The World Needs Your Passion: Business

February Behind-the-Scenes: Moving Front List to Backlist

Monica Leonelle — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 05:42:24 GMT

I’ve been talking for a year about how I’m shifting the focus in my business to things that I’m more interested in right now—energetics, or how creation actually works, and my romantasy fiction pen name. This has put me in a weird place with my catalog as a lot of it is nonfiction aimed at authors. I also have a 6-book series about twin flames aimed at …

I Lose the Most Friends When I Write About AI

Monica Leonelle — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:24:26 GMT

I often post the most intense things about the patriarchy, supremacy, politics, gender equality, capitalism, and God.

But I lose the most friends when I post something fairly benign about AI.

I am pretty neutral on AI use, seeing and experiencing the positives and negatives just like everyone else in creative and knowledge-working fields. At the same time…

Ask Monica: What Would You Do To Make a First-Time Kickstarter Successful?

Monica Leonelle — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:10:05 GMT

An author asked: “I tried Kickstarter a year ago and my project didn’t fund. I want to try it again but want to figure out how to get readers to the project this time. What are some ways I can reach readers?”

Dear Creator,

This is a great question and something I’m in the midst of doing right now for my upcoming fiction projects. Here are some of my tips:

Ask Monica: What Should I Be Considering for a New Business Partnership?

Monica Leonelle — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 16:27:13 GMT

An author asked: “I’m retiring in the next five years and want to bring on a younger business partner. We will run the company together for a while, and then they will take over. You’ve had many business partnerships over the years. What are some things I should be thinking about?”

Dear Creator,

I’ve had many business partnerships and co-authorships over …

What to Do When AI is Coming for Your Teaching or Coaching Business

Monica Leonelle — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:27:37 GMT

Lately I’ve been reflecting on the fear that seems to be keeping a lot of creators up at night: What happens when AI can do what I do?

If you’re teaching, coaching, or helping others through your content, you’ve probably felt it. That creeping anxiety that your expertise might become obsolete. That your courses, your coaching calls, your carefully crafte…

10 Things I Accomplished in 2025 (And What I Learned From Each One)

Monica Leonelle — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:19:16 GMT

It’s about halfway through January by the time I’m posting this, and part of that is because I had a 2026 wins post all set to queue—but I had missed an important step to planning that required me to write a completely new post.

This is my year-end 2025 review, leading into 2026 goals. In this short series, I’ll share some of the biggest lessons learned …

Ask Monica: How Do I Start Delegating When I’m Completely Overwhelmed?

Monica Leonelle — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 16:37:34 GMT

An author asked: “I have French translations that need formatting, German translations that need covers and formatting, new covers for an old series, and a romantic series I want to launch. I need to start setting up systems so I can pass things off to assistants, but I’ve had assistance before and I’m not always great at articulating what I need. Where…

Ask Monica: How Do I Prioritize Projects and Leverage My Creative Network for Growth?

Monica Leonelle — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 16:57:26 GMT

A fantasy author asked: “I’m struggling with several decisions at once. I have two different Kickstarter campaigns to choose between—one for a novel that’s finished, and another for a collaborative project. I can’t decide which to launch first. I’ve also worked with dozens of collaborators on previous projects, but I’m terrible at reaching out to my net…

Ask Monica: How Do I Systematically Delegate My Social Media Content Creation?

Monica Leonelle — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 16:03:32 GMT

An author asked: “Instagram posts are taking me 20-30 minutes each, and there’s definitely an energetic tax. I use AI to generate the text and ask for tropes with emojis, but I still have to pull quotes, find photos, and find music. I’m getting some traffic bump when I post regularly, but I can’t tell if it’s helping with sales. Should I delegate this, …

Writing Success is Not a Linear Path—It's a Biosphere

Monica Leonelle — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 14:54:39 GMT

Hey there —

In the first part of the Future of Stories series, we talked about how the identity of “the author” and the productization of “the book” are both shifting. Today I want to talk about success paths, and also, are they really paths? What does it really take to reach success in the publishing industry—and what does it take to stay there, too?

Hon…

The Behind-the-Scenes Truths of My New Three Books

Monica Leonelle — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 21:00:32 GMT

Hello!

Today I’m offering you a behind-the-scenes look at why my new three books are so important to me personally, and why I’m running a campaign for them.

To catch you up, the books are:

Getting to Six-Figures Sustainably
Passion + Profit with Author Ecosystems
Six Figure Storyteller with Author Ecosystems

These books actually do mean the world to me, and I…

Why You Are Not Just an Author Anymore

Monica Leonelle — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 22:01:34 GMT

Hey there —

I have some exciting news! My three new books for writers are live! Get them in ebook, print, or audiobook here »

I’m running this preorder through a platform called Curios, which I’m experimenting with as a new hybrid model for authors and creators. It’s part crowdfunding preorder, part storefront—and gives me a chance to test some new fulfil…

New Crowdfunding Campaign For Author Ecosystems

Monica Leonelle — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 20:40:32 GMT

As you may have heard already, over the next year I’m re-launching many of our previous Writer MBA co-written books under my solo umbrella, and I’m using Curios to do so!

Today I wanted to talk about one of my favorite books that we ever wrote: our “greatest hits album,” originally titled $8333.

We launched this book back in fall 2024 and the premise was …

I'm Crowdfunding on Curios! What To Expect From the Platform

Monica Leonelle — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 20:19:57 GMT

In working on the rebrand for my co-written books at Writer MBA, I wanted to re-launch these books optimally and realized that I had a huge volume of books that became “qualified” for crowdfunding. To qualify for crowdfunding, you basically need to have something new. A new book counts, but many don’t realize that a new format or a new cover/rebranding …

Everything That's In My New Three Books

Monica Leonelle — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 21:30:19 GMT

My new campaign is live on Curios!

Go here to see it:

Today I want to share the Table of Contents for all three of these books, along with some new graphics I’ve made to commemorate the occasion.

First—What Are These Books?

Yes, they are sort of redos—or rather:

Getting…

Behind-the-Scenes of the Book Sales Supercharged Rebrand

Monica Leonelle — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 15:27:20 GMT

I’ve been a bit MIA over the summer and for good reason—we ended Writer MBA in May/June and honestly? It’s taken me a lot of the summer to find my new footing and remember and reclaim my voice, which has been silent for so long.

I also don’t do as well at life during summer. Originally, it was because I dislike the heat, preferring fall and spring weathe…

Welp. It's Over.

Monica Leonelle — Thu, 01 May 2025 16:00:59 GMT

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to make a proper post on Substack for The World Needs Your Passion—and it’s weird to be making it when I have some backfill to post still.

Once you read to the end of this, you’ll understand why I haven’t shared much since 2025 started. I have three big announcements that you may be interested in, so make sure you r…

How Creatives Might Survive and Thrive in a Post-Productivity World

Monica Leonelle — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 23:01:05 GMT

Note: We are now at Day 10 of my Digital Advent Calendar event and still going strong! I’m dropping one resource in full from my catalog every day onto my Substack! These resources require a paid subscription. You can get a yearly subscription here (20% off!) or if you want a smaller commitment, you can get a month-to-month subscription here. I’m enjoyi…

Why I'm Going All in on Substack's Platform Going Forward

Monica Leonelle — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 21:00:24 GMT

Note: As I’m writing this, I’m also running my Digital Advent Calendar event and dropping one resource in full from my catalog every day onto my Substack! These resources require a paid subscription. You can get a yearly subscription here (20% off!) or if you want a smaller commitment, you can get a month-to-month subscription here.

Additionally, this post is too long for email, according to Substack. It also cuts off at a paywall about 30% through. The post is really great though, and full of detail about subscriptions, so you should read it. You will just want to read it from the website:

This post is Day 4’s gift, and I hope you enjoy it!

Well…I’ve decided to go all in on Substack. It’s taken me years—literally years—to make this decision, and I thought it could be helpful to dig into why that was and share my framework for finally coming to a choice about the matter.

A Quick Background on My Experience With Subscriptions

I started on Substack back in 2021 (!!) and have been posting little tidbits here for the last four years. In 2023, I attempted a subscription, and that went fine aside from me getting pregnant, having a second child, and not being as consistent as I needed to be.

This subscription is easily my most successful one, with over 100 paid members for most of its time, with the highest numbers at 213 paid members. I’ve let those numbers dwindle this year, though I’m still close(ish) to 100 paid members (currently at 87).

Outside of Substack, I’ve dabbled in Ream, Patreon, and even a fiction Substack, but right now this is my most successful traditional subscription.

We also have subscriptions at Writer MBA, and we see our events as a subscriptions or memberships of sorts too. More often, we do recurring revenue across 12 months, which provides a baseline for us. I count it, because selling is a spectrum with one-time payments on one end and subscriptions on the other; 12-month payment plans fall strongly toward the subscription side of that.

All to say—while I don’t have a huge subscription, I do have some experience building and running one for several years…And I knew I wanted to stick with the business model, even though it can be really challenging.

My Decision-Making Framework For Choosing a Platform

I’ve spun on my answers to a short list of questions about this decision for a long time. I asked myself each these questions and considered each one for months, if not years in many cases. I’m fully aware that during that time, I could have been spending my energy on building a subscription. I could have been doing things. I could have been making things happen.

In my defense, I did do things! I maintained a presence on Substack, I tested Patreon (and hated it for whatever reason), I researched Ghost and Wordpress but felt exhausted at the thought of maintaining them, and I set up shop on Ream for awhile before deciding I wanted more stability.

Here are the questions I kept asking myself over and over again.

Do I need to do this? (In my case, do I need to do subscriptions?)
What are my options?
What am I actually going to do?
What are my reservations about this platform?
What doesn’t work with my current attempts to do subscriptions?
How can I make those pieces work?

The rest of this post is my answers to those questions.

Do I Need a Subscription?

This year has not been a banner year for really anything for me aside from staying afloat with kids and my job. I’ve gotten a lot of books done; they were mostly books that should have been done two years ago. I’ve written and recorded things that I’ve only posted to the smallest of audiences. I’ve also helped build a conference that is going to be awesome. I’ve made a lot of plans for the future, and I’ve laid a lot of foundation this year that I hope pays off for my future self.

But I’ve desperately wanted to have a simplified business model, and I feel like subscriptions + a storefront for one-off purchases are my ideal solution.

I still like retailers and those are somewhat set it and forget it. Or at least, set it and forget it aside from refreshing your ads once a month. (Which by the way I need to do that.)

And I still like Kickstarter, though I need to wrap up all my projects (getting there and doing another push before the end of the year). In the future, I need to do projects that I’m super ecstatic about. Kickstarter is so much excitement and so much presence and so much customer support, and I don’t have as much of that as I need right now, at least not for the projects I tried to do. Lastly, I need to not use Kickstarter like it’s a storefront. It worked/works well for Russell as a Tundra to use it as a storefront in place of a web store, but I’m not a Tundra.

As a Grassland, the steady effort of a few sales a day, or of adding a few new people a day to a subscription, is really soothing to me. Processes for upgrading are soothing for me. Automated emails are soothing for me. Scheduling ahead is soothing for me. The subscription model, especially here on Substack, is so well built for a Grassland, so it felt like a no brainer to have/keep my subscription going.

What Were My Other Options?

As I said, I’ve looked at a lot of other platforms. Some of my considerations included:

Multiple tiers vs. single tier? - I knew I wanted multi-tier, so that actually ruled out Substack for the longest time! For years, the lack of multi-tier was a dealbreaker for me here on Substack.
NSFW vs. clean content? - I want to serialize fiction with on-page sex in it and I knew people were getting shut down on Patreon and elsewhere for posting. Ream or self-hosting seemed like the best option.
Self-hosted vs. hosted with higher fees? - I went back and forth but ultimately decided that I just didn’t have the energy to self-host my subscription. That would be a requirement for Wordpress or Ghost, and made it somewhat easy to rule both of them out. I do already run WooCommerce for my shop, and my website is on Wordpress, but it felt so daunting to try to run all of that on one site. There’s also a lot of extra work to get people there when you are going at things self-hosted. It’s really no different from having a website store. I didn’t want my subscription to be a deep cut, I wanted it to be a main event and a clear, separate product.
Stability vs. features? - Stability is of course, very important for a subscription that you plan to go all-in on for multiple years! At this point in my process, I was pretty much set on Ream because I had ruled out all the other platforms. But Ream was young and incredibly buggy. There were some good things about it, and I loved the scheduler, but I knew the features I needed to run my subscription could be years out to release, still.

I think a big reason I took soooo long to choose a platform is because my considerations slowly ruled out every platform, which just left me spinning. And although I landed on Ream for a time, the stability issues in both the software and the team just became too big of red flags to overcome. So I had to start over and see what I could compromise on. I went back to Patreon and hated it again. (No real reason, I just don’t enjoy the experience of trying to use that platform as a creator.)

At some point in Q3, I realized that I don’t want to (and maybe can’t) spend the time and energy on supporting multiple tiers of a subscription. I don’t want to do this for fiction or for nonfiction, even though you can make a lot more money from a lot fewer people if you have multi-tier. Why? Well…

The Social Media Secret Every Author Needs To Sell More Books

Monica Leonelle — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 20:00:55 GMT

Russell and I have welcomed Book Brush into our community multiple times and had them as a digital sponsor of Writer MBA’s Future of Publishing Mastermind for 2024. As an author, I've always been a fan of Book Brush's instant mockups, which you’ve probably seen in my newsletter and Kickstarter campaigns. They are a lifesaver for creating eye-catching vi…