How I’m semi‑retiring as a writer (without quitting writing)
Design a creative life you don’t need to escape from, reclaim your time without giving up the work you love, and stop burning yourself out without anything to show for it.
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Hi,
I semi-retired more than two years ago at this point, and fully retired from shows last year. The word semi- is doing a lot of work in that sentence, but it’s essential for maintaining the mindset that makes my lifestyle possible.
It gives shape to the career I want, which is one where I’ll always write, show up for readers, hop on podcasts or stages, but I don’t need to do any of it to keep the lights on or pay the bills.
I will always do those things because I like praise and crave the attention. Plus, I genuinely love writing. It regulates my brain and filters my anxiety. So, I’m always going to do that work. I just don’t want to be trapped by it.
When I consult with creative humans, they tell me things like “I just want to write” or “If I could just make things forever, I’d be…” which is great in theory, but I always push back and ask:
“You might want to write for the rest of your life, but do you want to be forced to write for the rest of your life?”
Because that is the difference between a working writer and a semi-retired one.
Since I’ll always rely on my back catalog for some amount of passive income, and I’ll always need an audience to sustain that catalog, it means I’ll never be 100% retired.
At best I’ll ever be 80% retired, which means instead of needing to work 40 hours a week, I only need to work 8.
Once I figured that out, it didn’t take long to realize I was already only working 30 hours a week. That’s 25% retired, which was a good start. Since then I built systems and used them to shift the shape of my weeks.
You might say “That’s not really semi-retired, Russell” to which I would ask “How much retired do you need to qualify as semi-retired?”
It’s the same question I ask when somebody says “How can you say ‘I love you’ so freely?” I tell them “How much love do I have to have before I love somebody? What qualifies as enough?”
I would say that any amount of love counts as love, which is why I can say with no hint of irony that I love each and every one of you reading this now. In the same way, I say that any amount of retired counts as semi-retired.
Intention is what matters here.
These days I hover around 60% retired. I still need to work about 16 hours a week, though not every week is the same. Those hours include meetings, writing, and anything I’m doing “for the money” instead of purely “because I want to.”
Even then, I’ve worked to make the have-tos feel like want-tos. A recent weekly “had to do” list included:
Co-hosting a webinar about writing.
Be interviewed on a podcast by dear friends.
Hosting a breakthrough session for 🦄Unicorn members.
Joining a meeting with a partner I chose to work with.
Last year, I “had” to be at Author Nation, which meant seeing friends all day, watching The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere, seeing O at Bellagio, eating at the Netflix Bites restaurant, and hosting partner dinners hanging out with old friends.
Another week, I had a livestream with a friend, a Zoom about a potential partnership, a planning meeting with a partner, a coaching call with a client I adore, an interview for our podcast with people I love dearly, host a 🦄Unicorn breakthrough session for my amazing members, and co-hosting Craft Con, where I interviewed 12 of my favorite successful authors about how they think and how they break blocks.
Yes, those are “have tos”, but what a life, right?
I also try to stay 5-6 months ahead on my writing schedule. I still write 1–2 articles a week, but the pressure is gone.
All that took a long time to build, but it started with recognizing I have agency. I may not be fully where I want to be, but I’m some percentage of the way there, and that percentage moves in the right direction when I design for it.
How to define semi-retirement
Most creative careers don’t have a clean on/off switch. We don’t stop making, but we can stop needing to make in order to survive.
Instead, we define semi-retirement with two numbers:
Your full-time hours baseline. For many people that’s 40 hours. If yours is different, pick the number that represents “I’m working full-time.”
Your required hours. The minimum number of hours per week you must work for money to maintain your life and business.
Your retirement percentage is the reduction of hours from your baseline over time. If you need 8 hours instead of 40, you’re 80% retired. If you need 20, you’re 50% retired.
This math reframes progress. Now, you don’t have to wait for an arbitrary financial finish line. You can move from 10% to 25% to 40% retired by shaving down the hours you must be present each week.
If you need help defining what that retirement even looks like, then I recommend this article on defining your win condition.
Once you have that win condition, and your retirement percentage, here’s how this looks for fiction vs. nonfiction authors.
Fiction authors: Build read-through. Align back matter to lead into the next book. Offer box sets. Use audio strategically. Plan release cadences that feed the catalog without burning you out. School visits, festivals, book clubs, Patreon, and limited signed runs can be both joyful and lucrative.
Nonfiction authors: Anchor your ecosystem around a core transformation. Make sure your books point to a talk, workshop, course, or consulting offer. Each format should be evergreen enough to sell without a constant live presence. Create two or three signature talks so every gig reuses the same spine.
Here are some levers you can use to increase that percentage and move closer to your win condition over time.
Build an income-generating backlist. For fiction, that’s series with strong read-through, omnibuses, audiobooks, translations, library distribution, large print, and smart pricing. For nonfiction, that’s evergreen titles, updated editions, audio, workbook companions, and rights sales. Your backlist is your retirement account.
Go wide on rights and formats. Exploit print, digital, audio, foreign, film/TV, special editions, direct sales, bundles, library rights, and speaking. Rights are levers. Each lever is a small annuity.
Treat your email list like compounding interest. A healthy email list and consistent communication keep your backlist alive. One thoughtful note a week can outperform a dozen frantic launches.
Productize your expertise. If you teach, coach, or consult, package it: cohorts, workshops, video courses, templates, memberships. Productize once, deliver many times.
Design a “one have-to per day” calendar. I try not to schedule more than one mandatory thing a day. It protects creative energy and stops obligation creep. If I stack two, I feel it. Three is a bad day.
Pull the joy forward. Choose podcasts, events, and partnerships you’d happily do for free. If you must sell hours, sell them in rooms that feed you back.
Front-load the creative bit. Being five months ahead evaporates pressure. Batch first drafts, schedule editing windows, and automate publication. Futures you will send present you a thank-you card.
Install low-friction systems. Templates for outreach, launch checklists, canned responses, a weekly finance block, and “done for future me” folders reduce decision fatigue and reclaim hours you can reclassify from “must” to “want.”
Here’s what a sample 16-hour “must” week might looks like.
Two 90-minute creation blocks to keep the pipeline moving.
One 90-minute admin and finance block.
One 60-minute partner meeting.
One 60-minute reader-facing session (live, webinar, or Q&A).
One 60-minute coaching or client call.
One 60-minute marketing block (newsletter, promo, backlist tune-ups).
Buffer: 3–4 hours for the unpredictable.
Everything else like reading, thinking, walking, journaling, and noodling on ideasdoesn’t count as “must”, which means that’s part of already living your retirement.
If you’re enjoying this, I also speak words into microphones on the Hapitalist podcast. Some of them are insightful. I’m currently bribing people to subscribe.
Go to this link.
Subscribe to the podcast on Apple or Spotify.
Enter to win a $25 Amazon gift card.
If you’re not into Apple or Spotify, you can listen on the app of your choice without entering.
A note on “passive” investments
We’ve talked a lot about how to make your catalog and business work for you, instead of you working for it, but perhaps the best, and some would argue only true, form of passive income comes from investing in the markets, or in ways that allow your money to grow without you doing anything except watching.
There’s a robust cross-section of literature that talks about pulling money from your business and investing it in index funds. If you can do that, then you’ll never “need” your books to make money at all, and your business can truly be about play.
That’s not a reality most writers live in, but a long time ago I committed to maxing out my IRA every year even when I couldn’t afford it. It didn’t look like much for a while, but over time we have watched it compound (especially once we found a good financial advisor).
Now, every time we get extra money, we put as much as we can into investment accounts, and have for decades now. Success with creative things is always very volatile, which is why successful creators are always investing in car washes, wineries, and phone companies that are considerably more stable.
We can’t do it all right now, but even opening a little space in your life is a big deal. Even moving 1% toward a thing every week or month can create massive, seismic shifts over a long enough time horizon.
If you get nothing else from this, I hope you get that even moving things forward 1% a month, or a year, is progress.
In 2015, when I started Wannabe Press, I was 0%, or even negative retired since I was working over 40 hours, but over 10 often painful years, I was able to shift that to 60% retired, with even the “worst” weeks being filed with friends and loved ones collaborating with me.
My wife and I both work from home, eat lunch together almost every day, and spend a lot of time together on the weekends. We are able to do just about anything we want, and take at least one big trip a year, plus going home for the holidays and small trips to conferences multiple times to speak on panels and teach workshops.
Maybe it can’t be your life now, but if you can find your win condition and pull it forward, then it could be your life eventually, little by little. We think this kind of thing happens all at once or not at all, but this is slow work, like water carving a canyon in stone, and it starts with a mindset shift.
