Westend61/Getty
It's all about timing.
- At the end of 2019, Wendy Fox left her six-figure job in senior leadership at a tech company.
- She decided to take the plunge to become a full-time freelancer and author, having already published three books while she held a day job.
- To make it work, she timed the choice carefully and met with a financial planner to see what her needs would be.
- She treats her writing like a startup, currently seeing herself as well-positioned but bootstrapped - and she's realistic about what she needs to make it work.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
I always wanted to be a writer, but, for much of my working life, I didn't want to try and make a living as a writer. Even a decade and a half ago, when I was finishing graduate school - I have a Master of Fine Arts in writing - earning money in the writing life was bleak. These days, most freelancers can only expect to earn about $10,000 to $20,000 a year. One 2018 survey of 1,300 freelance writers found that almost 60% of them made less than $20,000 in gross revenue.
Book publishing is not necessarily more lucrative. The average advance for an author is somewhere in the $15,000 range for a fiction book, and more like $20,000 for a nonfiction book.
Even if you're a fast writer and crank out a book every two years, that still means every advance has to be amortized over at least 24 months. You don't see another dime until the advance is "earned out" - an advance is a loan against your royalties, and you earn it back about a buck a book at a time. In my final months of grad school I was not planning my move to New York City; I was teaching myself to touch-type, relatively sure I would end up at an office job.
Courtesy of Wendy Fox
Wendy Fox and her most recent book.
I did land a teaching gig just out of school, but I didn't see a way forward in higher education without a doctoral degree (more debt) and a book (I hadn't written one yet). After almost two years, I found a tech company who was willing to take a chance on me. Over the next decade and a half, I climbed the corporate ladder to an SVP of marketing position.
Yet, despite being very aware of what I was getting into, near the end of 2019 I left a six-figure, senior leadership role at a growing tech company to take the plunge as a freelancer and author.
While I'm at the beginning of this journey, here's how I planned for it and what I've learned so far.