You might hear this term sometimes when writers talk about how they make ends meet.
…You might even have one yourself already. How would you know? Well, it probably helps to know what it means, first!
Video script:
Hi, I’m Jess, a writer and careers advisor, and this is careers advice for writers. This video is about portfolio careers... because in many cases, this is what a writer will end up with.
A portfolio career is a fancy way of saying that you make your money through more than one means at any given time, rather than having one job at one company as is considered more traditional. So, for example a General Practitioner who also runs a website offering health advice would have a portfolio career.
I am a huge proponent of portfolio careers for writers (and other creatives too), mostly because... I have one. Let’s be honest, most of us are not lucky enough to start out as full-time authors – the advance for my debut novel was £7500, split into three payments over about 18 months. I can’t live on that, so I needed another stream of income.
Also, books take a long time to write, and sometimes just as long to sell, so even if you get to a point where you’re mostly self-sufficient from your writing, are you financially secure enough to go a year or two between contracts? If you’re self-published, can you manage to live on your earnings and keep investing in your future projects?
There are endless ways a portfolio career might look. Like me, you might have a more stable “day job” - I work 4 days a week at a university with a very supportive team of managers and colleagues, so I pay into a pension, and I have a guaranteed salary at the end of each month. This really matters to me because of my history of homelessness, so writing would have to really start paying before I’d be willing to give this financial security up. That might mean I’m slower to get future books written, but on balance, I’m happier with a day job than I would be without.
Other people might have a day job that is in some way relevant to the world of writing, such as working for a publisher or agency, becoming a creative writing academic, or working as a bookseller.
It might not even be a formal “day job” at all – some writers are also illustrators, game developers, graphic designers, with freelance contracts in those creative industries.
And some people make a living selling the craft aspects of their writing expertise – becoming a book-related content creator, running writing retreats or developing writing courses. I’m wary of recommending this route in some ways – you may know I am suspicious of a lot of writing courses – but it goes some way to demonstrating what a portfolio career could look like if you want to make writing a significant part of your professional life.
Ultimately, this is a decision you might make for yourself at some point: is your writing just for fun, or are you pursuing publication as a professional? Because you absolutely can do that – to make it a more realistic plan, it can help to think holistically, and realistically about what that looks like for you.
