SHOULD I GIVE UP MY DAY JOB?

No. That is my final answer, but it’s not just about the money.

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I’m a lawyer. It’s how I’ve regarded myself for thirty years. Even at the height of my writing career, if we’d met at a dinner party and you asked me what I did, I’d say I was a solicitor. I wouldn’t say writer. Perhaps it’s imposter syndrome, or perhaps it’s just that being a solicitor has always been my main job (or maybe it avoids the “never heard of you” moment).

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That isn’t to say that writing wasn’t time consuming, to the extent that it felt like I had two full-time jobs at times, but I didn’t embark on a writing career in the same way that I set out on a legal career, which is something I did straight from university, the logical next step from doing a law degree. Writing was something I did alongside my main job, just hoping to be good enough to see one book on one shelf, to prove I was good enough.

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The thing with being a solicitor, however, is that it is well paid and relatively secure, so I’d have been a fool to give up a job I enjoyed, just in the vain hope that my secondary career would take off. I had a young family, and just like everyone else, I had bills to pay. And the same would apply if I had a different job, like a minimum wage job, because I’d need that payday every month.

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Writing income is hard to gauge. I’ll tell you how it works.

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You’ll sign an advance, which is just an advance on your royalties, like asking your employer for your wages early. The advance will normally be split into different stages. I’ll give an example.

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Let’s say you get a two-book deal, and your advance is £10,000 a book. In the UK, the average advance for a first-time author is between £1,000 and £10,000, but let’s assume you get lucky and get the £10,000 per book advance. You don’t get £20,000 in your bank.

In fact, the payments will be structured, so that you might get, for example:

• £4,000 for signing the contract

• £4,000 when each manuscript is accepted

• £4,000 when each book is published

Now, this is where it gets tricky, because publishers tend to decide that “accepting” your manuscript is after all the editing has been done, which really is just a way of kicking their negative cashflow into the long grass. And the publication date can alter on a whim, depending on whether there is another author they prefer. Don’t worry, they’ll tell you, the delay is a good thing, but any delay means a delay in getting paid.

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Let’s apply this to a two-book deal.

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1st January, you sign the deal. The editing process will take maybe six months, but then they need to plan the release date, so don’t expect a publication date before 1st November. Well done, in your first year, you’ve pocketed £12,000, with the signature advance, the acceptance advance, and the publication advance.

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The second year is a bit leaner though, because you’ll have spent all year one writing the second book, which you rush in by December 31st at the end of year one. But the editing will take six months again, maybe longer, so you don’t get your acceptance advance of £4,000 until maybe June.

If the publication date is the same annual pattern, it’s coming out in November, but what if all the publication slots are full, and they can’t pencil you in until March? That means that in the second year, you’ve earned £4,000, and that’s all you’ll earn in the third year, following the March publication, if they don’t give you another contract.

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You might get royalties further down the line, but not until you’ve earned the notional £20,000.

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If you’re prepared to go all in and give it a whirl, go for it, but there’s a reason why so many successful writers are posh: it’s because they didn’t need the money, so could afford to take the gamble.

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But it’s not just about the money.

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I was talking to a writer once who was also a lawyer, who I knew through a mutual lawyer-friend, just after I’d signed my first deal, and I asked him whether he’d thought about giving up his job and doing it full-time. His answer was no, but it wasn’t anything to do with the money. He said that the full-time writers he knew were miserable, because once they relied on writing to pay the bills, they would get worked up about things like placement in shops and sales and publisher-inertia. In contrast, he could write because he enjoyed writing, and anything else was a nice bonus.

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He was right. When I met other writers who did it as their main job, they were always dissatisfied with their lot, even though they’d achieved their dream. I was lucky enough to be different, because writing was never my everything, so I could enjoy doing it. Never forget that the fun is why you do it. If it becomes your financial reliance, you’ll stop enjoying it.

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And this brings me neatly on to other writers.

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