Only in the traditional publishing world. Readers, especially genre readers on Kindle, do not care about the publisher, agent, or the industry trappings, they o

Only in the traditional publishing world. Readers, especially genre readers on Kindle, do not care about the publisher, agent, or the industry trappings, they only want good stories. The situation is analagous to iphone or steam indie games: if you work hard and are persistent and can overcome the problem of visibility, you can find an audience and make a living. Some make six figures or more just on Kindle. But you have a job, you don't need to do that. You can write part-time, focus on short stories, get a better idea of where your current ability level is, decide if it's a hobby you do want to pursue and to what extent, join critique groups, and then try to get published in short fiction markets. Short form lets you complete something, have it evaluated, withoug having sunk multiple years into a single manuscript. The last thing an aspiring writer with a full-time job should do is get emotionally invested in a single novel that takes years to finish and never goes anywhere because they never learned to write fiction properly in the first place.