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I hired my son to work for me and here's what happened ...

Published about 2 years ago • 2 min read

Hiring family can be tricky. It's scary enough to invest in a publishing assistant when you're on a tight budget. (Trust me, hiring my first assistant back in 2017 was the scariest step I'd taken in my author career up until that point, and I stressed over the decision for weeks before and weeks after.)

Having an assistant comes with tons of benefits. It frees your time to write. It gets certain tasks that drain your energy off your to-do list. Assistants can help with formatting, social media, ads, newsletters ... whatever job you need filled, there's somebody willing to do it for you for pay!

BUT ... what happens when you want to hire someone you're related to? On the one hand, hiring family has amazing benefits. You're helping somebody out by providing them with a job, a paycheck, and training. You presumably will have an easier time trusting a relative with sensitive information than you would a VA you hired off fiverr. Working together as a family might even give you more reasons to enjoy one another's company. Having a shared project to work on together can definitely bring two people together.

My son is 14 and works for me for five to ten hours a week. For my fiction business, he helps me create Amazon ads, proofs emails and blurbs, and makes sure my royalty reports get uploaded to my Readerlinks for tracking. For Successful Writer, he's the guy in charge of uploading cpurse videos, keeping the Successful Writer podcast feed up to date, posting webinar replays, and creating the pretty images you see on my course sales page.

In our case, this situation works out really well. He gets spending money, we've started a college savings account (where the taxes owed are less than if I took that money out of my own earnings and saved it on his behalf), and he will graduate high school with job experience that will likely be high in demand. (Anybody looking to hire a publishing assistant in 2025 just let him know!)

But not EVERYbody you're related to is going to make for an ideal hire. There are some pitfalls to be aware of as well.

It's fairly easy for me to act as my son's boss, because I've been telling him what to do for his entire life! When you're working with someone like a spouse, that can get trickier. When my son makes a mistake (which is rare but does happen!), I don't feel bad pointing it out, whereas if it was somebody sensitive whose feelings I didn't want to hurt, I'd have a harder time. (Sometimes it's easier to manage a stranger than somebody you share a house with. There's a reason people tell you not to do your "business" where you eat.)

If you're considering hiring a family member, make sure you're hiring them based on their strengths. It might SOUND like the perfect idea to hire your niece to do your editing, but if she's really bad at catching typos, it's not in your or her best interest to add that to her job description. Just because your spouse is married to an author doesn't mean they'll be amazing at running ads and creating social media graphics!

Lastly, it's important to have solid boundaries and know when to take off your boss hat. If my son started to get overly stressed out, if I found that his working for me impacted our relationship, I'd hire somebody else or we'd come up with an arrangement that didn't put our closeness at risk. In other words, family trumps business. Always.

If you've been on the fence about hiring a publishing assistant, hopefully this gave you some nice food for thought! Be on the lookout, because future Successful Writer trainings might even involve how to work with a VA. Until then ... happy writing and talk to you soon.

To your success!

Alana

P.S. Attention novelists! The price for our Creating Compelling Characters course is going up at the end of the week, so you have one more day to grab it at a discount.

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