We were lucky to catch up with Nick Thacker recently and have shared our conversation below.

Nick, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you take vacations? How do you keep things going – any advice for entrepreneurs who feel like they can’t step away from their business for a short vacation?

I became a writer by accident (actually, I hated writing in high school and SWORE I’d never do it again). And here I am, over a decade later, making a living… writing fiction. I often feel like I hit the jackpot in terms of work/life balance — my entire life feels like a vacation.

Yet… whenever I’m actually “on vacation,” I’ve got my head in my laptop. I’m answering emails, working on the next book, setting up a new test for Facebook ads.

I thought that made me a failure, that I was broken and didn’t love my family or friends. Why else would I spend a vacation by the pool, working? Why is my “work/life balance” so messed up?

I believed I was doing the “life” part wrong.

The truth is, our idea of “work/life balance” is flawed. Sure, when we work 50+ hours a week for a corporate overlord, punch a time clock, or fight against an incessant alarm clock to make that morning meeting, work/life balance is really important — without it, we’re slaves to our jobs. We’re forced into the endless cycle of working for the weekend.

But as an entrepreneur, or even as someone with a side hustle that’s not our day job, that idea of balancing when we work and when we live… is a myth. It’s a fallacy.

Someone asked me recently if I was “doing work wrong,” because I was always connected to my work. I was on a ski trip, jotting notes down for a new book while riding the chair lift.

My answer was, “no, I think we’re doing WORK wrong.” What if we could design our work around the way we want to live? What if there was a way to design our lifestyles AND our workstyles so that one fed the other — not took away from it?

“Lifestyle design” was the techbro’s hot topic about 15 years ago, and for good reason: it gave us the idea that our dream of making good money AROUND our chosen lifestyle was possible. It gave us the idea that our work could be minimized (yet not financially stunted) enough to allow for our non-work life to fit in.

I’m more a fan of designing our work — whatever we do that makes us the money we need to live — to fit within our lives. I’m even more a fan of designing our work to be the sort of work that we WANT to do while we’re “living.”

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I believe the world needs more books. My goal with my company, Book Career In A Year, is to help authors (both new and experienced) achieve exactly that — bringing their books into the world in a way that’s profitable for them.

I’ve been an author for over a decade, but I got into it accidentally. I wrote my first novel as a Christmas present for my dad, and all the fun ideas I wanted to cram into it didn’t fit — those became the next book, and the next. I was working at a marketing company, but I realized soon after that this “book thing” might be able to pay the bills… if I could only figure out how to get more readers interested.

The next decade was filled with missteps, failures, and money lit on fire as I tried to understand just how to do that. Eventually I figured out how to attract readers with better book packaging, genre expectations, marketing, and generally better writing. I somehow became a full-time author.

I continued to write, but I saw other authors making the mistakes I made along my journey. They would fall for the same marketing scams, pay ridiculous amounts of money to “chase a list,” or have absolutely no understanding of advertising. I wanted to change that, so I started working on a business plan.

That plan became Book Career In A Year — courses, training, coaching, and resources, all designed for one purpose: help authors succeed.

I didn’t want to make promises I couldn’t keep: BCIAY isn’t about selling some scam-laden “marketing package,” it’s about teaching authors how to do this stuff on their own — at the end of the day, no one will care about their books/career as much as they will. And the truth is that being an author today is only 50% about the writing. The other half is about marketing, sales, publishing, and scaling.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Writing is often something we engage in as a hobby, or side activity. That’s no different for me — I wrote my first book for my dad, but thereafter it quickly became something I loved doing, even if it didn’t pay the bills.

But sticking with it proved to me it was something worth pursuing in a more purposeful way. I kept writing, but as I finished each book I took stock of the market — what new tools were available to me that might help publish or promote my work? What new marketplaces were getting into this newfangled “digital book” world?

I was becoming a writer, but I never took off the marketing hat. I looked at new opportunities in the market as ways to reach new readers, but I knew my long-term goal was to be well-read, not try to become rich. For that reason, I was quick to give away my stories — full-length thrillers I would offer to a new reader in exchange for their email address.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was like Marketing 101: give away a sample of the product in exchange for the ability to contact them later.

It worked. I started to build a mailing list that grew to substantial numbers, and many of those subscribers loved my work and were happy to purchase it. I began to make more money every launch, every new book.

Pretty soon I realized I was making the utility payment each month — then the mortgage, then replacing my day job income, and then more.

It only took a few months of tripling my day job income before my wife gave me the ultimatum: “you can’t do both (your day and the writing gig); which will it be?”

I believe I chose well ;-)

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I get to design my life AND work. I help authors succeed. I create things from nothing. I make up stories for a living. My creative life is my creative work, and I wouldn’t have it any other way (seriously, I don’t want to go to an office OR have to leave my laptop at home when we go on vacation!).

Contact Info:

• Website: nickthacker.com
• Instagram: thenickthacker
• Facebook: authornickthacker
• Twitter: nickthacker
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgR2JTaQKIOippu4bI_0FeQ