The Indie Scholar Blueprint · Free
You were built for the intellectual life.
The university just isn't where it happens anymore — and for a lot of us, it never was. The Indie Scholar Blueprint is a short, free guide to making a real living reading, writing, and thinking on your own terms. No institution required.
An old tradition. A modern blueprint.
Spinoza ground lenses. Hume wrote history on commission. Emerson sold out lecture halls. The independent scholar is not a new hustle — it is an old and honorable tradition. The Indie Scholar Blueprint is how to live it now.
A practical guide for the independent scholar.
Short, concrete, distilled from six years of building a working life of reading, writing, and teaching outside the academy. Read it in an evening. Act on one thing the next morning. Free PDF.
A practical guide for the independent scholar.
Distilled from six years of full-time writing, reading, and teaching outside the academy — what to focus on, what to write, how to find readers, and how to make a real living at it. Read it in an evening. Free PDF.
What's in it
- How independent scholars actually earn — the handful of models that work outside a salary.
- What to write, what to publish, and how readers find you when you have no institution behind you.
- The rhythm of work a serious intellectual life requires — and the mistakes that quietly end one.
- The lineage you're joining: Spinoza, Hume, Emerson, and the modern version of their arrangement.
Who wrote this
I finished my PhD in 2014 and was a professor for five years. In 2019 I left and moved all of my writing and teaching online. It took three years to cross six figures, mostly from philosophy courses covering everything from Plato to Deleuze. The Blueprint is the working model, distilled — meant to be read in an evening and acted on the next morning.
This is for people for whom reading and thinking are not optional. If that's not you, this guide won't land. If it is, you already know.