Welp. It's Over.

But all is not lost.

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 read to the end.

Announcement #1 - We will not be running the Future of Publishing Mastermind or Writer MBA Conference again in the foreseeable future.

The 2025 Future of Publishing Mastermind + Writer MBA Conference went fantastically in my opinion. I don’t think I was the only one who felt this way—our conference team though so too, and in general, attendees and sponsors seemed pleased. These two events were our dream events, they went off mostly without a hitch—but unfortunately, we cannot continue them going forward.

We know that our people have loved these events so much, as have we. Russell and I would have loved nothing more than to bring these events back year after year—which was always our stated plan until recently.

The reasons?

Semi-Reason #1 - It cost too much.

We obviously had some financial woes, and Russell and I both paid a real $15k each out of our own pockets that we will never get back. Writer MBA can't pay us back.

We also funneled Writer MBA’s money from a few other projects into the conference, forgoing payments that we were owed. I would estimate that we were each more like $30-40k in the hole at the end of this event, which doesn't even factor in what we should have been paid for the event.

That is a huge sustainability problem, but also a fixable one. It wouldn't have taken much to cut the bloated operational budget we were working under. It comes down to two line items that should have been at 50-60% of what they were. During April, one changed easily which made way for the second one to change. We knew we could substantially reduce the costs of running the events again, with a right-sized budget for what we needed.

I want to say this very clearly—there is belief by some that events can’t or shouldn’t make money, but of course they can. It’s a math problem. The math was bad this year, but we learned and could have gone on if this were the issue alone.

Semi-Reason #2 - Every year is a high risk influenced by outside factors.

Retention is a challenge on conferences. I have so much to say about event retention and maybe someday I will, but for now it's important to know that just because someone loves the event doesn't mean they will attend the event year over year. The idea that events grow over time is a misunderstanding of events.

Still, we knew we could significantly reduce the bulk of the challenges and risks of launching again with a strong wait list. That was what we intended to do if we ran the events again.

Those two things, done well, would have taken us from negative $40k each to positive $40k each.

But some more things were still holding us back. Instead of making a full list, I'll cut to the two key ones.

Real Reason #1 - The conference was sucking up too much promotional time.

If you do launches for your books, you'll understand this well. Let's say you get a good 3-4 chances to promote your work in a big way every year. If you are good at launching, you can maybe stretch that to 6-8 chances a year before burning out yourself and your audience.

Our conference (the one we lost money on, mind you) took up pretty much all of our promotional slots for the year. When it wasn't taking up a promotional slot directly, something we were doing to funnel money into it (that we also weren't getting paid for) took up that slot. And that doesn't at all speak to the time and energy constraints of doing all that work, too.

While the actual financial pieces of the conference were easy to fix, this part really wasn't. If you own a conference, you will probably need to launch ticket sales at least 2-3 times a year to capture each type of buyer. You will need a layered plan to also capture sponsors in the same way–not a launch, exactly, but an effort or campaign or networking trip.

Real Reason #2 - The opportunity costs to our individual businesses were too high.

Beyond promotional costs, there were very real opportunity costs. The biggest one has been that Writer MBA is a brand with a promotional schedule and Wannabe Press (Russell's company) is a brand with a promotional schedule and The World Needs Your Passion (my company) is a brand with a promotional schedule. Each of these companies have endless emails, campaigns, etc. All three do fairly similar things and a casual observer isn't really able to tell the difference.

My audience has grown significantly through Writer MBA, but when all three companies are operating independently, that audience is bombarded with similar books, offers, campaigns, and communications. It burns out the audience fast, so we individually had to cut things from our personal companies.

But that cuts into my pie in real ways. Not just losing money on a delayed project, but also audience capacity. If someone gives me money to attend a conference, they aren't going to give me money for coaching too. Writer MBA was eating my company's lunch.

For years, we have lived as a 3-headed Cerberus while being fed like the average dog.

I don’t want to say that there will never be a conference again, because I hope to someday do a conference again—though obviously I could never do what Russell and I created without him. Wouldn’t be the same.

Otherwise, I actually loved the conference and I enjoyed solving the challenges the conference faced, despite the high stakes. I would like to do a conference again under my own brand. I know what I'm doing now, and I understand theoretically how to pull the various levers to make an event profitable and impactful. I also understand how to stack a conference with a single company's other offers so that they all enhance each other.

What I don't understand is how to do any of this with three companies. I don't understand how to turn this conference from one steak to three steaks, so everyone feels fed.

And while this Cerberus setup greatly affected us through the conference…It also became the #1 challenge everywhere else in Writer MBA too.

Which brings me to the next thing.

Announcement #2 - We are sunsetting Writer MBA, the company.

Don’t worry—we are going to deliver on any outstanding anything from campaigns, projects, books, interviews, etc. whether it is a Russell thing, a Monica thing, or a Writer MBA thing.

Russell and Monica are not going away. But Writer MBA is on June 30th, 2025.

The reasons?

Reason #1 - Everything I've said about promotional costs and opportunity costs doesn't just apply to the conference. It applies to everything we do at Writer MBA.

It applies at a lesser level, but that level is real and no longer feels worth the squeeze to either of us.

We did not intend to close Writer MBA. The decision did not come lightly, but rather through a 6-month long conversation that Russell and I have been having every week over email, text, calls, and tons of bougie dinners. Even leading up to the conference, Russell kept saying to me, “but surely we'll at least have a Shopify store?” And my reply was always, “Yes, the Shopify store is happening.”

This plan continued after the conference, into mid-April, even as our appetite for doing the conference again waned.

We fully intended to continue with Writer MBA, even without the conferences, because it was a no-brainer…But the more we discussed it, the more it felt like we “should” continue, and not like we wanted to.

In Elle Luna’s book, The Crossroads of Should and Must, she writes:

“There are two paths in life: Should and Must. We arrive at this crossroads over and over again. And every day, we get to choose…When we choose Should, we’re choosing to live our life for someone or something other than ourselves. The journey to Should can be smooth, the rewards can seem clear, and the options are often plentiful…

“Must is different, Must is who we are, what we believe, and what we do when we are alone with our truest, most authentic self. It’s that which calls to us most deeply…Unlike Should, Must doesn’t accept compromises.”

We have spent a lot of time talking about a Writer MBA without a conference. A Writer MBA that was less aggressive, less demanding.

But all we could come up with were Shoulds:

• We should do a joint Shopify store where we can sell our back catalog

• We should do more Kickstarters together

• We should re-release our co-written books with new updates

• We should get our podcast snippets to TikTok and YouTube shorts

• We should use Author Ecosystems to send our email list into overdrive

This list when on and on, but there was no joy of “Must” behind any of it.

In examining this, it started to make more sense to me.

It wasn't exactly just burn out on multiple fronts—financial, energetic, promotional, creative—though I certainly felt some burn out.

It was completion.

Reason #2 - We said and did everything we wanted to do.

In 2022, Writer MBA had a 3-part thesis to communicate to authors that we said we would lay out in full through co-written books that we would launch on Kickstarter:

• Crowdfunding

• Wide

• Direct Sales

In 2023, Writer MBA expanded that thesis during the Direct Sales launch:

• Author Ecosystems

• StoryUrge

And we did exactly this. The last campaign ended on March 31st, 2025—just a week after the conference.

I honestly had gotten so distracted by the conference that I didn't even realize that we said all five of the major things we needed to say about what makes a good, financially sustainable author career.

But we did it!

• We made Kickstarter a thing in author community. (We did not do it alone, but we were integral to the movement.)

• We made our Kickstarter-Wide-Direct thesis and thousands of authors are moving this direction now.

• We completed the two additional campaigns in our expanded thesis—Author Ecosystems and StoryUrge—and while these didn’t hit as hard, we know that we offered gold in the process and people will get it soon enough.

• $8333 was in there too! Our greatest hits album book is possibly one of my favorite special edition ideas ever.

• And finally, we created the conference prototype that we wholeheartedly believe is the next evolution of conferences for this industry.

It is serendipitous that we finished the conferences + finished our thesis within a week of each other…But a third thing happened too.

Through a clerical error (not ours), our Writer MBA LLC was disbanded a few weeks ago.

I'm already a strong believer in divine order, but even Russell was convinced that it was a sign—that it was time to shut down. (Maybe more convinced than me.)

And when I took this line of thought around a full shut down to its natural conclusion, it made me realize that we needed to sunset almost everything, from our course access, to our books, to many of our websites, to our bank account. All of those things required money, conversation, collaboration, communication…But we were energetically complete with them all. Neither of us wanted to keep collaborating, communicating, or pouring money into them.

While I was having these revelations, Russell was going through his own process leading him to similar conclusions.

There were two hold outs for both of us—our co-written books and our Author Ecosystems framework.

The books

Books can be forever, and I'm so proud of what we've done, but catalogs require maintenance. There are new formats, derivative works, publishing channels, and expected updates as the industry changes. There is tracking and splitting payments. I had to ask myself, “do I really want to be talking to Russell about this Kickstarter book five years from now?” My answer was no. With nine co-written books, I worried we would be talking about these books every week for the rest of our lives.

We both intend to take our portions of some of the books and relaunch our personal takes on the topic, so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, all but the Kickstarter book will be pulled from retailers in the next few days.

The Author Ecosystems framework

We also looked at Author Ecosystems. We are so proud of this framework, and for such a long time we intended to keep building it and paying each other out for the monetization of it.

Recently, we have hit a hilarious disagreement where Russell wants to drop the system to 4 types and I want to expand it to 6. This is not something that would have broken us—we would have worked it out eventually—but since we had different ideas of how to evolve this work, we’ve decided now is a great time to branch the framework from what it currently is. So Russell will keep some of the branding elements in his next iteration/expansion of the framework, which sounds really cool. I will do a complete rebrand as I’m expanding it beyond authors and into creatorship and entrepreneurship.

You can still read our original work about this framework here:

While it took a while for both of us to let go of the co-written books and the framework, there was another thing about these two categories of collaboration.

Aside from the conference, they were the two that bring us the least money. They are our favorite and most meaningful things that we've done together, and they are also in the bad money-20 of the 80/20.

With all of this in mind, it just made sense to each rebrand and rerelease our portions of the projects on our own, as we wanted and if we were called to.

All in all, we spent six months trying to hold Writer MBA together and coming to no good solutions, but when we explored the clean break it came together so fast and easy in less than six hours.

So…Are we okay?

Look, I'm definitely your average “yes there was drama but let me tell you the next time I see you because I can't say it publicly” type of person.

So believe me when I say no, there is no drama between us.

Don't get me wrong, Russell and I disagree on things and annoy each other like siblings sometimes, but this is the most logical and sensible thing we've ever done.

I am very, very sad to not be doing business with my friend anymore. Russell is one of my author besties and closest confidants about both business and life, and we’ve also been through so much together. So much. That alone would demand my respect and discretion, but I also believe we’ll continue to be supportive of each other’s businesses and continue to stay friends going forward.

We are shutting down because it's become so obvious that we can't do the things we’re excited about in our own businesses AND continue to run Writer MBA as we have.

It is a bittersweet goodbye. At the same time, I am tentatively joyful to step into my next iteration of business. And I'm excited to see Russell do the same and be happy.

Russell and I have always had truth between us, and we have both accepted this truth that we are complete in our partnership and what Writer MBA was intended to do.

All in all, I'm pretty proud of us, and how much we've grown in the last four years, and how excited we are to keep growing.

Was Writer MBA a success?

This is where my disappointment is probably the greatest.

We absolutely did what we intended to do.

We had a great impact on the industry and individuals.

My disappointment is that I had hoped we would build a 7-8-figure company and have a greater brand legacy than we will.

We ultimately created this company when we each had much smaller capacity. We then outgrew it very quickly. Even when we were planning to continue Writer MBA, we discussed giving it a new name because we had gone so far beyond teaching authors.

And so, Writer MBA burned brightly but then quickly ran out of wick.

• I am sad that I thought we were building *the* company, but it was a container that couldn't hold us or our dreams for very long.

• I am sad that we became so good at collapsing time that we pushed the industry forward very quickly, and ourselves too. I don't even know that I remember the full whirlwind, it happened so quickly.

• I am sad that we reached all the levels I had hoped to reach, and none of it was the promised land I had expected. New level, same devils and all.

• I am sad that we created a company that needed us to burn our other two companies down in order to survive—neither of us were ever going to do that, of course. We are artists above all else.

Also though, I am celebratory. We have leveled up in ways we could not have dreamed of. And now this level up is complete, and we’re both on to bigger things sooner than I ever expected. It's a win-win, and I honestly can't wait for my next evolution!

Lastly, I want to say that a lot of people have underestimated Russell and me, both individually and as Writer MBA. In the words of Mel Robbins, “let them.” I find it very comforting to imagine people underestimating us again, in this moment, when honestly?

If you thought Russell and I were doing cool things with one company, you’re in for double the cool things now that we’re both able to focus on our individual companies.

This isn’t even a setback, from my perspective. We’re both slingshotting forward, just in different directions.

Announcement #3 - More fiction, plus a new series for creatives.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but both Russell and I will be doubling down on our respective companies, and there’s so much goodness there for both of us going forward.

I am diving pretty deep into fiction, which—as a reminder—I was basically writing romantasy (or romantic fantasy) before it was a genre (I believe many of us were). I actually even used the words “romantic fantasy” because I had so much romance in my books, despite the detailed worldbuilding. I’ll be doubling down on fiction which was kind of always the plan for this year and the next few anyway.

For nonfiction, I have a few books and workbooks to finish up, and a huge backlog of launches that I never did, so it will probably seem like I’m doing a lot in the authorship world still from an outside perspective.

Creatively, however, I’ll be working on a new series that has been percolating the background for a long time—several years already.

The biggest reason I want to do this new series—which will build a lot on my current authorship books—is because I realized a year or two ago that I’ve shared a lot about my process for writing and building companies, and shared even more with Russell and Writer MBA, but I’ve never shared the energetics of it. I’ve never shared what I’m doing behind-the-scenes to create, grow, and scale a business to new levels. Yet the energetics are probably 80% of the work I do these days.

I am talked out (written out?) on just about everything authorship and writing. I don’t know how I could keep writing about it after 40 books.

But the energetics of creation itself? Well, that’s something I know a bit about, and something I’d love to share. I also know a lot of the authors in our audience are interested in energetics too.

There are two other pieces that I know are important in this next iteration:

The true nature of energy.

For the audience, this may be spirituality, religion, or simply observation of the magic and mystery of life—but the topic of energetics is as much ethereal as it is physical, mental, and emotional. My work is relevant regardless of your religious or spiritual practices, but you’ll have to be open to the mystical, the unknown, to unlock some of the concepts in this new series. I’ll even be bringing some of my previously written spirituality books (I have six of them!) into the discussion around what it means to be a creator and how the universe and life support you in doing the thing you are called to the most (the “Must,” if you will).

Visual art.

I’ll be bringing a lot more visual art into my work, and I’m not sure I will ever publish a book again without including my own art in it. This one is a little sad for me to talk about and explain, because I’ve been denying a part of myself for a long time.

Six years ago, I was eight months pregnant with my first child, sitting in the last art class I would ever take. I had intended to go back after my maternity leave ended, but then there was a deadly virus—COVID—making its way across the globe. My child was five months old and we were in lockdown.

I attempted to do art on my own for a time, but eventually it got exhausting and I decided to take an indefinite pause. I did not feel I could keep pursuing writing and art at the same time while I had young children. It was just too much creative brainpower needed and writing was the more profitable choice for me and what I had built already. I decided to set art aside completely and take up LEGOs instead as a hobby and meditation. That way I could still feel like I was creating but there were instructions and zero decision-making on my part.

My youngest is now fairly launched and things are stabilizing for me. But I’ve been getting a deeper intuitive hit that visual art is a “Must” in my life and career. My career was never meant to be just writing. In fact, visual art was meant to have equal space in my career.

I’m still processing this revelation and what it means, but I know some of what it means, which is that my books will look a little different in the future.

I’m both happy and sad about this new piece of information—mourning the pain this part of me feels at being ignored for so long, being terrified of having to “start over” as a beginner in something, and feeling stupid that I could even figure something so obvious out so much later in life. After all, I have based my life and my brand on the story of having followed my passion and survived, but here I am having not followed it in this big, big area.

The good news is that I’ll be able to relive all the early fears—imposter syndrome, not knowing if I’m good enough, not knowing what I’m doing, not knowing if the work will ever lead to anything—and hopefully it will make my new series for creatives even better.

This series was meant for years from now.

I had planned to write this new series for creatives years from now. I kept telling my best friend, “Yeah, that’s later though.” My thinking was that there was visual art in it, and I haven’t done any visual art for years, so surely it was later? Like even much later. 5+ years.

The closing of Writer MBA has pushed that timeline up for me in a way that I’m not even fully comfortable with yet, and that I can’t even necessarily explain. It’s not that I need something to fill the void of Writer MBA—not at all. Until a few weeks ago, my intention was still to wait a few more years to work on this series.

It could be because my energy feels freer and plentiful, but I could put that energy anywhere. The best I can pinpoint it is that there’s an urgency to bring myself into balance. This series is not the product, it’s the bi-product of that.

As a friend told me, “It makes sense, because the world needs this series right now,” but I’m also still just sorting out how any of this will happen or work.

So, this isn’t exactly a fully formed announcement, but it is a direction into a blank page that I didn’t expect to be staring at.

It’s funny—I have had years to prepare for Writer MBA’s potential shutdown, but I did not expect to need an answer by May 1st…And as of even a week or two ago, I certainly did not expect to have one.

This is going to be transitionary but also, the transition may happen quickly.

Final Housekeeping

For Writer MBA:

• We are sunsetting officially on June 30, 2025 but we will still be around. We are still support@writermba.com for the foreseeable future.

• We will deliver on everything outstanding from courses, projects, campaigns, interviews, books, whatever else. This is true whether you bought them from Russell, from Monica, or from Writer MBA.

• Neither of us are leaving the industry. We are closing our joint company and focusing on our individual companies, both of which are still a part of the industry.

• We will still share a podcast, two websites, 1-2 books, and a Facebook group for the foreseeable future.

• Russell noted that this may feel like a divorce to some of you, so I guess I probably shouldn’t say, “but you get double the toys now!” But truly, you will get double the toys from our respective companies.

• We are considering having a last hurrah sale on our joint catalog that will run through June 30, 2025, but we need to finalize a few more things before giving you the link to it.

For Monica Leonelle:

• I am still going to update this Substack with a backfill of content—soon. I haven’t updated because so far in 2025 we just finished two conferences and ended a company—along with everything else we’ve done (I’ve put out several books, for example). A lot has been happening behind the scenes.

• I am still updating and responsible for all the Kickstarters I’ve ever done and we’ve ever done. Nothing at all has changed about that, and we literally have books at the warehouse that will be shipping out shortly.

• I’ll be finishing up a few more authorship tasks (books, workbooks, recordings) first.

• I’ll be getting my fiction together and doubling down on it next.

• I’ll be building this new series on the nonfiction side. I’m not leaving the industry at all! But I do hope these books expand my audience and speak to all types of creators, not just authors/writers. The content will be much broader, similar to Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic) or Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist) or Julia Cameron (The Artist’s Way).

You can always reach me if you have any questions: team@theworldneedsyourpassion.com

Thank you for reading to the end, and I’m so grateful to everyone who continues on this crazy journey of creativity with me!

You can read Russell’s statement on this here:

The. End. (not of this Substack)