Goodreads asked Paul Tudor Owen:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Paul Tudor Owen I think there are really two main lessons I took from the whole process of writing The Weighing of the Heart and getting it published. One is that you can’t take no for an answer. You’ve got to keep trying to find an agent, a publisher, keep trying to get your book into the shops, trying to promote it. Nobody else is going to do it except you.

Having a book published by a small publisher, it’s your own responsibility to do a lot of the marketing, and that kind of relentless self-promotion practically goes against your nature as a British person. So the way I deal with it is just to channel my inner American and think: how would a New Yorker handle this? They would say: here’s my book, it’s brilliant, you should read it. If Instagram had existed in F Scott Fitzgerald’s day, he would have been posting pictures of himself and Zelda reading his novel in the pool at the Ritz complete with a bouncing gif of a shark with books for eyes…

The other lesson is to just keep writing. Don’t get disheartened. If you’re good, there will come a point when people are interested. And the best thing you can do in the years until that happens is write as much as you can, keep improving, keep experimenting, keep practicing. And then you’ll be ready when that happens. It will all have been worth it in the end.

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