Your spouse, a sibling, a friend need to read your drafts. They have to be people unafraid to tell you what sucks. For early feedback, that's more important than professional editorial skill. Most people know what sucks.

Don't write more than 3 hours at a time. I write three hours in the morning, 9 A.M. - 12 P.M. Other people are best late at night.

Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.

A comparison of the average professional baseball salary to the national average salary over the last one hundred years shows that for the first fifty years, 1920-1970, baseball players held a steady multiple of about 3.4 times the national average income.

If there is going to be any meaningful sales, it's going to be through word of mouth and people recommending it to their book club and then a thousand more book clubs do it, and then you get into real sales numbers.

If you have one true friend you have more than your share.