My whole career I’ve tended to work with people ten to thirty years older than I am, and now is no exception. A significant and growing part of my clientele are retirement-age or approaching-retirement authors—so much so that I’m developing a specialized version of my Author’s Business Accelerator called the Retirement Author’s Business Studio, designed specifically for this cohort and where they are in their lives and careers.
Lest you group these folks all together, let me tell you that there are five general income/business paths amongst the retirement/near-retirement set:
Those who are unconcerend about the money spent and the money made. They’re retired, they have retirement savings, and they will be spending their retirement spending money on the things they wish, and their books and publishing adventures are amongst those things.
Those who would like to break even on their publishing ventures—for financial or dignity’s sake or both.
Those who would like to make a bit of money from their author lives to supplement their retirement savings/income—they may or may not work hard at making that happen.
Those who need to make more than a bit of money from their author business. They’re vibrant, energetic, and motivated to keep the dollars rolling in.
Those for whom money is only one aspect of very large author/author business ambitions. Often, they’re the people who have always thought big and played big, and they’re not stopping now.
As a whole, this a group that tends to be talented, savvy, and wise—eager to keep understanding and exploring new things, stay meaningfully busy, and build something that matters, while also slowing down, maintaining perspective, and enjoying the ride more deliberately than they may have earlier in their careers. They are, in short, some of my favorite people to work with.
They’re also some of the most enlightening. Here’s what they seem to know as a collective that the rest of us are still working on.
Retirement-age authors are often learning entirely new skills—social media, ebook formatting, podcast guesting, event production, outreach—with no or minimal prior frames of reference and no professional identity invested in what they need to know now. While this could look like disadvantages, it’s closer to freedom: They don’t resist looking like beginners because they’ve stopped caring about that particular kind of looking bad. The beginner’s mind isn’t just a Zen concept—it’s often a competitive advantage available to any willing to claim it.
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Retirement-age authors have a clarified relationship with time that most younger authors haven’t developed yet—they know viscerally that waiting for the right moment, the right deal, the right level of readiness is a luxury they can’t afford, and neither, honestly, can any of us. The urgency isn’t morbid (and it’s not all that rushed either!); it’s liberating. They’re not waiting around for perfection. This attitude cuts through the endless deferral that keeps so many of us perpetually preparing to build instead of actually building.
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Retirement-age authors are often the most willing to ask for help, hire expertise they don’t have, and admit openly what they don’t know—partly because they’ve lived long enough to know that figuring everything out yourself can be slow, frustrating, and unnecessary. They ask their grandchildren to explain Instagram. They hire designers without apologizing for not knowing design. They find the who without agonizing too much over the how, naturally and without the ego resistance and lone wolf leanings that can make this hard for the rest of us.
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Retirement-age authors cross the threshold of experimentation easier than almost any other demographic I work with—they try things, see what happens, and adjust without the extended deliberation that paralyzes younger authors who rightly? wrongly? feel they have more to lose. A retired police officer who’s never done a book event signs up for a local author fair and figures it out. A former funeral services salesperson with a memoir pitches herself to three podcasts she’s never listened to and gets on two, invited for a repeat visit on one of them. A near-retirement hospice nurse walks into five gift shops with her book on hospice care and comes out with two consignment agreements. They don’t wait until they’re sure it will work. They give it a try and usually walk away with some good stories—and often anew acquaintance or two.
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This is perhaps the most instructive thing retirement-age authors model—and the one most authors at every stage can most consistently forget. Retirement authors are, on the whole, having more fun than their younger counterparts. They share food and wine at their book fair tables. They laugh when things go sideways. They enjoy all the necessary sales, marketing, and author-reader conversations with strangers, the process of learning something new, the satisfaction of finishing a chapter or making a sale or getting a yes from a podcast host. They don’t treat their author business as a grind to be endured on the way to some future payoff and instead treat it as the thing itself—worth enjoying now, in its current state.
Do what you love and love what you do isn’t a platitude when retirement-age authors practice it. It’s an ongoing decision and approach, and it makes their businesses more sustainable, not less.
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Which of these five lessons do you most need to hear right now? Which one of these is consistently the hardest for you?
If you’re a retirement-age or approaching-retirement author who recognizes yourself in any of this—the beginner’s mind, the present-tense urgency, the willingness to try things, the desire to build something meaningful while also enjoying the ride—I’d love to talk.
I’m developing the Retirement Author’s Business Studio: the same strategic rigor and personalized approach as my Author’s Business Accelerator, designed specifically for where you are in your life and career. It’s the same commitment to building a sustainable, income-generating author business that fits your specific books, readers, and situation, but more spacious, more enjoyable, more attuned to the particular freedoms and priorities of this season of life.
If this sounds like what you’ve been looking for, reach out. No hard sell, no pressure—just a conversation about what you’re building and whether this might be the right support for it.
Contact me at sharon@conspirecreative.com or schedule a free call.
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