Is writing your hobby or career?

Quitting your job. Writing full time. Turning your writing into a career. 

It's a dream for so many. It's a nightmare for others. 

Turning your writing into a career is a decision that should be carefully considered. Check out my thoughts, and the pros and cons of each, in this video:

Whichever path you choose, you might want more guidance in marketing your novel. For video tutorials and a complete marketing guide, please check out my online course, How to Market Your Novel.

Full Transcript:

I want to talk to you for a moment about the difference between a hobby and a career, and which you should take... which path you should take when looking at your writing journey, because you're going to attack the two options in different manner and make different decisions based on that. So, first of all, let's talk about writing as a hobby. And one of the beautiful things, there are many beautiful things about writing as a hobby. One of the first is the lack of pressure. As a hobby, your books do not have to succeed, you aren't financially dependent on them succeeding in order to pay your utility bill or your rent. So that can really be freeing because it can mean that you write books that you want to write. You can end the books in the manner that you want to end them, and you aren't on a specific, strict publishing schedule.

If it takes a lot longer to write a book and you expect, that's okay. If you turn out a bunch of books quickly, that's okay. You're really writing for yourself and that such a beautiful and wonderful place to be. If you can write as a hobby, embrace that don't, don't be in this giant, you know, mad rush to make writing a career. It is a wonderful thing to have writing as a hobby, and it's one of the few hobbies that actually can earn you money and earn you money very easy manner, as long as you don't have giant expectations on your writing. So when you look at different hobbies... I tried to play tennis failed horribly. Me personally, I like horseback riding; that is a hobby of mine, I will never make any money from horseback riding. Horseback riding will cost me a great deal of money.

Tennis, I will never make any money from tennis. It was a fun way to meet other people and to get in shape, but I was terrible at it; I still am terrible at it. So, those are my hobbies. And when I compare those with writing, writing is so different, writing has very little cost involved in the writing. You know, you should pay for training; you should pay to learn with the production of your book. It's good to invest in your book, but those investment costs compared to any other sport or any other activity are very low and it can be very low. So that's the good thing is there's very few costs involved in writing as a hobby and it can create money, which is great. And most people who write and publish as a hobby, earn enough per month to pay for their car payment or to pay their utility bill or to put aside money to take a vacation every year.

So the fact that you have a hobby that can potentially earn money is amazing. And if you do have a superstar success or book that really blows things out of the water and really creates a large amount of money for you, a big check for you; that's great. I still urge you to still consider that a hobby because too often in this business, someone will have a great success. Their first book will be hugely successful or their fifth or sixth book will be hugely successful, and they quit their job and they switch from a hobby to a career. And those again are two very different things, so I urge you to always take a look at your book at your writing and make sure that the career path or the path that you take, whether hobby or career is the right one for you. That's what a hobby is like.

Now, let's talk about writing as a career. Writing as a career is something I do, so I'm going to give you my opinion on it from my standpoint, and know that from my standpoint, I am very successful. So I am not the norm and exception, and it is all too easy to see the exception and not to necessarily see the normal. So a normal author or someone like me, our books need to be successful. They need to be successful in order for us to pay our bills. What that does is that puts an enormous amount of pressure on your creativeness. So suddenly you're writing a book and it's much easier to second guess every part of that book because you need the book to be successful because it's a product. You need your products to be successful in order for you to have a business.

So your writing, which is this fun and creative and amazing thing, suddenly needs to perform, and so that causes you to put expectations on your writing and it can cause stress and we don't want to bring any unnecessary stress into our life, so that is something to consider. If you're looking at writing as a career, the first thing you need to consider is the stress involved. The second thing to consider is time. So in a normal job, you have a nine to five job or some other jobs you'd go in and you work and you've come home. And you're able to leave that job, and writing isn't exactly like that, and it's not like that because it's such a creative endeavor. So, we can't exactly control when and where we get our impulses and when and where our impulses run away and leave us.

So there are times when you lose that creativity when either you're just not in the mood to write or you're, you know, just creatively in a rut where you don't feel like it. And there are times where we just are stuck and blocked. Writer's block is a term for a reason. It's very common. And that a lot of times our writing passions are diminished, our creativity is diminished and it's just really hard to create a story. And that when writing as a hobby is not a problem, when it's a career, it's a serious problem because suddenly your production has stalled. And a lot of times when your production stalls, your stress level rises and it's even worse; you'd take a normal problem and make it worse, so that is the second thing to consider.

Now, let's talk about some of the pros of writing as a career, because there are a lot of pros. Be your own boss. You don't have a boss, you don't have a workplace. You don't have coworkers to deal with. You know, you are a hundred percent in control of everything. You're in control of your own schedule. If you want to take a week off, take a week off. If you want to take a month off, take a month off, you know, you have a flexible schedule, which is awesome. And another thing is the money can be really great. The money can also be really bad. So, you know, you have an unlimited earning potential, but you also unfortunately have an unlimited non-earning potential also. But some of the pros can come with great income if your books take off and are successful, again, that is not the norm, but it is possible.

Another thing, you know, you can go to signing, you can meet readers, you can interact with readers online. There's a lot of great positive energy in the writing community. You become friends with other authors. You can join that network again. You can do all of that when you write as a hobby also, but as a career, you are engaged in that world full-time. The negatives are, it can suck you into that world full-time, so you really, as a full-time writer, you can manage your schedule carefully because it's very easy to end up spending six, seven hours a day on Facebook and marketing and things like that and not a lot enough time to the actual writing, which is what you need to do to be successful.

And earlier, when I talked about like the great thing, no co-workers, you can work in your pajamas from home. It can also be a lonely activity. A lot of people really miss getting up and leaving the house every day. That's not me. I love being in my pajamas and sleeping till 10 if I was up late writing or getting up early and knocking out my writings and then having the rest of the day to do something else. We travel a lot, so it's nice because I can work from wherever I'm at, so those are really positives for me. And my personal life, our world is fairly chaotic. We move around a lot. We do a lot. We're very active family. So my job is great because I can get up and go with all of that. But it also means sometimes it's hard for me to be like, Hey, I need time to write. I'm going to go in my office. You're not going to see me for two hours; that needs to be how it needs to be. So you have to be very strict to family and yourself to keep a schedule.

So that's another thing, we talked about the stress and needing your books to succeed; the publishing world is very finicky. Readers are very finicky, environments, economies change., and so there are times where bad boy romance are really hot and you're writing an awesome bad boy romance, and by the time your backward romance releases, bad boy romances are no longer the trend and people are now buying scifi with dragons. You know, so it's an unpredictable market. So that can be very scary for someone who's writing full-time, who's writing as a career because you have no idea if your next book is going to be a huge monster success or if it's going to flopped. So that can also... and you never know, some of my best books didn't sell nearly as well as some other books, which I would not have thought were my best books, which were huge bestsellers.

So that unpredictability can be really stressful on your income. But what I always suggest if someone is going into writing as a career, and if you aren't great keep your expenses, your personal expenses, very low at whatever level they were, you know, or half that is when you have a salary job. And if you can keep your expenses really low, that will keep the expectation and the need off of your books. So again, if you're dating novel just becomes a blockbuster hit and you get a check for $50,000 in the mail from your January income, do not expect that to continue. Keep living as if you were making $28,000 a year, keep your expenses and your, you know, expectations at $28,000 a year. And then, if your next book is also hugely successful, awesome, but if your next book isn't, it's okay, you are okay.

And I don't suggest that anyone rushes into writing as a career, as a full-time job. Give yourself time, give yourself 10 or 11 or 12 books, enjoy writing as a hobby. But if it is time to make that leap, you'll know it, you'll feel confident, and again, as long as your expenses are low and you're not putting a great deal of stress on yourself and your writing, it could be a great career. So those are the two sides of the coin, writing as a hobby and writing as a career. I hope this video was helpful. If you have any questions, please feel free to shout them out. I'd love to chat with you about it.

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