for the following numbers, the poverty line for a one-vessel household like us in the lower 48 United States is $15,060.
The Bottom Line for 2024
2024 was the most lucrative year of our life:
• $11,146.00 in disability benefits
• $11,336.95 in gross art income
• $01,710.55 in business expenses, leaving…
• $09,626.40 net art income, which plus disability benefits equals…
• $20,772.40 net total income ($22,482.85 gross).
Super respectable, by our standards! If we hadn’t had to pay double rent for seven months, we would’ve been rolling in dough! As it was, rent devoured everything. It always does.
We can’t afford rent without our disability payments. We can’t afford much anything else without our job. We need both.
Disability Payments
We get money from SSDI (AKA “disability”) and/or SSI (AKA welfare). At present, SSDI pays us $971 a month; SSI pays us zero but still exists for health insurance purposes.
The most important thing to know about SSI is we get punished if we have more than $2000. If we go over that, we get angry letters from the government, and if we don’t rectify things quickly, they will cut us off completely. There are ABLE accounts that allow disabled people to save money, but we have chosen not to have one, because different accounts have different rules about how much you’re allowed to take out and how often, and all require the money be used for disability or work purposes, the exact definitions of which have yet to be written up. We just don’t trust it, especially now, but other disabled friends do and speak highly of the accounts.
SSI and SSDI get small cost of living adjustments every year. They also go up as you pay into them, so the more you work, the better your disability payments… even though disability makes employment hard. Such is life.
Being on disability makes moving over state lines extremely difficult. Despite high rent, we will never leave Massachusetts because our friends, colleagues, and events—our wealth—are overwhelmingly here. We tried moving to the cheap Midwest in 2014, and we were unable to get our offline social or professional life off the ground, plus social services made returning a rolling paperwork disaster for four months—never again, we swore.
Finally, disability benefits entail earnings limits. If we make too much we get cut off. I’m just gonna quote the Social Security Administration worksheet: “If you work while you receive disability benefits, you must tell us about your earnings no matter how little you earn. You may have unlimited earnings during a trial work period of up to 9 months (not necessarily in a row) and still receive full benefits. Once you have completed your 9-month trial work period, we will determine if you are still entitled to disability benefits.” In 2024, a month counted as a “trial work period month” if we earned $1,110, and the hard cut-off number was $1,550.
Here’s a quick table of our yearly disability payments:
2018 | $8,496.00 |
2019 | $8,736.00 |
2020 | $8,868.00 |
2021 | $9,666.00 |
2022 | $9,888.00 |
2023 | $10,752.00 |
2024 | $11,146.00 |
Non-Disability Money
Our non-disability money comes from a bunch of different places:
• Patreon
• Cons (comic cons, zine fairs, craft markets, etc.)
• “Flat Events” (events with set pay rates, like lectures)
• Paper book sales (“retail” when I sell it to you, “wholesale” when I sell it in bulk to a comic book shop, library, or therapist’s office)
• Ebook sales
• Donations (includes LiberaPay and windfalls both)
• Work for hire (commissions, sensitivity reads, pet care, cleaning houses…)
• Also once in 2018 I split a table cost with someone. That’s what that random $54 is.
This wide array of moneymakers is normal for people like us; never keep all the eggs in one basket, especially when sites and cons pop up like mushrooms and disappear just as quickly. In case you want to see the breakdown, here’s the table summing it up (all numbers are gross):
Date | Patreon | Cons | Flat Event | Ebooks | Paper Retail | Wholesale | Donations | WFH | Misc. | Sum |
2018 | $2,776.10 | $2,036.00 | $250.00 | $514.60 | $305.40 | $82.50 | $240.00 | $705.00 | $54.00 | $6,963.60 |
2019 | $3,411.28 | $817.25 | $635.00 | $1,833.00 | $495.59 | $273.70 | $490.00 | $145.00 | $0.00 | $8,100.82 |
2020 | $3,459.57 | $368.50 | $200.00 | $1,033.50 | $163.04 | $58.39 | $1,675.58 | $400.00 | $0.00 | $7,358.58 |
2021 | $3,499.94 | $771.00 | $270.00 | $1,009.00 | $731.82 | $0.00 | $1,015.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $7,296.76 |
2022 | $3,627.17 | $1,546.13 | $200.00 | $1,363.69 | $1,089.60 | $137.00 | $702.00 | $88.00 | $0.00 | $8,753.59 |
2023 | $3,979.93 | $2,760.00 | $325.00 | $1,449.89 | $535.47 | $280.00 | $1,072.46 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $10,402.75 |
2024 | $3,888.08 | $1,853.00 | $646.00 | $1,561.04 | $475.39 | $124.65 | $2,338.79 | $450.00 | $0.00 | $11,336.95 |
Blue is the #1 moneymaker, green #2, yellow #3.
As you can see, Patreon has held the top spot for a long time; second and third place are a toss-up between cons, ebooks, and donations, depending on circumstance. (The COVID-19 pandemic crippled the offline con scene, thus why income from them plummets in 2020 and 2021. Meanwhile, ebook sales surged when we joined itch.io and also when the pandemic made ebooks more desirable).
The donations are a humbling symbol to us of how many people put their backs into helping us through the hard times—it’s no coincidence that all three times that column got colored, it was during the early years of the pandemic and the “double rent” situation of 2024.
What Sells Best?
Tiny $1 one-pagers reliably top sales charts by volume, because they’re cheap and get bought in bulk. However, if we go by revenue brought in, rather than number of copies moved, we get this. (All sales numbers are retail, approximate, and gross.) In this case, we color-coded the three most recurring titles, using the colors of their covers.
| #1 Title | #2 Title | #3 Title |
2018 | Homeless Year | Cultiples #2 | Alter Boys in Love |
Paper $ | $700.00 | $375.00 | $300.00 |
Ebook $ | $10.00 | $216.00 | $10.00 |
Sum | $710.00 | $591.00 | $310.00 |
2019 | All in the Family | Homeless Year | Ebook Megapack |
Paper $ | $100.00 | $540.00 | - |
Ebook $ | $925.00 | $80.00 | $550.00 |
Sum | $1,025.00 | $620.00 | $550.00 |
2020 | All in the Family | Ebook Megapack | Homeless Year |
Paper $ | - | - | $140.00 |
Ebook $ | $400.00 | $300.00 | $70.00 |
Sum | $400.00 | $300.00 | $210.00 |
2021 | All in the Family | Homeless Year | Alter Boys in Love |
Paper $ | $600.00 | $200.00 | $140.00 |
Ebook $ | $450.00 | $50.00 | $110.00 |
Sum | $1,050.00 | $250.00 | $250.00 |
2022 | All in the Family | Multi Orgasmic | Homeless Year |
Paper $ | $600.00 | $248.00 | $320.00 |
Ebook $ | $280.00 | $428.00 | $60.00 |
Sum | $880.00 | $676.00 | $380.00 |
2023 | All in the Family | Homeless Year | Madgic #1 |
Paper $ | $480.00 | $440.00 | $360.00 |
Ebook $ | $390.00 | $80.00 | $60.00 |
Sum | $870.00 | $520.00 | $420.00 |
2024 | All in the Family | Ebook Megapack | Homeless Year |
Paper $ | $260.00 | - | $300.00 |
Ebook $ | $250.00 | $500.00 | $80.00 |
Sum | $510.00 | $500.00 | $380.00 |
Trade paperbacks unsurprisingly top the list; they’re beefy, with a nice profit margin. The Ebook Megapack sells rarely, but it’s so expensive that it’s managed to place anyway (and its profit margin is amazing, since there are no printing, shipping, or con costs). And there are a couple times when a floppy proves so shockingly popular that it scrabbles onto the table! (Multi, Orgasmic and Madgic #1 are the only times this has happened.)
All in the Family originally got finished in 2015, and for a few years it moldered near the bottom of the sales ranks, only to suddenly blast to the top after Josephine Riesman gave it a stunning write-up in Vulture magazine in 2019. All of you who own the 2021 paperback, thank Josie Riesman. It got made because of her. (And then Olivia Li went and ran the Kickstarter and published it, so thank her too. We can never run a Kickstarter campaign ourself without risking total financial ruin.)
Some books sell better on paper, others as ebook. The Homeless Year sells respectably on paper even after nine years, but it has never done well as an ebook, probably due to the rough artwork. (We credit the paper version of Homeless Year’s staying power to Jack of Plures House’s amazing work on the cover colors.) Multi, Orgasmic is our #2 best ebook seller of all time, but it sells crummy on paper, probably due to how niche the subject matter is.
Cultiples #2 was a flash in the pan, and we are forever grateful. That series felt like carrying a dead body up Mt. Everest. Thank goodness it didn’t become what we’re famous for.
Also, in case you’re wondering, after expenses, ebooks and paper books are roughly equally profitable, so we sell both. Ebooks are better for blind and overseas readers, while paper books don’t require electricity and are banned less.
Expenses: Where does the money go?
Rent. Housing is the all-devouring dragon of our universe:
2018 | $8,184.00 |
2019 | $7,455.00 |
2020 | $7,560.00 |
2021 | $7,560.00 |
2022 | $7,560.00 |
2023 | $8,850.00 |
2024 | $11,400.00 |
But rent doesn’t count as a business expense unless you’re rich/lucky enough to have an independent space purely for business, like a studio. Real business expenses:
• Print costs
• “Commissions/fees” (Olivia Li’s portion of AllFam sales, but mostly the cost of con tables)
• Contract labor (paying other people for work—sensitivity reads, OCR jobs)
• Office expenses (envelopes, stamps, paper, toner, staples…)
• Art supplies
• Travel (back when we did out-of-state cons)
• Meals (see above; only 50% can be a business expense)
• Advertising (Dreamwidth paid account)
Here’s the table:
Date | Print Cost | Olivia/Cons | Cont. labor | Office exp. | Art Supplies | Travel | Meals (50%) | Advertising | Sum |
2018 | $903.64 | $379.66 | $327.00 | $248.78 | $122.32 | $58.49 | $25.50 | $35.00 | $2,100.39 |
2019 | $93.03 | $133.00 | $50.00 | $287.43 | $129.76 | $184.98 | $21.62 | $35.00 | $934.82 |
2020 | $0.00 | $40.80 | $124.00 | $481.43 | $616.20 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $1,262.43 |
2021 | $267.94 | $20.00 | $78.40 | $338.61 | $25.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $35.00 | $764.95 |
2022 | $752.75 | $390.00 | $87.70 | $636.26 | $48.25 | $810.08 | $5.75 | $30.00 | $2,760.79 |
2023 | $427.26 | $695.65 | $104.40 | $460.66 | $84.66 | $97.80 | $0.00 | $35.00 | $1,905.43 |
2024 | $433.73 | $495.79 | $71.00 | $540.96 | $117.07 | $17.00 | $0.00 | $35.00 | $1,710.55 |
Blue is #1 expense, green #2, yellow #3. If you ignore the effects of the early pandemic (that zero in the “print cost” column of 2020 is a tragedy), print costs, cons, and office expenses are the big dogs.
Print costs often reflect how well cons are going. The more books we sell, the more we print! And books with spines (like the Homeless Year or All in the Family) are much more expensive to print than short stapled floppies like Multi, Orgasmic or LB Goes to Alaska. Floppies, we can do short runs of 10 or 20, a whopping expense of $40 tops, but books with spines have to be done in runs of at least 100 to be even sort of cost-effective. (Ever wondered why our trade paperbacks are so expensive? It’s because we can’t save up for a bigger, more cost-effective run! Sorry guys, blame the welfare system!)
Anyone who has ever sold merch is familiar with the “eternal unsellable box o’ shit” curse, the product you just cannot move. (We will be selling Flights of Reality until we die.) As a result, we print a trial run of 20 for every paperback and just eat the cost. We can sell 20 copies of anything (see Cultiples #2), and if it sells well, then we purchase the big run. If not… rest in peace, tiny print run. (I love you, Infinity Smashed: Found Wanting. You’ll always be a bestseller in my heart!)
Cons can be expensive. A local library fair may be free, but an event like Flamecon or the Small Press Expo can cost well over a hundred dollars, not including travel, board, meals, etc. (It’s easy to tell when we did a bunch of cons out of state; those are the years where the “travel” column ranks.) Common wisdom says that the bigger (more expensive) the event is, the more lucrative it is, but this isn’t necessarily true… at least, not for our weird niche market ass. Our most lucrative events for 2024? The Boston Anarchist Book Fair, the Massachusetts Indy Comics Expo, and the local Dyke March. MICE is a pretty well reputed comics con (and for many years, our “crown jewel” of cons), but the BABF and the Dyke March are cheap local events that people outside their respective milieus don’t pay much attention to. People who go to Boston Comic Con aren’t necessarily interested in our work… and neither are the people at a Dissociative Identity Disorder conference, we’ve discovered. It’s tempting to get obsessive over trying to predict which events will be the golden tickets, but often, the only way to find out is try. These days, we stick to local cons; it’s way cheaper.
Office expenses are boring necessities: stamps, envelopes, paper, staples, printer toner, ledgers, receipt books… and post office boxes. (Seriously, if you are a hate-able demographic with a couple cults in your rear view mirror and a tendency to become homeless, get a PO box).
Art supplies are mostly self-explanatory… and also include reference material, like photo books or Chuatico and Cibowo’s Comic Creator’s Guide to Literary Agents.
By working artist standards, our expenses are absurdly low. We have no studio or employees. We work cheap, use our tech til it dies, and then buy secondhand or refurbished. This is overwhelmingly a product of the savings limit. Damn near any question that starts with, “Why do you…?” can be answered with “because money/housing.”
“Why do you work in black and white?” Because it’s cheap and reliable.
“Why do you draw at 100% size in 8.5" x 5.5" hardback sketchbooks?” Because they’re cheap and durable, plus easily survive months in a homeless go-bag.
To be an oil painter, we’d need paints, canvas, brushes, a place where canvases can dry for days. To be a writer, we need a pencil, a spiral, a twenty-year-old laptop, and a USB drive. To be a cartoonist, we need all that, plus a paperback-sized sketchbook, our pencil pouch, an old-ass secondhand scanner, and an old-ass secondhand drawing tablet. Except for the scanner, we can (and do) lug that in our travel/homelessness pack.
How Do You Keep Track of All This?
We track income and outgo with a “con book” (for convention sales), a receipt book (for books mailed out), a ledger (which keeps track of everything, every expense, every tithe, every quarter we find in the couch cushions), and a spreadsheet file that condenses the ledger stuff for tax purposes (and also digital checking when we don’t have our ledger). Really, the ledger and the spreadsheet are the biggies.
Taxes
We pay federal and state income taxes every year, and sales tax (6.75% on buttons and books with spines) every three months. We paid more in 2024 income tax than Elon Musk in 2018 combined with Jeff Bezos in 2007 and 2011. (That’s because they paid zero.)
We learned to do our taxes thanks to a 2016 workshop with E. J. Barnes, “Taxes for Working Cartoonists,” and still use the guide she gave us, along with a text file keeping track of things we learned the hard way (and the adjustments after Trump changed the forms). We don’t feel okay giving a whole lecture on how to do your taxes because we are not an accountant and only know how to do our own.
Tithing/Tzedakah
This is not directly related to our work, but if we owe no debts and aren’t scraping for survival, we donate 10% of our income monthly to good purpose. If said purpose is not an individual in need, we choose the cause based on how little they badger or spam us. (Through trial and error, we have found that archive.org, the Bail Fund, and the Mashpee Wampanoag are good for this.)
We consider such tithing a religious/ethical obligation and do not take tax deductions for this, because it morally offends us that helping a starving friend (i.e., what poor folks do) is rewarded less than donating to some ritzy philanthropic organization (that is, charity practiced by the rich).
Harassment & Bans
If you make a work that honks somebody off, odds are good you’ll get slapped with a DMCA, plagiarism, or libel claim. Many sites delete first and ask questions never; it’s how we got shadow-banned from Gumroad. Cons may refuse to let you table with them, ban certain works of yours from being sold, or put you through an ethics investigation. It’s one of the reasons we stick with local cons; it lets us get to know the con staff, who are more likely to talk to us.
When we can reach someone, we always challenge the DMCAs, respond to the claims, try to stay reasonable and polite. We don’t want to teach people (including ourself) to win via tantrums. Part of why we’re still on Patreon is, they were willing to work with us over Cultiples #2. Gumroad weren’t; they would only say, “you know what you did.”
If possible, inform con staff in advance. As embarrassing as it was, we found con staff generally receptive and understanding. Most cons of size have dealt with this, especially if they are queer or have other “hate-able” demographics. Flamecon, Dyke March, and Arisia had security teams in place; the Boston Anarchist Bookfair has been attacked by neo-Nazis multiple times and has the most hardcore security plan of any event we’ve been to. Overwhelmingly, people were supportive and the show went on.
The one time we were banned from selling titles at an event (the Cultiples books at Arisia 2019), we were able to harness the notoriety, throw a banned book sale, and sell more of those books than we would’ve at the con!
Harassment comes from human beings. Robo-bans are more institutional. They may have nothing to do with the work itself, only some fluke of code or government decision or payment processor, and there is no recourse because all communications go down a black hole. (This is familiar to anyone in the disability or welfare system.) All in the Family, as far as I can tell, got robo-banned from itch.io, for having “incest” as a tag/content warning, which lumped it under child pornography. We threw another banned book sale, and once again, it seemed to work, but it’s been months, and none of our emails to itch.io have been answered. We can’t find a human being to talk to and the robot says no, so now we are on ebook site #3: Payhip.
Always have a site ready in advance for when you are forced to move. Banned from Amazon? Have Smashwords ready. Kicked from Patreon? Have SubscribeStar in your back pocket. Always have a plan to leave every site you’re on, because when the time comes, you’ll likely be too stressed to research. Assume everything is temporary, much like life itself.
Soft Costs
A lot of our work is not easy to put a price tag on. Scanning old, out-of-print books, or digging through old website archives, all the assorted research and donkey labor we do, how do you quantify that? LiberaPay and Patreon provide a tiny salary, allowing us to focus on slow-blooming but valuable projects; everything takes longer than people think, and a lot of that work is invisible.
Take that 1791 German medical multi case that papierfliegerfalter so kindly translated. That was the end-product of so much work:
• Our trawling the BPL archives for old multi books
• Discovering Goettmann and Greaves’s bibliography
• Requesting it days in advance because it was stored off-site and otherwise impossible to procure
• Arranging our schedule so we could go see the book
• Book-scanning the damn thing
• Sending it to Orion Scribner for OCRing so we could finally…
• Ctrl+F and find the citation for that 1791 case in the first place
• Post about it, which is trivial but led to…
• Erinptah finding a digitized copy of the work in German
• papierfliegerfalter offering to translate the work
• Bartering a box of our works and shipping them to Europe in exchange
• papierfliegerfalter translating the 1791 case and sending us the files
• Us uploading the files
That’s four different bodies directly involved, not including library, technical, and postal staff. None of us got directly paid in money for any of that. None of that work would’ve happened if I’d been chained to my drafting table, constantly cranking out sausage to feed the rent-dragon. When people pay or donate to us, they buy us breathing room to do all the stuff that leads to our best work. Our plural history essays/video wouldn’t exist without the research we had the leisure to do. Even books like All in the Family, which focus far more on our interior experiences, wouldn’t get made if we didn’t have room in our life to deal with those things in the first place.
What we’re saying is, blessings on every one of you who’ve ever tossed us a buck. Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-01 07:41 am (UTC)I now feel even more blessed to be one of the people with the paperback Infinity Smashed: Found Wanting.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-01 03:10 pm (UTC)