Creative Careers: Jack Heath
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A writer. An actor. A dancer. A singer.
They’re the professions that many of us spend our childhoods aspiring to—but what is the reality of life in the spotlight?
Sarina Talip finds out for HerCanberra’s Summer Magazine: Shine.
JACK HEATH
For bestselling author Jack Heath, it’s been a long, hard slog. At 33, he’s already written 31 thrillers for adults and children.
Jack wrote his first book when he was a 17-year-old student at Lyneham High School. When he got the book contract, he was in his first semester of a music composition degree at the Australian National University. He dropped out to edit the book but has since regretted not completing a degree.
As a naive 19-year-old, he thought he’d won the publishing lottery. But reality quickly set in. “My third royalty cheque was actually 0 dollars and 0 cents—it just hadn’t earned out its advance. I was very poor for that next six months when I was waiting for the next cheque.”
He was living in a tiny apartment in Lyneham and surviving on apples and kangaroo sausages, which was all he could afford.
“Crucially though, at any time I could have just moved back in with my parents… So that’s another storytelling diversity thing, you only hear the stories from the people who have that safety net.
“I’d been surrounded by all these other authors whom I’d met at writer’s festivals and who all seemed so successful. Later on I realised that a lot of those people had either day jobs or rich spouses. In one case, a guy who I thought was the most successful author, it turned out that his parents had just given him a million‑dollar apartment.”
Jack only become a full-time author in the last two years. Before that, he had day jobs to pay the bills. He worked in a call centre for an IT company, sold televisions at the Good Guys in Belconnen, and then worked at Dymocks where he “shamelessly” spruiked his own books.
Then his book 300 Minutes of Danger did “really well,” so he was able to go down from working four days a week at the book store to three, then to two, then to one.
He felt “safe enough” to quit in December 2017. He realises he’s one of not many Australian authors who can make a living from just writing.
To beat the odds he advises writers to just make “lots and lots of attempts.” He adds, “I wrote 31 books, three of them have been massive bestsellers, the other ones just did OK, and it’s not like those three were better than any of the others. It was just a matter of them falling into the hands of the right readers at the right times.
“That’s why whenever I have any big royalty cheque or sell film rights, I’m like, ‘Straight onto the mortgage.’ I don’t want to go back to the call centre.” He shakes his head emphatically.
Feature image: Photox-Canberra Photography Services
This article originally appeared in Magazine: Shine for Summer 2019/20, available for free while stocks last. Find out more about Magazine here.
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