18: The pros and cons of becoming a full-time writer

How many of us have dreamed of ditching our 9 to 5 job to become a full-time writer? In 2020, Jody Leber-Pay quit her job in financial services to write books. Under the pen name, Bradley Pay, Jody has written two novels so far in The Spectrum Series with her co-author Robin Bradley. 

Jody shares how she prepared to make her career switch, the pros and cons of being a self-published author, and how she handles both the creative and business sides of her new career. She also offers advice if you're thinking about becoming a full-time writer.

Find Jody Leber-Pay and The Spectrum Series at:

Website: https://TheSpectrumSeries.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/thespectrumseries

Amazon Author’s Page: www.amazon.com/Bradley-Pay/e/B085FXJJN5/

Goodreads Author’s Page: www.goodreads.com/author/show/20021721.Bradley_Pay

Resources:

Writer’s Digest webinars: www.writersdigest.com/webinars

Reedsy webinars: https://blog.reedsy.com/live/

Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) webinars: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202193640

TED Talks about writing: www.ted.com/topics/writing


More episodes for making a career change after age 50:
Ep 4: Aged out: Making a career switch at over 50
Ep 16: Starting a new career after 50
Ep 21: A side hustle results in a career switch
Ep 23: How being bilingual helps your new career
Ep 32: How to make a career change after 50
Ep 41: Pursuing your passion at any age

Music credit: TimMoor from Pixabay

Podcast info:
What's your career switch? What do you think about this episode and the show? Tell us at careerswitchpod.com. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Transcript

Lixandra: Hi, everyone. I'm Lixandra Uresta and this is Career Switch Podcast. This show is here to encourage you to take action with whatever career change you've been considering or are working on. In some episodes, I talk to people who've made their own career switch, whether by choice or circumstance. They share the good, the bad, and the truth about their journey, including what worked for them and what didn't. In other episodes, I speak with experts who offer their best career advice on issues that can come up during the process of making a career change. After all, it takes guts to switch things up, and it's not easy. However, it is possible. So. I hope you hear something in this episode, an idea, a suggestion, a piece of wisdom that'll spur you into action with your own career switch, whether it's taking that first bold step or trying something new. Welcome. I'm glad you're here. 

How many of us have dreamed of ditching our 9-to-5 job to become a full-time author? It's such a lifelong goal for a lot of people, and that's why I was intrigued when Jody Lieber Pay contacted me about being a guest. In 2020, Jody quit her job in financial services to write books. Under the pen name Bradley Pay, Jody has written two novels so far in the Spectrum series with her co-author Robin Bradley. In this episode, I pick Jody's brain on how she made her career switch to write full-time. She shares how she prepared to leave her profession, what it's really like to be a self-published author, and how she handles both the creative and business side of her new career. 

Hi, Jody. Thanks for joining us today. We have a lot to cover, so let's dive in. What were you doing before your career switch, and what led up to it?

Jody: I was working in the technology part of financial services and companies such as Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, Lehman brothers and whatnot. And then from October 16 through May, 2020, I actually worked full-time and I was trying to be an author part-time. I would spend every Saturday and almost every vacation writing with my writing partner, Robin Bradley. In February, 2020. We published our first book, which was really exciting. What happened was last year in 2020, the hours at work started to get longer and I was very, very stressed about trying to balance both work and writing. And so I really quit to be kind to myself and reduce the stress and focus on the book series.

Lixandra: Did you know that you eventually wanted to quit to become a full-time author?

Jody: Yeah, so I sort of knew I wanted to be a writer. I had published a technical book in 1998. I actually said at that time, if I had written again, it would be actually fiction and with another author. And so it's kind of funny how you say something way back then and then it eventually comes true. What I did know is that I wanted to be out of corporate America. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to change. I just didn't know what it was going to be until I met Robin.

Lixandra: Now, Robin Bradley is your writing partner. How did the two of you meet and how did you get started writing together?

Jody: We were on a riverboat cruise on the Danube river, and it was going from Hungary to Germany. And that was in the summer of 2016. And Robin and I met on that cruise through mutual friend. And a group of us were sitting around in the boat's lounge and I saw a man slouched over on the bow of another boat. And I said, Robin, Robin, imagine if that guy stood up and was tall and handsome and looked in your eyes and fell in love. And from that comment, we spent that entire afternoon laughing hysterically, making up stories. We talked about, you know, this murderer going around the world and what would he do when he would travel on river boats and kill people. And the following days, Robin started taking notes. And a month later I reached out to her and I said, Hey, are you still interested in that book series that we were talking about? And she said, yes. So that's really how it all began. And some of the characters from that crazy day of just BSing and talking and drinking Chianti, you know, actually are in the series today. So that's how we started it. And that's how I sort of knew what I wanted to do, but it was really meeting Robin was really the pivotal point.

Lixandra: How did you financially prepare to become a full-time author?

Jody: I had always known that eventually I wanted to retire early and do something. And so financial preparation was a huge key part of it. So for 18 years, my husband and I worked in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and we lived off of his paycheck and saved my paycheck. We also decided not to buy a house cause we didn't want the unexpected costs that come along with buying a house. You know, all of a sudden you need a new roof for all of a sudden you need new windows put in, you know, those kinds of costs can really eat into your savings. So now I'm 57 or 58 now cause I retired last year and we live off the savings. And then another thing we did was we moved to a lower cost area. We moved from New Jersey to Arizona.

Lixandra: So many of us have this dream that someday we'll quit our jobs to write full-time. I've been wanting to write a book since I was 12. I think many people romanticize the idea of writing at their leisure and living off their book sales. But for many of us, it remains a lifelong dream. How did you make sure that full-time writing would be your next career and not just a passing phase?

Jody: Yeah, it really started with baby steps. So for three and a half years before I quit corporate America, it really was taking these little baby steps in establishing a foundation, kind of establishing a routine without it being a hard cut. It was actually something that built gradually over time. We didn't treat this like a hobby. or like a dream. We treated it, even though it was just a very, very, at the very beginning, very part-time job, like four hours a week, part-time job. We treated it like a job. We set hours, we set time. Through that process and in those early days for us, we established the foundation and the high-level outlines for the book. We created 35 character biographies across the five books. We started really with getting that foundation. We had a set schedule every Saturday, and then after about, I don't know, six or eight months of doing that, or maybe even a year, we even started using my vacations to write. It's really about thinking of it as not a hobby, as a job, and then even if it's like an ultra-poor part-time job, you know, two, three hours a week, you treat it like that.

Lixandra: Tell us more about the structure you and Robin have established to write together.

Jody: Yeah, so we schedule regular times. We write two or three times a week, more like three times a week, actually. And we schedule, you know, nine to five. We make sure that people know I have my husband. I tell him I'm not available. I don't take phone calls. I don't look at text messages or emails. And so we treat it just like you would any job. And we've also created procedures for writing, you know, how we're going to write, you know, we do brainstorming, we do chapter breakdowns, we put together bullets for our chapters, then we do paragraphs and then we add all the details. And then we clean it up and polish it and send it out for a whole series of reviews. And then we have roles. I mean, at work, what do you do? You have roles and responsibilities, right? And so while we're both very creative and we both work together on the stories and developing the stories. Robin is in charge of grammar and polishing of the books. That's her background. She's very good at it. What I do is the marketing and I work on the technical side of it. So we have two very distinct roles.

Lixandra: Tell us about the marketing since that was new for you and it's a big part of being a self-published author. How did you learn to market your book series and how is it going?

Jody: Yeah, that has been an interesting challenge because I spent a lot of time researching online. How do you do marketing? How do you do publicity? What's the difference between the two of them? At first I was so overwhelmed because everybody is saying something different. So somebody, one article says, you know, do Amazon ads. Another article says, don't do Amazon ads. Another article says, do Facebook ads. Another one says, don't so on and so forth. It's everybody's opinion, you know, and everybody has one. And so it was just a matter of just picking one and trying it. When you're working for yourself and when you don't know, when you're brand new in what you're doing, you really have to do things by trial and error. And so I had to become, and I'm still working on it. I'm comfortable with trial and error and not expecting myself to just know the answer. That's how it is in corporate America. They come to you because they think you know the answer. But in this case, it was a matter of just trying things and, and trying it a little bit at a time, not trying to like, I don't know if you've ever heard of the saying, boil the ocean. Try and boil one cup at a time, you know, just take it one cup at a time and deal with that and understand what you're doing and see what the results are. And then not looking at failures as failures, but looking at it as just one more step forward. That was a huge lesson that I've had to learn because it really isn't a failure. It's just, you're learning.

Lixandra: Let's talk about the fact that you've switched from a corporate to a creative career, which is a different type of career switch. You didn't simply switch to a new industry where you still have a set job with a salary. A creative career usually means you're working on your own project that people may or may not like, and success is up in the air. You and Robin self-publish your books, so you don't have a publishing house behind you. I think that's a reality for many authors nowadays, to self-publish and handle the business side themselves. Why didn't you seek out a publisher?

Jody: We weren't interested. And the main reason was because we didn't want to be on someone else's schedule. I was working when we started all of this. So we didn't want to be forced into a schedule and into being stressed out about what we needed to do. We want to make sure our stories are good. And if that means it takes an extra month or two to publish, that's, we're okay with that. And so that was the primary reason we decided to self-publish. So we chose to publish our books through KDP, Kindle Direct Publishing. You can publish not only Kindle books, but paperback books, and more recently, you can publish hardback books. It allows you to upload books in a format for Kindle or paperback. It allows you to upload the covers. So you have to do cover design. And then you can manage your books there. You can order author copies from there. You can order proof copies from there. They do have online tools. So you can actually preview your book as it's going to look as a book. They also have tools so you can look at it on Kindle. So it's very comprehensive.

Lixandra: And Jody, what's it really like to be in a creative field as a full-time author?

Jody: Yeah. So for 37 years, I worked in corporate America or in the government. Even when I changed jobs there, there were a lot of things the same. So like I moved from Morgan Stanley to Wells Fargo. Okay. Well, the organization is pretty much structured the same. The type of roles people have are pretty much the same. The type of work, the terminology, people's personalities, you know, people drawn to technology. It's pretty much the same, no matter what company I would work for. And so there was a sense of comfort when I changed jobs. Cause you know what it's going to be like in general, you might have to learn a lot still, but you still have this foundation that you, you go in with. When you go from working in financial services and technology people versus being self-published and being an author, there's different personalities and there's different terminology. People approach things differently. It took me a little while to kind of recognize that. And so, you know, if I could share something with people, we expect things to be new and be okay with things being new. And so it's just a lot of work. You could pay people to do some of the work, like even publicizing and marketing. But Robin and I were very opinionated on how we want to do things. And so we, we chose, um, to pay somebody to do copy editing of the book. However, when it comes to publicity and marketing, we chose to do it ourselves. I think what also makes it hard, it's all being done on technology and technology is constantly changing. So as an example, just this year, TikTok has become a huge platform to be able to market books. And that wasn't the case last year. And so you're having to keep up with things. It's probably true with any job, but when you're trying to learn and things are changing, it feels kind of unsteady. You have to remember you're running your own business. You're an entrepreneur. I mean, if you do want to sell books and make a living out of it, you have to write and do the publicity and the marketing because the publicity and marketing, there's hundreds of thousands of books out there and it, you know, your book needs to get noticed and you need to learn what's best for you to be able to get your book noticed. And so it's, it's really a business. It's all doable and anyone can do it. It just takes time to learn it.

Lixandra: Since you're saying that it is a business, are the books a source of income for you?

Jody: Not yet. Financially, we don't even make enough money to cover our expenses. And so right now, Robin and I are both chipping in, but we know it's going to break. I mean, I know it's going to break. I know that eventually we're going to hit something and we're going to be able to push it over the line. I'm very confident in that because they're good stories.

Lixandra: So you're still living off your savings? Yeah, we're still living off our savings. All right. Since quitting your corporate job, have you had any doubts about your career switch?

Jody: I really missed the network that I had established and working with people and having that common understanding of what you're going through at work. You know, none of my friends that I had made over the years even understood what I was doing. And I didn't really understand what I was doing in the early days. I wished I had built more of a writer's network. before I had quit to kind of feel like I had that safety net. I looked at LinkedIn once in a while, see what's going on. And I see my colleagues from my technology jobs and companies that I worked with, you know, getting promoted. And I had this urge to want to go back to corporate America. There's this gravitational pull toward what you're familiar with and what you're comfortable with. Finally, this year in the summer, I decided after Having quit for a year, finally, I decided, no, I can't do this anymore. I can't keep looking backward. I have to only look forward. It's also tough because you're in a new career and you don't know if you're good at it or not yet. You know, I spent a lot of time, you know, 37 years doing what I was doing and I had this level of confidence. So it's also building up that thick skin and taking feedback and looking at feedback a little bit differently and remembering. You don't have to agree with the feedback. You just have to consider it thoughtfully and see if it's something that wants to kind of direct you to make a change, or it's something that you're just going to let go and just move forward. And so that, that was part of the process too, was gaining that confidence in writing and being an author.

Lixandra: Okay. So tell us about your five book series called the Spectrum Series.

Jody: So the series is about Tracy. Tracy is a retired judge, and he's a philanthropist, and he travels the world on riverboats, his fatal flaws killing again and again. Each book is a different heroine who's impacted by his actions. So Murder in Zaporizhia is about Gia. She signs an unusual contract with three men she hardly knows. She enhances her lifestyle significantly, but it means she has to keep secrets. But then what happens when she crosses paths with Tracy? Murder in Strasburg is about Isabel. She has a best friend who she adores, but then she sees his true colors. And then how do things change when they encounter Tracy, the serial killer? Book three is about Remy. She has raised her guard for years and years, and when she finally drops it, she makes new friends, and unbeknownst to her, one of those friends is a serial killer. The other two books, we are keeping the titles close, so you have to stay tuned.

Lixandra: Now, you and Robin write under the pen name Bradley Pay, a combination of your last names. Books one and two are currently available, both in hard copy and Kindle, and book three will be out in summer 2022. Where can listeners find the book series?

Jody: We have an author's website, which is the spectrumseries.com. And then you can follow us on our author's page on Amazon or on Goodreads or on Facebook.

Lixandra: Great. So what advice and resources do you have for our listeners who are also trying to become full-time authors as their career switch?

Jody: The first piece of advice I would give is to understand why you're writing. What is your goal for writing? Once you figure that out, embrace it. Even write down how many books do you want to sell? You know, what type of people do you want to target for your book? And then start networking. So start networking with other authors. You can get onto Facebook groups for writers. You can take webinars. There's lots of free webinars and there's some that aren't really that expensive, like $50 or less. Writers Digest has lots and lots of webinars. Amazon on their KDP site, and they have webinars. Also Reedsy, R-E-E-D-S-Y, they have webinars. Sometimes your favorite authors might have some, so look up your favorite authors and see if they offer any type of webinars. And then there's TED Talks on becoming an author. So those are all good places to start. And then, you know, as you start searching around, you can find even more. I think another piece of advice I want to, would want to give someone is don't let yourself become paralyzed. There's so much advice out there and there's so many different ways to do things. I spent probably a month or so last year. I was so paralyzed. I didn't know what to do because there's so much information. I finally convinced myself that I just needed to be prepared to succeed or fail and that it's a long journey. And so you just have to be patient. It's not something that happens overnight. I mean, unless you get picked up by Oprah and then the world opens up, you know, I mean, that's a rare case. For most authors, it's just a long journey and it's just one step at a time.

Lixandra: Thanks to Jody Lieber Pay for being our guest today. Check out the show notes for the Spectrum Series website and Facebook page and for the Bradley Pay Amazon and Goodreads author page. 

You can find links to the resources mentioned in this episode and more helpful information in the show notes and on our website, careerswitchpod.com. While you're there, join our mailing list and follow us on Instagram and Twitter at careerswitchpod. 

So what's your career switch? Are you excited to take action after listening to this episode? Tell us at careerswitchpod.com. We'd love to know, along with any feedback you have about the show. We're a new podcast, so please rate, review, and share with your friends and colleagues. It'll help get the show out there. Thanks for listening today. Till next time.