Goodreads asked Lynda Engler:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Lynda Engler First, learn about the publishing world, and then keep learning because it changes all the time. I was lucky because I began my career straight out of college working for a national book store chain (yes kids, there used to be STORES that sold physical books!) Learn about what editors and publishers want. Learn about writing; this is where spelling DOES count… and grammar, and tense, and punctuation, and word order. All those rules your English teachers tried to teach you… PLEASE learn them. A great plot with awesome characters will NOT make a good book if it’s badly written.

Second, read everything you can. Don’t even think about becoming a writer if you haven’t spent your lifetime being a reader. Read in and out of your genre. Read the top sellers because your manuscript will be compared to those. Read the Classics – ok read SOME of the Classics. Some are just awful. I’m sorry but some of the “great” books are unreadable in this day and age. Don’t get me started on the Classics that I hated.

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