: Re: Is there enough money in writing for me to quit my dead end job? I am currently working full time hours in a dead end job, I began writing a novel with a friend about five months ago now.

@Megan928

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You've gotten plenty of negative answers here, which, I am sad to say, are accurate. The unfortunate truth is that writing is a horribly unrewarding profession. The fact of the matter is that, no matter how you slice it, most writers do not make enough money to support themselves from their writing.

And when I say most writers, I mean literally ALMOST ALL WRITERS do not make enough money from writing to make what you might call an honest living. You look at all the published books and think, wait a minute, that can't be true, but when you look at the numbers, it still works out that way. In the first place, all of those published books represent a small percentage of everything that is written, and then you have to remember that for each of those books, the writer is likely a person who might be lucky to have published a few books, making a few thousand dollars from each one, and is that a living when spread over any number of years? No.

Let me give you one concrete example. I was married to a woman who was a very successful professional writer. She did nothing but write full-time. In sixteen years, she published almost thirty books. She even sold one of her books to Disney and it was made into a Disney television movie. Her career was far more successful than the average writer. And even in her very best year, she didn't even earn thirty thousand dollars. Her average income was about fifteen thousand dollars a year. Could you live on that? She couldn't. Who could? And let me reiterate. She did far, far better than the average writer. And the only reason she was able to do what she did as a writer was that she had someone else to support her so she didn't have to work at another job.

So there you have it. You can't expect success as a writer. Even some of the most famous writers the world has ever known never in their entire lives were able to quit their day jobs. So write for the joy of it, but don't expect to make a living at it, and if you do get lucky and make it big as a writer, then we will all take off our hats to you.

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