$5.37
Academia is no longer the stable, well-paid profession it used to be. These days it’s common to cobble together some kind of living wage from multiple jobs – most of them paid by the hour or extremely short contracts. Some people call this a ‘portfolio career’: but to us this term seems to be an attempt to put a positive spin on what academia really is for many people: an uncertain, precarious work life.
I wrote this book with my friend and colleague, Dr Narelle Lemon.
Twenty years ago, right about when we started our academic careers, a period of casual teaching and research assistant work was seen as the start of an academic career. Now a significant number of people spend entire careers working as a casual (or ‘adjunct’ as they are called in the USA). Casual academics are anything but casual about their work. We meet passionate and committed academics all the time who want to stay in the teaching and research they love but are not making enough money from it to survive.
This short book was born of our frustration with this precarious work situation. While we are fans of collective action, in the meantime a person must eat. We’re both quite good at generating ‘extra income’ on top of our academic salaries. We use this money to attend conferences overseas, buy books, access expensive subscription services (looking at you ChatGPT and Claude), hire in help, and get the latest equipment – all stuff our universities won’t pay for. Now that we have both reached the highest pay grade in the Australian system, this extra income is big enough to cause us both headaches at tax time. As Taylor Swift would say, this is a champagne problem. We want you to have this champagne problem too!
Description
Academia is no longer the stable, well-paid profession it used to be. These days it’s common to cobble together some kind of living wage from multiple jobs – most of them paid by the hour or extremely short contracts. Some people call this a ‘portfolio career’: but to us this term seems to be an attempt to put a positive spin on what academia really is for many people: an uncertain, precarious work life.
I wrote this book with my friend and colleague, Dr Narelle Lemon.
Twenty years ago, right about when we started our academic careers, a period of casual teaching and research assistant work was seen as the start of an academic career. Now a significant number of people spend entire careers working as a casual (or ‘adjunct’ as they are called in the USA). Casual academics are anything but casual about their work. We meet passionate and committed academics all the time who want to stay in the teaching and research they love but are not making enough money from it to survive.
This short book was born of our frustration with this precarious work situation. While we are fans of collective action, in the meantime a person must eat. We’re both quite good at generating ‘extra income’ on top of our academic salaries. We use this money to attend conferences overseas, buy books, access expensive subscription services (looking at you ChatGPT and Claude), hire in help, and get the latest equipment – all stuff our universities won’t pay for. Now that we have both reached the highest pay grade in the Australian system, this extra income is big enough to cause us both headaches at tax time. As Taylor Swift would say, this is a champagne problem. We want you to have this champagne problem too!
People have noticed our success (and our lovely laptops). They keep asking us questions like: how we find the time for our side hustle? how do we know what to charge people? How do ‘do branding’, manage money and protect our IP. And many other topics besides. We find ourselves at workshops and conferences having intense, hour long conversations with colleagues about how to set up PayPal or choose a content management system for a newsletter. There was enough interest, we decided, for a book on the subject – but none of the conventional academic publishers were interested. They all said, “that’s a bit niche”. But niche is opportunity in the side hustle business! So, we decided to go it alone.
The first version of this small book was written in a single weekend in Victor Harbour, South Australia, with the help of Claude Opus. This is the first version of the book. If there’s enough interest, we will do a second release as a proper ebook with a cover. There’s a feedback survey planted in the text of this book. Follow the link and give us feedback and we will send you version two (if we write it) for free!