Robin Stevens’s Advice to New Authors

A lot of people give advice about how to write a novel, and that’s great. But I’m more and more getting the feeling that all anyone can really tell an aspiring writer is ‘start writing and keep on writing until you’ve finished the story’).

It’s rarer to see advice about what to do once the book has an agent, and a book deal, but actually, I think that this sort of thing would be far more practically useful. I thought it would be simple (and slightly magical), but it turns out that there are lots of surprising pitfalls, and lots of people around you who think you know what you’re doing – whereas in reality you barely know which way is up. So here are some things that I think every new author ought to know.

• That advance? It isn’t all yours. Not only does some of it go to…