Annual Letter to Imaginary Investors

Dear Noble Financiers,

While I was severely disappointed in the low attendance at our most recent board meeting, I recognize now that summoning you to the Dunkin Donuts at the foot of the Bourne Bridge might not have been the best plan. To be fair, I wasn't there, either. Messed up the directions and ended up at the wrong dunk. If any of you did happen to attend, my apologies. Shelly was supposed to give you a free cruller.

Now on to more important matters: Our 2023 results, pipeline, losses, jokes, reflections, and outlook for the years ahead.

Results

Gross revenues rose by 3.1%, overturning our expectations of an 82% decline. We attribute this minor success to continued interest in our services.

We published one new book in 2023, a work of middle-grade fiction called Sea of Gold. (An updated, revised, revamped version of our first novel for young readers, Fish.) Despite the lack of pictures, and the fact that the story demands 18,000 seconds worth of the user's attention, and not the 1.4 seconds required to consume most modern content, readers seem to be enjoying it very much.

Our ghostwriting and consulting divisions continue to expand, and we expect to focus our efforts there in the coming quarters. To those of you in the group who accuse us of shifting to ghostwriting because we've run out of things to say, well, um...huh.

Pipeline

We finished two books for the adult market in 2023, both with Daniela Rus, the Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. The Heart and the Chip and The Mind's Mirror focus on robots and AI, respectively. Really wish we hadn’t worn old-fashioned headphones during Talks at Google.

Our expectation is that these books, which have now been sold into several foreign markets, will support future revenues, but as usual, we have absolutely no idea what those numbers might look like. Since we're all business people, though, let's say we expect to sell 1.2 billion copies globally.

We are also going to be releasing Sea of Gold: The Duke’s Curse, the long-awaited sequel to the novel formerly known as Fish:

What do you think? Let us know in the comments. The book is out in September.

Losses

Our misfires were too numerous and multifaceted to track, and as an optimistic venture, we feel it would be irresponsible to catalog them all here.

Jokes

After the tremendous success of Crooked But Quick, we have conceived several additional fake businesses. News of these ventures will be released throughout 2024. T-shirts will be sold, but investors should expect no revenue. This should not be difficult for you, though, since you too are imaginary.

For economic reasons we reduced our practical joke budget to $10, which increased the use of postcards. Also, the horse joke isn’t finished yet.

Reflections

By nature we are not a reflective organization, as we prefer to learn quickly from our mistakes while rushing rapidly ahead, like a fishtailing snowplow trying to break speed records on a snowy Vermont highway, so this section is always difficult. Generally, though, we're wondering if we should've gotten into construction.

Outlook

Those of you who have been with us since 2003 and the publication of The Wages of Genius have enjoyed an occasionally bumpy ride. Yet by the end of 2024 we will have published 19 books. These volumes have so far been translated into more than 25 languages. Four of them have been New York Times bestsellers.

So we urge you to stay with us, and in return we promise to continue working our very hardest to produce great stories, update you annually on our progress, and host the next board meeting at a Dunkin Donuts closer to a major airport.

(Thank you, as always, for reading, and please feel free to comment or click the heart below if you liked this post, so we know what’s working.)