Goodreads asked Angela Benedetti:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Angela Benedetti Write. Write a lot. Read. Write. Take a class. Write. Read a book about writing. Write some more. Finish a story, send it out or indie pub it, and start another one. Until you have a substantial body of work (like twenty or more stories published) marketing is a useless waste. If you really enjoy blogging or tweeting or whatever, and would do it anyway, then do that fun thing because it's fun, but don't do promo stuff just because you think you should. And the worst thing you can do is publish your first book, then take the next year off of writing to "promo." Don't do that.

The second worst thing you can do is let other people put limits on what you write. If you want to write a sequel to your last book, then write it. If you want to write something completely new, do that. If you want to write a story in a new subgenre, or a new genre, then do that. If you want to try something that sounds crazy, go ahead and try it. Don't write something just because you think others expect it of you, or NOT write something because you think some people might not like it. Write what you want, and worry about where to publish it after. (While you write the next thing.)

If you go tradpub -- submitting to editors and waiting for acceptance or rejection -- you'll probably be getting a lot of rejections for a while. Maybe for years. This goes with not letting other people limit you; if you want a tradpub career, keep writing and studying and writing and learning and writing and trying. If you still think a story that's gathered a dozen or twenty rejection slips is good, then indie pub it and let the readers decide. There are people making a living off of their indie pubbed books, and plenty of genres and subgenres the big publishers decided were dead are blooming again because there are readers who love them, and indie publishing is reaching them. It might be that tradpub editors don't think your work has enough of a market, but there might be plenty of readers to support indie pubbed book in that genre or subgenre or tone or form.

Or if all you have is fifty or a hundred form rejections, maybe your craftsmanship isn't up to par yet. Keep working, studying, writing.

Keep writing. (Can't say that enough.) Writing is like any craft -- mastering it takes hours and hours and YEARS of practice. Writing is the only craft, the only art, where popular wisdom says that Baby's First Project can be polished up to professional standards if you just keep reworking and reworking and reworking it. Imagine getting your first trumpet lesson ever, and learning to honk out "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," and going immediately out to the park to play your song with a hat at your feet for tips. Or getting your first set of oil paints and doing a painting of your mother, then working on That One Painting over and over, scraping and repainting and adding and scraping and repainting, until you find a gallery willing to take it. :P That sounds dumb, doesn't it? But a large chunk of the writing community (not counting most of the published writers, but a lot of the unpublished writers and way too many teachers) encourages exactly that, the idea that Baby's First Story can be rewritten and rewritten, and polished-polished-polished until a paying market will accept it, if you just work hard enough and focus on perfecting that one story. Don't do that! Write something, send it out, write something else. You'll learn MUCH more from writing six stories than you will from writing one story and rewriting it five times. That path leads into the pit of doom! Write new words regularly -- every week if not every day. Especially if you're just starting out, learning and improving your skills should be your main goal, and you do that by writing lots and lots and LOTS of stories.

(And even when you've been at this for a while, you should still be learning and growing and improving. It never stops, you'll never have learned all there is to know, or max out all your skills.)

Schedule your writing time first. Writing means writing new words. Editing is not writing. Research is not writing. Submitting, or formatting and making a cover is not writing. Marketing and promo are most definitely not writing. Protect the writing first. If you have five hours free per week to work on your writing, spend at least four of them actually writing. All five is better, especially if you're just starting out.

Once you've got your writing time locked in, find some more time to read and learn. Read a lot of books, a lot of stories. Keep up with the genre(s) you write in, yes, but also read stories in other genres, and from other times, and from other cultures; they'll give you new styles and new techniques and new structures. Read non-fiction; it'll give you more things to write ABOUT. And schedule time for learning, for taking a class or reading a how-to book. If you want to indie pub, figure out what you need to learn -- setting up a business, formatting, designing and making covers, writing blurbs and other marketing copy, bookkeeping and taxes -- and schedule time (and money when needed) to learn each thing. Spread it out; if it takes you a year or two or more to learn all the basics, that's fine. Make a reasonable schedule based on your life and your finances. Keep writing, but acquire the skills and knowledge you'll need to be a good businessperson. Note that things like setting up a business and keeping your books and doing taxes apply to people who only tradpub, as well as indie pubbers; make sure you don't get blindsided by the IRS, or whoever your local tax authorities are!

Practice. Keep writing. And don't let anyone tell you that you should write this or shouldn't write that. If you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong. :)

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