Goodreads asked Sally Spencer:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Sally Spencer If you're writing for yourself, then my only advice would be to keep reading and re-writing what you've written until you feel happy with it.

If you're writing to sell, then the first thing to do is to consider what market you're writing for, because very few books (probably none) have universal appeal. Are you writing for the teenage market? An adult market which reads to relax? An adult market which would like to be challenged? Once you have decided, so you should read some books which have been successful in that market, and try to work out what that success is based on. But you should never try to imitate any of these books. You must have your own voice, and if you do not, the reader will not warm to you.

Before you start writing, you should ask yourself what the book will have which will justify the reader giving up several hours of his time (time he'll never get back) to reading it. If you can't say what you hope he will get out of it, then it is probably not worth writing.

You should know much more about your characters than you ever tell the reader. If you have a central character called John, and I ask you what he likes to do to relax, you should know the answer - even if you've never thought about it before - because you know him.

Finally. if you find rejection hard to take, then don't become a writer - a few authors find success with their very first book, but most acquire enough rejection slips to paper a wall with.

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