1. If you want to have a successful book, marketing and promotion take over your life and you can’t write anymore.
2. Male writers are adept at taking themselves seriously and carving out time to write, women writers are not. Well, they are, until the cat is ill, or your husband needs dinner. This is a problem.
3. Life carries on even when your book is at the top of the bestseller chart, and you have to deal with it. This is unexpected.
4. If you don’t write while the builders are in, and the kids have moved back home, you will never finish
5. Writers’ block is for people with time to spare, I sit down and start typing.
6. Writing is lonely, and solitary and often depressing.
7. You will find encouragement in the strangest people and discouragement in your friends….not in all of them but certainly in some. People have agendas and motivations and resentments you won’t expect.
8. Writing a book and seeing it on a shelf in a bookshop is fabulous. It’s long, and frustrating and you need determination, but the end result does live up to the hype.
9. You are lucky if you make any money, do it for the love of your art then use your business skills if you have any to transform the book into a money making platform.
10. Writing is the most anonymous of professions, you can be at the to of the best seller list and hardly anyone will know who you are, and if you are lucky enough to have it made into a film, you have to fight not to be expunged.