I’ve been a published writer for nearly thirty years. I have sixty titles to my name ranging from picture books and poetry through middle grade and teen fiction to non-fiction and a memoir for adults. When people hear how many books I have published, they assume I must be making a lot of money. But the very fact I have had to ‘shapeshift’ so much as a writer might give you a clue that this is far from the case. The publishing landscape has changed dramatically in recent times as the Society of Authors knows, meaning that I, along with many other professional writers, have had to take heed of that old adage, ‘Don’t give up the day job.’

Trouble is, I gave up the day job twenty years ago. I used to be an in-house editor for one of the Big Five and went freelance when my kids were born. During this time, I was regularly in contract, writing two middle grade titles a year while bringing up small children and animals. I couldn’t handle the tight freelance copyediting deadlines as well as the writing. And part of me didn’t want to – if I could give up the hustling that freelancing required, it meant I was Truly A Writer at Last! Didn’t it?

Of course that ‘moment in the sun’, as one of my writing friends called it, was just that – a moment. It turned out that my writing career was dependent on too many factors, namely an editor who championed me (she left), a good sales record (one book did not sell well) and a market which valued building authors from the mid-list up (enter the seductive magic of the celebrity). I found that overnight I was consigned to the scrap heap by a publisher who had given me contract after contract for seven years.

So what to do? Try to go back to freelancing? That didn’t seem a very attractive prospect as the old model of paying by the hour had also changed. Any work I was offered was for a flat fee only which if I worked out the hourly rate meant I would have been far better off stacking shelves in Tesco.

A friend came the rescue by offering me the chance to be a manuscript tutor on the Writing for Young People MA at Bath Spa University. I thanked him, but inwardly I was thinking, ‘Be a tutor? I can’t do that.’ I explained that I had no teaching experience, but he persisted, assuring me that my editorial experience plus my own career in writing meant I already had the skills that were needed for the role. He wore me down in the end, and it turned out he was right. I discovered I loved working with students on their manuscripts and felt a huge sense of achievement when some of them got picked up for publication.

A couple of years later, the same friend offered me a post as Associate Lecturer on the undergraduate creative writing course at Bath Spa for which he was the module leader. I thanked him, but inwardly I was thinking, ‘Be a lecturer? I can’t do that.’ Thankfully, this friend is a pretty persuasive person. Yes, the day I gave my first lecture my knees were shaking so much I had to sit down, but I soon I was looking forward to seeing my students. What’s more, teaching others about writing meant that my own writing flourished. It helped being part of a team of lecturers who were also writers as they were so encouraging and supportive. I will always credit these colleagues for inspiring me to write my memoir, A Place for Everything. They had been following a blog I was writing and motivated me to turn it into the book.

My module leader was also the reason I became a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. I had been complaining to him one day about how difficult it was to make any money from writing any more. ‘You should apply to the RLF,’ he told me. ‘It’s a charity that offers financial support to professional writers. I’m a Fellow for them at Exeter University. It’s a job – a wonderful job. I spend two days a week with undergraduates, helping them with their essay writing, and for that I effectively get a salary which means I can afford to take some time out of the week to write.’ I thanked him and said I would consider it, but inwardly I was thinking, ‘Essays? I can’t do that.’ I hadn’t yet learned that the good old Inner Critic had no idea what I was capable of.

In the end it was a move to Cornwall that prompted me to do it. I had lost all hope of ever publishing children’s fiction ever again, had had to leave my post at Bath Spa and was feeling pretty bereft. It was with a ‘nothing more to lose’ frame of mind that I applied to be an RLF Fellow in 2021 and was fortunate to be given a two-year post at Exeter Penryn in Cornwall.

Becoming an RLF Fellow has been far and away the best thing I have ever done for my writing career, my confidence and a feeling that I am giving something back. While at Penryn I spent two days a week in a little office in the Humanities building, seeing students individually for what I came to think of as my ‘essay surgery’. Students would come in, invariably looking anxious, and I would diagnose their essay problem. I came to realise I could see what the problem was just by allowing them to talk for five minutes. More often than not, the issue was one of organisation. If they talked about their essay in a roundabout fashion, chances were their written sentences were rambling too. This in turn would mean their essay was unstructured which explained their disappointing low marks. I soon understood that these were students who had breezed through A-Levels but had no idea how to build an argument and therefore were falling short of what university-level essay writing expected. The role was symbiotic: the more adept I became at diagnosing the writing problems of others, the better I became at noticing the problems in my own writing. It was a win-win.

When I left the post at Penryn I wanted very much to help A-Level students prepare for university so that they didn’t experience the anxiety I had seen on campus. I asked to be put forward for the RLF’s Bridge programme, which sends RLF writers into sixth forms to take them through a four-hour writing development workshop. I have been doing this for two years now. Unlike the university Fellowship scheme, this pays a fee per workshop rather than a fixed fee for a whole academic year. At the moment there is no yearly cap on the number of workshops I can set up, so the incentive is there to book in as many as possible.

I am extremely thankful to the Royal Literary Fund which offers so many opportunities for writers to earn fees. This can be achieved through doing valuable educational work, in universities first, following on to work in schools and in community and workplace settings via its Writing for Life programme. The charity also has a Grants programme, where eligible writers can apply for support in the event of financial hardship.

Becoming a Fellow opened up other teaching opportunities for me as well. Once I was a Fellow I was approached by the London Writers’ Salon to write courses for them and to be a writing coach. These combined roles, plus workshops I am asked to run, now earn me three times what I can hope to earn from publishing books. It’s still not a fortune! However it means I can justify spending time on writing, which remains my one true love.

So, yes, I do have a day job for when the books don’t add up. I am just thankful that it is what many of us have come to term as ‘writing adjacent’ rather than stacking the shelves in Tesco.