Dan Moren

January? In this economy?

I don’t have a lot of new year’s rituals, but the one I have done the best job at sticking with over the past several years is that every January, I look back over the past twelve months and run down my finances for the no-doubt millions of you who are interested in the vagaries of one random dude on the Internet’s career.

So here I am again, but this time with a big milestone: hard as it is to believe, this past fall marked ten years of being out on my own, which is several years longer than I’ve held any other job in my entire life. But it also means, hurray, a full decade of data about income and my business. As always, I’m indebted to folks like Jim C. Hines who have been sharing their own financial information for many more years than I have.

Without further ado, let’s dive in.

Big picture

As always, I don’t disclose the total dollar amount, but the usual factors hold true: it’s well under six figures and doesn’t include income from any other sources, such as investments, or my partner’s income—just what I make and spend from my business.

Over the past couple years, my income had fallen a bit. Part of that was due to the arrival of my kid, which meant I was spending a couple days a week looking after him full time. This year, he’s mostly been in daycare 1, which has gotten me back to a more normal schedule—not to mention lending back some brainpower.

It’s no surprise, then, given that my working hours expanded in 2024, my gross income was actually up about 12% year over year. There is, however, one very surprising—but welcome!—change at the root of that, which I’ll go into below.

I was amused to see, as I filled out my year-over-year spreadsheet, that this year’s income was right on the button for my mean income over the last ten years, and just 3% over the median. Nailed it, I guess. (In the sense that I make a largely consistent income, albeit one that has not grown substantially in the decade I’ve been self-employed. Which would be pretty reasonable were it not for, oh, inflation and new expenses like having to raise a child. So even if the amount I’ve made for the last ten years hasn’t changed much, those dollars don’t go as far, and there are more demands on them.)

My expense ratio was lower than the average, largely because I’ve been doing less work travel in the last few years, but it was perfectly in line with the last two years: about 17%.

Perhaps the most interesting change was in the breakdown of where this year’s income came from. The gross income for my tech writing and podcast businesses were almost flat—up 2% for tech writing, down 3% for podcasting—but fiction writing was up. Way up. 157% up. I’ll get into why in a minute.

So, though my income from podcasting and tech writing2 was almost perfectly flat (about 0.3% less than last year), the increase in fiction writing income had a wacky effect on the overall breakdown: fiction writing accounted for 18% of my overall earnings in 2024, compared to just 8% in 2023.

A tip of the hat here to my agent, Joshua Bilmes, who emailed me after last year‘s finance breakdown and said: “For 2024, we’re gonna get that “Fiction” percentage up into the double digits.” I don’t know what eldritch magicks he called upon, but I would like to pledge them my undying fealty.

Let’s dive a little deeper into these categories.

Freelancing

Though my bottom-line freelance tech writing situation in 2024 was very similar to the previous year (as the above numbers suggest), diving deeper yields a few more substantive changes.

As I mentioned in my wrap-up last year, Macworld reduced my columns to two-per-month halfway through 2023, making 2024 the first full year at the new lower quantity. I did manage to secure a slight rate increase for myself, but it didn’t kick in until the last quarter of the year, so it provided only a minimal benefit. I also didn’t pick up as many other one-off freelance assignments this year as I often do.

Fortunately, those downsides were compensated for by pouring more work into Six Colors, hence the overall number ending up basically flat year-over-year.

Podcasting

Podcasting continued to be a tumultuous industry in 2024, and unfortunately I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

The advertising market in particular has changed a lot in recent years, and my two ad-supported shows are square in the middle: podcast ads only accounted for 14% of my overall revenue, compared to 20% in 2023, and gross ad revenue was down 20% year over year.

This hit The Rebound particularly hard: it’s a smaller show, traffic-wise, and we’ve long struggled to fill spots. Ad revenue there was less than half of what it was in 2023; my other show with advertisers, Clockwise saw a much smaller drop.

The bright spot, once again, is direct member support. The Rebound in particular may not be popular with advertisers, but our listeners quite enjoy it: revenue from our membership program Rebound Prime went up a lot this year—not quite enough to offset those advertising losses, but remarkably close.3

Member support on The Incomparable has gone well too: I had a slight increase in what I make there, though because of the structure of payouts there, it’s a little harder to point towards any specific source.4

However, we’ve struggled on the membership front with Clockwise and revenue was down a small amount there in 2024. My co-host Mikah Sargent and I are tweaking our membership perks or the show in the coming weeks to see if that might help drive new subscribers.

The takeaway here remains the same as previous years: if you love a podcast and have the means to support it directly, that’s a huge help. Not to sound too much like a PBS fund drive, but small podcasts especially owe a lot to listeners like you.

Fiction writing

I promised I’d get to it and here we go. Yeah, my fiction writing income went up a lot this year, but the reasons behind it aren’t a mystery. I mentioned last year that two big payments I was expecting hadn’t come through yet; both did in the early part of this year. Even without those, however, I would have had a more modest, but still significant 53% bump in my revenue.

There are a few big factors at play here. First, I started getting payments in 2024 for All Souls Lost, the novel I put out through my agency in 2023. Since there’s no traditional publisher there, I garner a bigger chunk of change for each book sold—meaning that even though Souls has moved to date fewer copies than any of my traditionally published books5, I’ve done much better on it financially. We also managed to sell the audiobook rights (one of the aforementioned big payments) which is a big advantage of not having a deal with a large publisher—it’s getting harder and harder for authors to retain rights to audio in those kinds of contracts.

Secondly, I’m at a point with my traditional publishing career where having a back catalog starts to pay off. Which is to say that I usually get royalty checks for all of my books a couple times a year. These aren’t big checks—I’m far from bestseller numbers—but they make money, and every little bit helps.

Thirdly, as I close in on eight years in writing fiction, I’m much more diversified. Which is to say, all of the above plus I self-publish my own short fiction, which also brings in royalties—more revenue, this year, than royalties from my traditionally published books.6 (I explained all the reasons for this and also why I’m continuing to publish traditionally in last year’s wrap-up and that all still holds true.)

So, what to take away from this? Well, if I want to make a more financially lucrative career from writing, what I probably would have done is already put out a sequel to All Souls Lost and supplement it with some more Galactic Cold War short stories.

Which sounds great, but I am also currently under contract for my next traditionally published novel and I’m not really capable of writing two books at a time plus essentially working two other part time jobs, raising a kid, and having any sort of life outside work. In a perfect world, I’d probably get a nice rotation of trad-published novel, agency-published novel, self-published short story going. That’s a cadence I’m working towards, but honestly I write slowly and I’m very tired.

Wrap up

With ten years of working for myself in the rearview mirror, I’ve gotten comfortable enough with the structure of my job to look forward at the next ten years or so and expect to stay the course. Which is good, because I think I’ve been ruined for any other type of career at this point.7

This weird cobbled-together lifestyle I have has its fair share of challenges: as a self-employed person, one doesn’t really get “raises,” even to take into account cost of living increases. You want to make more income, you basically have a couple main options: work more (generate more things for people to pay for) or get lucky (have something you’ve made hit it big). The former can be exhausting and the latter is totally out of your control.

But it’s also a wonderful and wild career because I get to work on the things I want to, my hours are flexible enough that I can spend some of it hanging out with my kid, and I’ve ended up helping foster a small cadre of communities that seem to genuinely enjoy what I do.

All of which is, as ever, my way of saying thank you to everybody who supports my work, whether it be by becoming a member of Six Colors or one of my podcasts or by buying my books.8

I’m not really sure what 2025 is going to bring; it seems a year of uncertainty for a lot of reasons beyond just the professional. Here’s hoping that we’ll all be back here in January 2026 safe and sound to look at more numbers from my ridiculous spreadsheets. Be well.