The dream of becoming a full-time writer is an exceedingly difficult one to achieve in trade publishing today. Book advances are delivered in multiple installments often spread out months, or even years, apart, requiring a sense of fortitude and a need to secure multiple revenue sources. The vocation, explain authors Rob Hart and Alex Segura, both of whom are full-time writers, requires adaptability and a lot of multi-tasking to make ends meet.
“The full-time writing life is hard,” Hart said. “Even if you sign a large deal, there are months between checks, so you have to rethink how you live.” Segura agreed: “Rob and I both hustle pretty hard. You have to keep the plate spinning, and while I'm working on the stuff that's coming out now, I have to be thinking about what’s coming out in 2025 and 2026.”
The two authors’ publication schedules this year are cases in point. In June, Hart published Assassins Anonymous (Putnam)—his “nail-biting latest,” per PW's starred review—and already has a sequel, The Medusa Protocol, slated for release next June. Segura’s next book, Alter Ego (Flatiron), a sequel to the Los Angeles Times Book Award–winning novel Secret Identity, is due out on December 3. And on November 12, Mad Cave Studios will publish The Legendary Lynx, a graphic novel written by Segura and illustrated by Sandy Jarrell that is set in the Secret Identity universe. As if that weren’t enough, Hart and Segura also teamed up to cowrite the sci-fi spy thriller Dark Space, published by Blackstone in October.
Hart’s 2019 novel The Warehouse, an alarming and addictive cautionary tale of late capitalism, was the breakthrough book that finally helped him reach his goal of writing full-time. “The Warehouse was a humongous deal,” explained Hart. “The problem was, The Warehouse and The Paradox Hotel,” which followed The Warehouse in 2022, “sold well, but they didn’t sell ‘amazing.’ ” (To date, the two novels have sold more than 18,000 print copies combined through outlets that report to Circana BookScan.)
After delivering both books, Hart’s publisher at the time, Ballantine, invited him to explore other publishing opportunities—something that was difficult for him to hear: “The Warehouse got me into therapy,” he confessed. In a testament to resilience, he went back to the drawing board and came up with the concept that would become Assassins Anonymous.
“When I wrote Assassins Anonymous, it was from a place of, like, you know, if this doesn’t work, I have to get a day job again,” Hart said. With feedback from media and readers alike positive, “it’s been a fun rollout,” he noted.
For Segura, “Sequels are really hard, because they're always going to be measured against the first installment.” But sequels also measure publishers’ investment in an author and their stories. In the case of Alter Ego, it’s a standalone sequel to his Secret Identity, taking place in the present day and introducing readers to writer-filmmaker Annie Bustamante as she investigates the history of a long out-of-print superhero comic, the Legendary Lynx.
With the graphic novel The Legendary Lynx, Segura saw an opportunity to dabble with metafiction, bringing to life a fictional comic book series from the pages of Secret Identity. It’s an example of writerly adaptability: looking for nuggets of inspiration from your previous work that could transform into a new project. “I was working on that with Sandy Jarrell, who's the artist who I've known a long time and a student of comic history,” Segura said. “We kept saying to each other, ‘We need to make this a comic. We need to make this a whole thing.’ ”
Neither Hart nor Segura are strangers to the world of trade book publishing. “I worked at places like Wizard magazine when I first got into the industry, and then DC Comics for a long time, and Archie Comics for a longer time,” Segura explained. “That was where I saw firsthand ‘art vs. commerce’ at work, which is one of the core themes of Alter Ego.”
Before going full-time as a writer, Hart worked at New York City’s venerable independent bookstore the Mysterious Bookshop. Even now, his experience lends itself to looking for all kinds of freelance opportunities. “There are periods where I was really hustling, doing freelance editorial work,” he said. “I was doing some ghostwriting, you know—anything I could do just to keep money coming in.”
The experience of putting out The Warehouse, Hart explained, helped him to evolve his craft, but also taught him several lessons about both the book publishing industry and the full-time writing life along the way. “I actually think what's happening in publishing for a lot of people is it's just becoming a grind,” Hart says. “Alex and I can cowrite a book together, and it's going to come out a little bit quicker than had I just wrote it by myself.”
Dark Space, which was pitched as Star Trek meets John le Carré’s George Smiley novels, stands as an example for both writers on the importance of diversifying one’s projects in order to succeed as a full-time writer today. The project, the writers explained, came together organically.
“I’m a big Star Wars and Star Trek fan, and I love space opera,” Segura said. “I texted Rob one day and was like, ‘Hey I have this spacey, loose idea for a story, and he replied almost immediately, ‘I’m in.’ ”
The duo quickly got to work, writing the manuscript collaboratively in a Google Doc. Instead of arbitrarily divvying up their writing assignments—by, say, writing from the perspective of one character each—they took turns writing and editing the book, allowing for a more organic generative process. “We didn’t want it to be two novels jammed together,” Hart said.
Both writers said that their collaborative working practices were directly informed by their years of experience in the book business, where they learned the importance of downplaying writerly ego in favor of doing whatever is best for the story. “We're both pretty easygoing in terms of stuff like that, and we just work really hard,” Segura said. “We're both really busy, and I think if there was more ego involved, it would be hard to do.” It’s a mentality, he added, that encourages both multitasking and a willingness to try new things as writers: “Dark Space was really the first time I wrote a full novel with somebody else, and it was interesting.”
One major takeaway for the two writers in recent years has been that the business and craft of writing go hand in hand, and that writing is a learning experience as much as it is an occupation or vocation. It was this perpetual learner mentality, they explain, that makes Dark Space read like it was written by a singular voice. “It’s funny, because there were points when we couldn’t tell who wrote what,” said Hart.
Another major takeaway for both Hart and Segura is that neither can rest on their laurels or spend more than a moment enjoying a book’s publication. In addition to The Medusa Protocol, Hart said, he already has a new collaborative novel with Jeff Rake, the showrunner of Netflix’s Manifest, called Detour, in the works, among other unannounced projects: “I would rather hustle as hard as I can at this than spend the rest of my time doing something else that I don’t want to do.” And even with Alter Ego and The Legendary Lynx set to drop this fall, Segura said, he has a number of unannounced projects of his own lined up that will keep him busy for years to come.
“Everyone asks how I do so many things at once, and a lot of it is that you need to in order to maintain a living,” Segura said. “You can’t take anything for granted.”
