Happy Tax Day! How is everyone doing with that? Without really intending to fit with the theme, my topic today has to do with financial matters, an issue that makes tax day especially interesting — being self employed.
One of the most sobering moments in the business came for me in December 2005. My first book had been out a month, it landed at something like 127 on the USA Today bestseller list, it was doing really well and everyone was really happy. Then both my editor and agent said, in the same week, “Don’t quit your day job.” But when? I wanted to beg. When can I quit my day job? When! I’d only ever wanted to be a writer. I’d been working “day jobs” — book store clerk and manager, administrative assistant, temp — since I graduated from college. I wanted to be able to pay my bills with writing. I didn’t want to believe the people who said that wasn’t possible.
Well, I quit my last temp gig in April 2007, exactly two years ago. (I quit my regular job in April 2006, not because I felt like I was able to quit but because the job had become untenable. I temped for the next year, because I couldn’t bring myself to look for a “real” job when my dream of writing full time was so close.) One of the things that pushed me around the corner was getting my first royalty check for the first two books.
One of the pieces of advice I’d picked up, something that’s true in any self-employment endeavor from writing to art to consulting, is you quit your day job when it starts to negatively impact the progress of your self-employed job. i.e. Your time would better spent and would earn you more money at your self-employed job than it would at the day job. In April 2007, I was staring down a couple of deadlines, a copy-edited manuscript, and my third book had just come out. Then I got that check. And I thought, Why am I wasting time at an $11 an hour temp job when I could stay home and do REAL work?
Sometimes, you just know.
“Don’t quit your day job” is one of the biggest pieces of writing advice you’ll hear. If you have a good day job with benefits, that’s probably true. If you enjoy your non-writing career, that’s definitely true. But if you have a sucky job with no benefits to begin with? Quitting to write full time was a step up for me.
Another thing that made the decision easier: I didn’t have a family to support. It was my dog and me, and a fairly low cost of living. When you have a family, the decision to write full time isn’t just about you.
But if there’s one thing the current economic implosion has shown me, it’s that writing isn’t any more or less reliable than any other job or career out there. I have friends who thought they would never get laid off getting laid off. Suddenly, I have the most stable, reliable job of anyone I know. Who’d have thunk?
