Should You Quit Your Day Job?

I regularly have writers tell me they’re about to quit their day job.

Have they built up their customer base to a point they can do that, or for fiction writers can they guarantee they’ll be contracted or sell enough books to cover the equivalent of their day job?

In every case so far, the answer has been no. My question then, is why would you quit your day job, especially in this economic atmosphere when you have no guarantee of getting another job should things turn bad?

Unfortunately, many writers see glamour when they think about writing for a living.  Let me assure you, the writing life is not glamorous.

It’s a lot of hard work and persistence.  It’s meeting deadlines, it’s having to be creative when you feel far from creative, and it’s wading through crap that you have to fix for a client.

I was forced to give up my day job about eight years ago.  It was due to a chronic medical condition that meant I could never go back to an outside job and keep well, or even keep alive. (And that’s not an exaggeration.)

It took a very long time to secure regular writing work, and it paid so little that it was simply pocket money.  Over the years I’ve built up a good paying writing business, but it took a very long time to do.

The reality is that you can’t walk out of a paying day job and expect the assignments to come flooding into your inbox.  It doesn’t happen that way.

The reality is you need to build up relationships before you’ll have regular clients, and you need to have contracts before your book is published. 

It’s unfortunate, but none of these things happen at the click of your fingers.

Just like it took years for you to learn to write well, it can also take years before your writing business pays enough that you can quit the guaranteed income of a day job.

***This article was inspired by a blog post written by Bob Mayer. You can read it here:

http://www.genreality.net/writers-dont-quit-your-day-job