Novelist and all-around brilliant prose crafter Hilary Mantel has great advice for writers, here’s a few tastes:

• Are you serious about this? Then get an accountant.
• Write a book you’d like to read. If you wouldn’t read it, why would anybody else? Don’t write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book’s ready.
• Be aware that anything that appears before “Chapter One” may be skipped. Don’t put your vital clue there.

Anybody who wrote both Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies should be listened to.