On (not) quitting the day job

On the 1st of January of this year, I went part-time at my day job.

That means today, 1st of April, it's been three calendar months since I switched to a four-day working week and started spending my Fridays doing writing and writing-adjacent things. It's been... well, everything I could have hoped for and more, quite frankly.

The people you meet

When I found out I was going to be published, the idea of going part-time was a 'maybe in 3-4 years, perhaps, if the stars align'. And one of the very first things everyone says to you when you enter the traditional publishing pipeline (agent, editor, other writers) is 'hey, please don't get a rush of blood to the head and quit your day job'.

And they're right! If you don't have a bunch of savings, family money or a well-off spouse (or all three, ideally), quitting your day job is an enormous risk. So, for me, in early 2025, becoming a full-time writer was pipe dream territory; the kind of thing that might happen if there was some wild confluence of luck and timing and my creative output that I could neither predict nor plan for.

Going part-time felt more achievable, but it certainly didn't feel imminent.

Then, several things happened over the course of a few months. Firstly my debut novel got optioned for television. Then it won an award. Then another award. Somewhere in there, it also earned out, which means I started earning royalties over and above my initial advance. It started to look like my first book might become the publishing midlist holy grail - a steady earner.

In July of last year, I also met the author and historian Iain MacGregor, when I chaired one of his book tour events here in East Lothian. It was a brilliant evening and Iain and I had a good chat beforehand, during which I asked him how many events he was planning. I'd expected him to say 'three or four', but he shocked me slightly when he said something like 'thirty two before Christmas'. The reason it surprised me is that, alongside writing history books, Iain is also Head of Non-Fiction for Head Of Zeus, a major imprint that's now part of Bloomsbury.

So I asked him how on earth he was managing that many events, and he told me he'd gone down to four days a week a couple of years previously, and that it had been 'a game changer' for his writing career. I must have had a thoughtful look on my face, because he encouraged me to look into it and told me it would possibly cost me less than I thought and provide me with more benefits than I assumed.

Making a plan

The first thing I did was to run through the economics of making a similar change. I'd be accepting a definite downside (a 20% reduction in day job pay) for a range of possible upsides. For me, it wasn't purely about time-in-chair putting fingers to keyboard, and this was part of the flexibility that Iain and I talked about. A lot of writing events are on Thursday nights and Fridays in the UK, so I'd be able to do proportionally more events while using proportionally less paid holiday from work to do them. It would also (and this is a big one for me), be able to compartmentalise my work far more effectively.

I've been a published author for a little over 18 months, but in the publishing ecosystem for nearly three years at this point (in terms of working with an editor, doing marketing work, going to events etc). And while I was making it work with a full time job, it was pretty tough. I was doing a lot of things at weekends and in the evenings and the demands were going up while the time available to deal with them remained fixed. If I could dedicate, say, a half-day per week to doing all the stuff that was being done in the evenings and at weekends, maybe I would reduce my likelihood of burnout and be able to turn things around more reliably.

So, I made myself a spreadsheet, calculated what I'd be giving up and thought long and hard about whether I was going to make this jump. What my spreadsheet showed me is that the impact on our finances wouldn't be as bad as I'd feared and the opportunities it would give me would be considerable. I then broached the topic with my manager and was relieved and delighted when they were incredibly supportive of the idea.

I'd calculated some back of the envelope maths that would make it a tight-but-probably-worthwhile risk if only writing money I knew for sure came in. But right at the end of last year I found out that there was more than I'd hoped for coming, which moved the economics of it all from the 'ouch, but maybe?' bucket into the 'this feels like a pretty good bet' bucket. So I put in a formal application to change my hours in December and it all got signed off just before Christmas.

In practice

Of course, my Fridays now look like the above - endless cups of tea on a sun-dappled terrace with the whole day stretching out ahead of me.

Well, not quite. I'm still working in the same home office where I do 95% of my work (day job and writing work). But I do have one full working day a week that is entirely for writing and writing-adjacent activities.

For the first couple of months of the year, I didn't really settle into a routine - I had a number of events, family things and appointments in January and February that meant I didn't get a full working day at home until the last Friday in February. So it's really only been a month since I got into the actual routine.

I won't go into tonnes of detail as I'm brewing a blog post about my overall writing routine, including days when I'm doing the day job, but I will say that Fridays that I have to focus on writing are broadly split into thirds now:

• The first third of the day is spent drafting - I work on one, sometimes two projects and aim to get a word count of about double what I would on a normal workday. That takes anywhere from 2 to 4 hours.
• The middle third of the day is spent prepping - this is a mixture of editing previous output so it's ready for my critique group and doing outlining, research or preparatory work for next week's drafting work.
• The last third of the day is spent doing admin - this is my catch-all term for all the stuff that comes into my life as a published author. One week I might be responding to an email interview request with my answers, the next I might be recording a podcast or reconciling receipts in Quickbooks or writing up beta read notes for a friend. On quieter weeks I sometimes use a bit of this time for reading proof copies of books I've been sent.

Some weeks I only get the first one done, then I need to head into Edinburgh for an event or for something like the photoshoot I did last week. But the main thing is all of the above aside from the drafting used to be squished into lunchbreaks, evenings and weekends. And now it's not (as much).

Productivity versus sustainability

What I could have done with this time is just absolutely MAXED out my production of new words. I have written as much as 7,000 words in a day, in the past. But that doesn't mean it's advisable, regularly repeatable or a good use of the time I have available to me. Raw word count is just one factor in a writing career, after all.

Instead, I've been very focused on using this new time to give myself a sustainable, repeatable and happily productive balance in my life, as well as enabling the events, travel and profile-raising activities that will help me find new readers. I think that is going to be a constant recalibration to deal with spikes and lulls in workload, career and external requests, but knowing I have at least one day a week to handle things makes an incredible difference to my state of mind. Over the past two years, as the workload mounted, I was finding it increasingly difficult to balance everything, but I feel more equipped to handle it now.

The other thing I'm hoping this day-per-week will provide me is the opportunity for experimentation. I can try out different formats and projects on Fridays, brainstorm new ideas and escape from endlessly grinding forward on a single novel-length project. It seems pretty clear to me that the three components of a successful, long-term writing career are sustainability, variety and consistency. My hope is that this part-time working will let me improve all three - I'll be able to produce more work, of more types, but without (hopefully) burning out in the process.

Making the money work

Early on in a writing career, making money of any kind seems extremely difficult. And when a little bit of money does start to come in, you tend to feel a bit like the famous Wallace & Gromit scene where Gromit is frantically laying the tracks in front of the runaway model train.

If you're relying solely on writing income, this dance becomes even more frantic. I've been lucky enough to be able to hold down an excellent and supportive day job, so the track I need to lay in front of my personal writing career can be placed in a slightly more relaxed way, but going part-time has unavoidably tightened the margins of the money coming into our household. It's on me to make the most of the time I'm buying with the money I'm not earning, so it can be quite difficult to escape the temptation to just write as much as possible. But this day-a-week of writing can be used better, I think, than just purely focusing on word count.

My hope is that, in aggregate, over time, the opportunities that Writing Fridays will afford me and the productivity they will enable will result in more money coming in than I'm losing by reducing my salary. But it's very important, I think, not to do the sums too closely and end up thinking 'was today worth the day's salary I could have earned?' each week. I think that would result in a lot of unnecessary angst and would hamper, not augment, my ability to actually do the work.

I'm hugely risk-averse, generally. But the times I have taken risks (persuading my company to let me work from Scotland in 2010, leaving agency work in 2017, becoming a contractor in 2019, looking for a new, remote-first job in 2022) have paid off each time. I'm hoping that will be the case with this change too. When you're operating without a huge amount of savings, or family money, or multiple incomes in your household, you have to choose when to make a leap of faith pretty carefully. I think I've chosen right, this time. But time will tell.

What's next

Since going part-time, there's not a day goes by that someone doesn't ask me when I'm going to quit and write full-time. To everyone around me, from colleagues to friends, family, readers and even people in signing queues, it seems a) the next logical step and b) inevitable.

Is it still the long-term goal? Yes. Of course.

But, I don't believe that you have to be a full time writer for it to 'count'. The idea that only things you can make a full-time living at are worth your time is, I think, quite a poisonous aspect of our culture. In practical terms, I don't really want to be a full time writer so I can say I've somehow won the game. I want to be a full time writer because having full control of my time and doing the thing that I feel like I was put here to do seems like the best way I could live my life.

I'm very, very lucky in that I love not only the writing part but also the publishing part too - I love the festivals and panels and writing blog posts and talking to people on podcasts. Not as much as the writing itself, but this is not stuff I'm gritting my teeth to get through because my publicist has asked me to.

Apart from short-form video. I can't stand doing that.

So for me, being a full-time author would let me do loads more of lots of different things that I really enjoy. I can't honestly think of anything better.

The point is, I think this new part-time split of writing and day job makes my current status quo manageable for the (very) long term, which is good because I was flirting with burnout until recently. But it may also increase the 'shots on goal' that I can make as a writer. And more shots means more chances. And more chances, hopefully, means an increasing likelihood that, one day, I'll be able to hang up my corporate lanyard for a final time, and the only lanyards I'll be wearing from then on are the ones you get at book festivals.

If something incredibly exciting drops out of a clear blue sky, that might happen a year from now (I'd probably wait at least six months or a year past the point when it seemed possible to actually make the jump - see above about risk aversion). Or it might be five years, or a decade, or never.

Equally, I may also be able to further adjust the balance of day job, writing work and personal life, if finances allow or opportunities arise. My main goal right now is to give myself the breathing room, creatively and financially, to make the most of those chances and hopefully make clear-eyed decisions when the time comes.

Three months in I'm pretty sure going part-time is the best possible thing I could have done for my writing career at this stage, with the risks, knowledge, skills and opportunities I have right now. It's been made a lot easier by having supportive colleagues and management at my day job, that's for sure. I'm determined to make the most of it, while keeping an eye on my long term goals.

But for the moment, I'm still enjoying the (incredible) feeling of waking up on Fridays (a little later than the rest of the week, thank goodness), going for a walk, brewing that first cup of tea and sitting down with the current project. It feels amazing.

Phew - that was a long post. But I wanted to pull back the curtain a bit on my decision-making process, because I think many writers feel like being a full-time writer is an all-or-nothing proposition. And I wanted to show that there can be lots of different paths to that goal, including starting with a day a week.

I'll report back in a few months about how I'm settling into things, as well as doing a roundup in early 2027, when I may be able to answer the question of whether it's been worth it financially. But for me it's inherently worth it, independent of the monetary outcomes, because it lets me do more of what I deeply love to do - write.