Great comment. I'm a final year PhD student right now who is planning on doing something similar. If you wouldn't mind, could you email me at the address in my

Great comment. I'm a final year PhD student right now who is planning on doing something similar. If you wouldn't mind, could you email me at the address in my profile here? I'm interested in learning more about your approach. In addition to consulting I'm also considering the following: - being an expert witness (a type of consulting) - translating papers and books (worked for Julian Barbour during the cold war, but I'm not qualified and don't suspect there is great demand) - being a lecturer or adjunct at a university (In my field it's about 10K USD per class best I can tell. My goal with this would be to help smooth out your income if consulting is too volatile. Also gives you access to university resources.) - writing technical books (unlikely to be enough on its own, but I'm looking more into people who have done this) - teaching workshops/short courses (Works for Edward Tufte. If books can be pirated easily then it might be best to give away the PDFs for free, sell hard copies, and make most of the money with workshops.) - science journalism (probably a dead end) - open source (D. Richard Hipp seems to have an interesting approach) - donations/crowdfunding (probably not sufficient but worth looking more closely at) - small grants (my advisor recommended this)