Writing: Good career move, terrible career (2018)
For the HN crowd there's probably a more realistic path toward writing as a career: self-publishing technical books.<p>[By one year after publishing my first book](<a href="https://jeremykun.com/2019/12/01/a-good-year-for-a-programmers-introduction-to-mathematics/" rel="nofollow">https://jeremykun.com/2019/12/01/a-good-year-for-a-programme...</a>), I had sold 11k copies, and with self publishing you get a much bigger royalty from each copy, drastically lowering the bar for financial success. I expect my second book to do even better, because my audience has only grown since then and the book is more general purpose.<p>I might be an outlier in that I have already built up a large audience from blogging about math. But the benefit of self-publishing, aiming your work at folks with disposable income, and having a niche all seem to make a full-time writing job quite straightforward.