John Soares, author of Writing College Textbook Supplements
Yes, you can make good money in this field. However, it takes time to reach the point where you command high levels of pay and get offered projects on a steady basis. Therefore, you must look at writing textbook supplements as a way to augment your current income, not replace it. This is especially the case if you work in only one academic discipline. If you work in more than one, you of course have more opportunities to get projects.
Many of you only want to write textbook supplements in order to add to your existing income. However, if you do want to earn your living doing this, be sure you are getting more than enough work to pay the bills. You must have three or more months of savings as a cushion for potential gaps in the publishing cycle when there is little or no work available, and six months’ savings is optimal.
You also should have three or more clients giving you fairly steady work. And you should always be contacting more editors at different companies and within the companies you already work for so you can line up more projects.
I left college teaching in 1994 after writing supplements part-time for two years. At the time I had some royalty income from two hiking books and was also writing some freelance outdoors articles for newspapers and magazines. Even so, I had some occasional lean times over the next three or four years.
It wasn’t until I branched out into different disciplines — history, geography, and earth sciences — that my career really took off in the late 1990s. This allowed me to work for several editors; usually when things were slow in one discipline they would pick up in another.
What are your thoughts on when to transition to full-time writing? Have you done it? Are you thinking about it? What are the pros and cons?
(John Soares is the author of Writing College Textbook Supplements: The Definitive Guide to Winning High-Paying Assignments in the College Textbook Publishing Market. You can download the Detailed Table of Contents and first two chapters for free.)
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