Has anyone successfully retired early to write?

Circumstances: middle class, employed, want to give up job, have some property I could sell, am willing to be poor but not totally destabilized. Has anyone managed this by selling property/buying annuity, moving to less-expensive foreign nation, or other tactic?

Public Comments

1. No, but that's my dream!
2. No, but you better get published before you run out of cash and have to rejon the world! Hemingway was established. When he ran out of drinking money he sat down and wrote something. Anything. Sometimes he addmitted it was meaningless trash (To Have and HAve Not, for example), but he knew who would buy and and how much money it would make him. Then he'd drink some more until the cash ran out and then he wrote again. It's done in Show Biz too! Everyone someone from the past does a World Tour, you can be sure they have started liquidating their principle bacause the royalties and interest aren't enough to keep them going. So it's time to do a tour, make half a million and get some album sales going! Half a million makes dandy interest, record sales make royalties. When the actor gets told they are no longer eligble for the SAG retirment or Health plan, they take a part in a movie, even a horrible movie. Or worse, they do TV. Just to get their points up so they can get health benefits, retirement money and a burial. Stephen King worked in a warehouse. He wrote six books, had an agent and his agent liked and placed Carrie. King did a world book tour, then came home and went back to work at the warehouse, because the royalty checks either never came or were so small they wouldn't pay for much! One famous best selling writer told the story of his first BIG sale. IT was a novella to a company that pulbished two each month. Pulp novellas. They told him HIS was smaller than the other guys, so they had to pay the other guy more. So he took $1,000 instead of $1,200. He later MET the OTHER GUY and the OTHER GUY told him the same story. His piece was smaller, so he too only got $1,000! I have a friend with so many technical books in print he doesn't even use his real name anymore! He's working with me on helping get my first work presented right. It will be 1 to 1 1/2 years of work. And IF I place it, my payment will proably be two or three dozen copies of the book for free. After that, royalties, but it's a technical book, it's doubtful if it will sell more than 10,000 copies to libraries, a few book stores. Royalties are like 15% of the cover price. On a $25 book that's $3.75? My advance is worth $750, which they deduct. That's about $35,000 paid over the life of the book IF it sells 10,000 copies! it could take 2 - 3 years for that to happen, so it's $4,000 the first year, $16,000 the second year, $10,000 the third year, $3,000 the fourth year. That's if your lucky! A technical book will sell! At least 50% of the libraries will buy a copy, so taht 3,500 sales. It has mass market appeal so maybe Amazon might sell 5,000+ copies. Writing is one of the lowest paid professions! My first sale was $35. I write an article on something I get $500 - $750 for 4,000 words. Gore Vidal writes the exact same thing, he gets $25,000 from Playboy or Vanity Fair or Esquire. I can't even get a long form rejection slip from them, just a pre-printed Post-it attached to my first page! His name, of course, on the cover sells 5,000 to 50,000 more magazines. Now in writing books I'm back to square one. It doesn't matter I get 25 cents a word, I write a 100,000 word book I get the same $500 advance they give every first time author, usually in free copies, not cash! They could be nasty and give it to you in cash and two free copies, then sell you all the copies you need to hand out to those who helped you at wholsale! And they still want to know what YOU are going to do the market the book. Will I write an article for a technical magazine so it will list my book on the last line, thus generate some interest from a few hundred people. Getting into the REAL mass market is Wal MArt, Target, Best Buy and you have to be on the top 50 NY Times Best Sellers to get taht, or yo have to write a diet book, bible, book on Britney Spears with pictures or a sex book. These markets won't take anything else! Wal Mart Sold HARRY POTTER by the PALLET. They must have put 1,000 books in each store. The sold that pallet out in a week. Most mom and pop stores sell 3 copies a week. Barns and Nobel probably sells 50 or 100 copies. A Wal Mart can sell 1,000 copies in a week of the right book. IT is said Jean Auel is still stuck under her original contract for the Earth's Children's series. Now, there's this guy Howard Stern intereviewed who was once a computer programmer making like $50K+ a year. He wrote a book on where all the naked scenes are in movies. You know like in hours minutes and seconds. For movies like BASIC INSTINCT. All the Sharon Stone skin scenes. His book outsells Leonard Maltin! He updates it each year. He is no longer programming computers for a living. That one book title did him sweet! That's rare. So, remember the FAMOUS words of David Crosy from Crosy, STills and Nash: Don't quit your day job!