Professional Author as a Hobby or Career

Video Transcript

"REBECCA SATO: Hi. I'm Rebecca with ExpertVillage.com. And we're going to talk about writing to pay the bills versus writing as a hobby and the kind of things that you should know and be aware of. First of all, this is kind of a personal topic but it's something that writers all think about at some point, or I should say, most writers. Because very few people from the day they become aware, self-aware, at whatever age that may be, is thinking I'm going to be a writer when I grow up. So there is a point in everybody's life where they start to think and that was the case with J.K. Rowling's. In her biography, she mentions that she had had an interest and had thought about it but it just--and she had tried but hadn't had much success really until her popular series--her popular Harry Potter series. So there is a point where if you haven't reached it yet or if you're there right now or if there's something you've already passed but it's just something that always relates to a writer. Because there will be times where you'll be a professional writer and you're making money and then there might be months where you don't know how to pay the bills where you don't have work. And there are ways to fill in those gaps by doing other types of writing that I talked about earlier in another video series about freelancing that there's a lot of different types of writing. If you need to pay the bills and you know you're a good writer but you haven't had any luck publishing anything recently, you can always do ghostwriting. For someone who's published that's not as fine because you might write an awesome novel and the majority of the credit and the profit goes to someone else. But the nice thing is you do get the stability because you get the money a lot of times upfront or at least in increments that you could pay the bills, so that's nice. Those are the kind of things to be aware of. Whether, at some point, everybody does decide to make the switch from--if they want to be a full-time writer, they usually do have a transitional period where it's kind of a hobby. And that's not a bad idea because if you do it as a hobby, keep your day job and write in your spare time, then it kinda allows you to develop your skills and your talents and build up a resume and a portfolio before you make that jump to full time. And you'll know when the time is right to make that jump because, financially, you'll be able to."