Unpopular Writing Tip: Keep Your Day Job

Every writer says it at some point. Actually, just about everyone in the arts–writers, musicians, actors, and so on–says it, maybe multiple times. Every day: “One day I’ll quit my day job and do this full-time.” It becomes an ambition, an aspiration, a goal. Perhaps even a sign of success, of having “made it.”

But I want to take a moment to challenge this idea, partly because I think it’s unrealistic. Also, I think it carries with it an underlying negative view of “regular,” non-artistic work. This is not a popular thought, and you may balk at it to begin with, so bear with me.

First, a caveat. If you have a source of income outside of yourself, e.g., a spouse who works, and that income is enough to support your writing career and your household, you don’t need to read any further. Feel free to check out a blog about Madagascan lemurs, or a video on the plot holes in Harry Potter. I’m not speaking to you. You’re good.

For the rest of you, I have a couple of things for you to consider.

1. Making money as a writer is hard

Whether you’re a software developer, a truck driver, or a Starbucks barista for your day job, you are hired to turn up on a regular basis and work. For that work, you receive a paycheck usually every two weeks, or twice a month, or every month. With that regular income, you can budget your expenses and plan your finances.

Imagine if you worked with no guarantee of getting paid. And whether or not you get paid for a piece of work, and how much you get paid, depended on whether or not people liked that piece of work. And if you do get paid, your pay might be twice a year, or maybe annually.

Welcome to the world of the professional writer.

Let’s look briefly at three different writing scenarios and how compensation works for each.

The Novel Writer

You spend years writing a novel, hoping it will be the one to launch your career. You write 80-100,000 words purely for the joy of writing. It’s hard. You write as much as you can while life happens around you. But after many late nights and re-writes and re-re-writes, you finish. Your beta readers offer great suggestions which you incorporate. Finally, it’s ready to query.

You spend the next six months sending out queries, getting rejections, some requests, and many no responses. After a year with no agent interest, you sigh. You shelve the novel, and turn up the heat on the next novel which, of course, you’ve already started.

So far, your writing has earned you a grand total of $0.00.

After a few more years, your next novel is ready. This one gets more traction with agents. Then, finally, an agent offers representation. Hurray! You sign an agency contract, and your new advocate goes to work on submissions. She hard-sells your book to all the editors she thinks might buy it. Woohoo! You get a bite. A publisher takes on your work. You get an advance, too! $20,000. At last, your writing earns money… except…

… the advance pays in three installments. A third now, a third when you submit final edits, and a third on publication day. So you get $6,667 at each installment. Actually… no… because your agent gets a 15% cut of that. So you actually get $5,667. Still, not bad. Except…

… you’re still a year away from publication. So you’re not going to see the rest of your advance for a long time. Even with a bigger advance–say, $100,000–you end up with $28,334 per installment. Again, this isn’t bad, but it’s not a lot to live on if that’s your only income.

NOTE: As Kelly Garrett points out in her comment below, in the U.S. your advance is also subject to any and all applicable Federal, State, and local taxes. The publisher does not deduct taxes.

And then, when your book publishes, that’s all the money you get until or unless your advance pays out. What does that mean? Simply, for every sale of your book, your cut of the profit (i.e., your royalties) go straight to the publisher until you have paid off your advance. Once you’ve paid off your advance, you will start to see royalties. Maybe twice a year. So if this novel is your sole income, you’d better hope it sells really well. The good news is, if the royalties from your book never pay off the advance, you don’t have to return the balance. You keep your advance and the publisher takes a loss.

Hopefully, one day, you will write that breakout, million-selling novel that, along with all of your published works, gives you a steady revenue stream you can live on. While that isn’t unrealistic, for some writers it never happens. Their books sell well enough to keep them writing, but they only ever provide a supplemental income, never a livable salary.

Here’s an excellent reality check from a writer who nearly experienced financial ruin because she didn’t understand how publishing works.

The Short Story Writer

You’ve accumulated some short stories you’ve decided to sell. Diligent online research gives you a list of publications suitable for your genre. You format your stories to fit the submission guidelines of each and then you begin submitting. Since many markets (i.e., publications) don’t like simultaneous submissions, you submit one story to one publication, another story to a different one, and so on, until you get rejections and you can then submit those stories to other markets. Some markets promise a 90 day response. Some of the more popular markets may take 6-8 months to get back to you. If at all.

As you can imagine, this can take a long time.

But at least you get paid for stories that are accepted. Unless you submitted to a fairly new market that is offering you exposure in lieu of payment. For most paying markets, once you sign off on the final edits to your story, they deposit funds into your PayPal or whatever. You may not have to wait months before you see money. But how much money can you expect?

That depends a) on the length of your story, and b) on what the market offers.

Most markets pay by the word, and the standard rate is around $0.06 per word. That’s six cents. So your 1,000 word story pays you $60. Your $2,000 word story, $120. If you manage to get into a popular market, say The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, you might see the rate go up to 10 or more cents per word. But those are highly competitive, and as an unpublished writer your chances of getting into those without other publishing creds are slim. Not impossible, but not the kind of odds you’d count on to make your rent payment.

The message here is this: unless you are already well-established, you cannot rely on short story sales alone to be a full time writer with no other income stream. You would have to sell a lot of stories frequently to make it even remotely worthwhile.

The Freelance Non-Fiction Writer

There are all kinds of freelance gigs available for writers. In his book, WRITING WITHOUT RULES, Jeff Somers talks a bit about freelancing. Jeff knows a lot about the topic since he freelances himself. Though, at the moment, Jeff freelances for some fairly large websites–not the kind of gig you’re likely to get without some good publishing creds under your belt.

One way to approach freelancing is to approach websites whose content reflects your interests, or topics you can comfortably write about, and offer to write for them. Submit some article ideas and outlines. Another is to work with a company, like an agency, who will take you on as a contractor and send you assignments. These assignments will be from clients they work with that you can either accept or reject.

How much you get paid for these will vary depending on your experience. You might get paid a flat amount for the article, or a per-word amount. Again, the standard rate is 6 cents per word, though you might be offered more. Article lengths will vary depending on the site. You could be writing articles anywhere from 500 to 2,000 words. Maybe more. But not long enough to make a substantial amount of money from each piece.

Bear in mind, unless you are being hired on the basis of who you are, you will have to conform to a style guide to make sure your content is consistent with the client’s site. And you will probably be uncredited, especially if you are not writing as a subject expert (as can happen with an agency-type situation).

As with short story writing, you will have to write a lot for this to be a financially-sustainable option. It’s a good gig for some supplemental income, but for most, not a full-time job.

2. Your day job is important

“But writing is my LIFE!” you protest. “I must write or I will be nothing! I will have contributed nothing to society!”

Perhaps that’s an exaggerated response, but I think it’s at the heart of what many writers think when they express the desire to write full-time. Unfortunately, this does a terrible disservice to many meaningful jobs that you could be doing to support your writing career.

In fact, any job can be a meaningful job if you invest it with meaning. Yes, your writing is important, but that day job also enables you to contribute to society. Even if it’s just in your interaction with co-workers, whose lives intersect with yours for those hours in the day.

Also, you can choose your friends but (unless you own the business) you can’t choose your co-workers. At work, you will come across people and opinions you find disagreeable. Unless you’re writing stories with bland Mary-Sue characters who all think and act like you, these people and ideas can help you develop interesting, three-dimensional characters in your stories. Not to mention all those turns of phrase and life situations you hear about at work that can inspire dialog and, perhaps, entire novels.

“I have all these stories to tell,” you might say, “and there are not enough hours in the day to tell them. I need to write full-time.”

You might be surprised how many great books were written around a work schedule. Either during a few hours every night, or in the first few hours of the morning. During lunch breaks. Having a day job forces writers to be creative and disciplined with their time. More than once, I’ve read about writers losing this discipline when they go full-time. Suddenly, with all day to write, they find themselves doing anything but writing!

Sure, you can develop discipline when you go full-time. But it is possible, and potentially just as rewarding, to keep your day job and also sustain a writing career.

That day job also serves another valuable function: stress relief. As long as you have that steady bi-monthly or monthly paycheck coming in, you don’t have to worry about whether your writing will pay the bills. This frees you to write for the love of it without the stress of thinking where the next meal or rent payment is coming from.

3. Think hard before you commodify the thing you love to do

A Twitter friend recently made this comment, and I think there’s a lot of truth to it. Often, when we turn a hobby, or something we love to do, into something we do for money, a part of the joy of it dies. Suddenly we have to think about running a business, revenue streams, and other things that have nothing to do with the main thing. And because that thing is now paying our bills, we are no longer doing it for pleasure. A sense of obligation creeps in which can rob us of that pleasure.

My wife is an excellent cook. She is humble to a fault, but when it comes to her cooking even she has to admit she’s good. Often she has contemplated opening a restaurant. Nothing grand, maybe a kind of tea shop selling baked goodies. One of the reasons she hasn’t pursued that is because she enjoys cooking. And the moment it becomes a business, and it becomes an important part of the family revenue, it’ll no longer be fun.

I’m not saying you should never consider writing full-time. There are good reasons for going full-time as a writer, and valid situations where it makes sense. But I am suggesting that a full-time writing career doesn’t have to be your goal. You can “make it” as a writer and keep a day job, too. That day job is meaningful, and might help inspire your writing. It also pays your bills so you can devote all your most positive affections to your stories.

Not a popular writing tip, I know, but one worth considering.

UPDATE: Here is a 30-min video from Bethany Atazadeh where she gives 12 tips for working at home and writing full time. Bethany is a full-time self-published author, but a lot of what she says here applies to anyone who is thinking of quitting their day job to write. On the topic of this post, watch particularly from around 16 mins in.

BTW, if you’re considering self-publishing, I highly recommend Bethany’s channel. She provides a lot of great advice, and is very honest about both the pros and cons of being your own publisher.