Can You Make Full-Time Writing Income On Part-Time Hours?

An award-winning journalist on how she continued making a full-time income even after she had a baby and started working part-time hours.

By Natasha Khullar Relph

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In January 2012, I became a parent. And everything that I had learned about productivity, meeting deadlines, and keeping to a schedule, was about to be tossed down the drain. I re-learned a lot of things during that first year sharing my office with my son. But the thing that I learned that may be the most important one of them all: Having a child was perhaps the best thing that had ever happened to be my productivity.

Working part-time that year, I made as much money as I had ever made working full-time. I’m re-publishing this article so that those of you who have children (or may have children in the future) may be encouraged to do the same.

I’ve been working part-time and on 2 a.m. shifts for the last six months after my son started crawling and I realized that the whole stick-him-in-a-swing-and-write-an-article thing wasn’t going to work anymore. But, and I’ve yet to run formal numbers, I think I did manage to make almost as much working part-time during my son’s first year as I was making working an 8-hour day during my pregnancy.

So how did I make a full-time writing income and how can you, working part-time, increase your income to a full-time level?

Here are some ideas.

1. I only took high-paying work

Or perhaps I should reword that and say I turned down a LOT of low-paying work. For some regular clients, I kept to my existing rates and I did take on some blogging and low-paying gigs for marketing purposes, but for the most part, any time I was approached by a new editor or client, I stuck to a good rate, which in my case, is about $1 a word.

If it was someone new to me and offering a low rate, I mostly turned it down. I don’t need more low-paying clients (unless they offer something else, of course, say an entry into a new kind of writing, or a prestigious clip that would look good in my nonfiction book proposal).

2. I took on easy work

You know me, I love me some hardcore journalism. When have I not loved to travel to remote regions and find stories that no one’s ever covered?

That’s right. Never.

Well, except recently, when I got a big more realistic.

Stories that I’ve covered about girls in India cycling to school in Bihar, women-only projects that have changed entire communities, war, rape, and disaster, for which I’ve traveled have paid between $250-1,000 (plus travel expenses). Stories about green living and friendship for women’s magazines, however, pay between $1,000-2,000 (or more) and I can write them from the comfort of my home. Plus I can write more of them because I’m not spending days on travel. They’re not going to win any awards, sure, but they brought in regular income and allowed me to spend more time with my son.

So guess which ones I’m currently choosing?

3. I pitched my ass off

Numbers, numbers, numbers. I can’t say this enough. The more you put out there, the more chance you have of

(1) hearing back with a yes, and
(2) getting better.

The more queries you write, the more you’ll learn. And the more queries you send out, the more statistical chance there is of your selling them. I try and send between 20-25 queries a week when I’m low on work. Here’s how I do it.

4. I used my hours wisely

In the last one year, I’ve stayed distant from Twitter and really scaled back from Facebook. I just don’t have the time. Some other writers do have success, especially on Twitter, where connecting with editors is easier and you have a better chance of getting heard (and therefore having your query read), but I find that the five hours I’m going to spend talking with editors about random things I have no interest in are better spent in coming up with fantastic ideas and writing kickass queries.

I do build relationships with editors; I (personally) just find it much easier to do so through my work than mindless chattering on Twitter.

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