You Don't Have to Earn Six Figures (or Write Full Time) To Be a Real Author

Why does nobody talk about the beauty -- and the dignified ubiquity -- of the part-time side hustle?

If you’ve been thinking that my “Artisan Author” thing is a stance against AI rather than a paradigm flip appropriate to a lot of underserved authors, I offer you this AI image of a unicorn with creepy human hands, sort of like how Clifford the Big Red Dog had human teeth. As if THAT wasn’t creepy.

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book The Artisan Author.

---

Here’s a paradigm-changer that nobody ever talks about: You don’t need to make a full-time living at writing to be fulfilled and happy.

I literally never see this. Oh, a someone here and there will bring up the idea of authors earning side-hustle income, but nobody gets on big stages, creates courses, or writes books about how to make a few hundred or a few thousand dollars a month. Nope — if you’re new to this and didn’t know better, you’d think from all the information out there that it’s six figures or nothing.

It’s not, though. In fact, I’ll even go out on a limb and say that there are more “side hustle” authors out there than there are prospective full-timers. The reason we only hear about the latter is because:

1. Full-timers are the only ones who run YouTube channels and speak at conferences,

2. The kinds of authors shooting for full-time incomes and beyond are the loudest, whereas part-timers are quiet and don’t make waves, and

3. You can’t make as much money selling how-to to part-time authors. I mean, what if you could have the profits of a course called MAKE SIXTEEN BAZILLION DOLLARS WITH NO EFFORT AS AN AUTHOR or one called How to Sell Five Hundred Books Per Year? Which of those titles sounds more lucrative for the teacher?

And yet, even though I pulled that number out of the air just now, selling five hundred books a year actually sounds pretty compelling for a lot of authors. Or a thousand. Or maybe just enough royalties to offset their car payment. Not everyone wants to nuke the world with their authorial success. Plenty just want to get their words on a page, then get people outside of their immediate friends and family interested in reading it.

As an Artisan Author, I hereby give you permission to aim for a side hustle or part-time income — or, hell, no income at all and only creative satisfaction — if it suits you.

Maybe you don’t want to devote eight hours a day to learning all the ins and outs of cutting-edge bookselling. Maybe you don’t want to write ten books a year … or five books a year … or even two books a year. Maybe this is a hobby for you. Maybe it’s a bit more. But the way most author instruction acts like anything short of full-time is pointless, or the people interested in it don’t matter?

Well, frankly that’s bullshit.

The beauty of the side hustle

The idea of side-hustle author income (whether it’s your end goal or just a stepping stone on the way to full time) fits neatly into the notion of 1000 True Fans. It’s not always easy to “scale down” the usual things authors say are necessary from full- to part-time, but 1000 True Fans scales easily.

Haven’t gotten your 1000 True Fans yet or don’t need that many? No problem. How about you shoot for 500 True Fans instead, and earn a half-time income?

Or what if you aim for 100 True Fans — enough for about $800-1000 a month?

Hell … what if the first milestone you celebrate is the easy-to-hit number of ten True Fans? Remember, True Fans are your most reliable income, but you’ll get a halo of less-then-True-Fan readers as a side-effect. Maybe ten True Fans are only worth about $1000 a year, but in gathering them you’ll earn at least another $1000. That’s $2k, or about $170 a month. Nobody’s ever going to get onstage and brag about their $170 months … but don’t we all know someone who’d be thrilled to earn that much so they can have a nice dinner out every so often?

I think approaching writing as a lucrative hobby or a side hustle is a perfectly valid way to be an author, and one that gets zero air time. If you see authors on YouTube talking about numbers that “small,” they’re usually documenting their journey as they try to increase that number. Smaller numbers are never considered worthwhile in their own right, and yet I know that many, many authors don’t care about making it big.

And to be clear, it’s not that they’re failing in their attempts to go full time. It’s that they honestly have no desire to do so.

Not every writer’s goals are the same, even though self-publishing is taught as if they are.

Writing full-time sounds glorious to many people (myself included), but not to others. We keep forgetting that, but it’s true.

Writing is hard emotional work. Even as an Artisan Author, it’s true that all other things being equal, you’ll earn more money if you have more books. And yet, many authors only want to write so much. Producing multiple books per year sounds daunting to them, as does the prospect of exposing themselves that completely to reviews and criticism.

My wife, for instance (were she authorially inclined) would never want to go full time. Writing is an inherently unstable and scary business even with True Fans. Many authors only want to dip their toes to limit their risk and fear … and yet nobody talks about them.

Well, I’m talking about them. If you’re in this with more modest aspirations than our industry normally trumpets, I hereby see and salute you.

More authors than not aren’t full time, and instead work a primary job. What’s more, plenty of those authors never plan (or want) to leave that primary job to do nothing but write. Maybe you’re one of them. If you are, I’m sorry that nobody pays any attention to you while they’re waving the seven-figure dream.

If you’re an author who doesn’t aspire to full-time — or if you know any of those authors — then you’re very much in the right place. Try to play the Kindle Unlimited game as a side-hustle author and your book will vanish without a trace, paying pennies within a month or two if it even still pays at all. But as an Artisan Author, you can build Fan equity and make your own fate. It won’t be easy … but at least with an Artisan approach, you can earn some True Fans. At least with an Artisan approach, your book still stands a chance.

One size doesn’t fit all, folks, even though that’s what most online author education implies.

Maybe it’s time we get our heads out of our collective butts and acknowledge it for once.

---

If you want to learn how authors of all types can succeed (by their own definition of “success”) as Artisan Authors, check out my forthcoming book The Artisan Author here. But you should know that in the actual book the above was excerpted from, the next section is called “A Compass, Not a Map,” which is all about how there’s no formula for anyone. I mean … don’t start thinking I’ve got a blueprint for success after I JUST SAID that one-size-fits-all thinking in author education is bullshit. I don’t have a blueprint. There is no blueprint. No type of authoring is easy, and you should run screaming from anyone who claims it is. Or, put another way: If you’ve been looking for Easy Buttons, please knock it the fuck off. I don’t have one, my new book doesn’t have one, and neither does anyone or anything else. If you don’t want to explore and take a few risks, you should really choose a different profession.