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I think I made my first short fiction sale in 2005. I had been writing unsuccessfully before that.

You have to write the story that's at the front of your head. There is no point in trying to write for the market; it won't ring true.

Publishers were ever eager for authors to do their own publicity because nobody else was willing to do it for nothing. But then it became clear that if you want somebody to champion the story, there's nobody better than the person who made it all up.

Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.

I've got five or six unpublished stories kicking around looking for somebody to buy them.

I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.

Each piece of content you create should lead your readers further down the path to purchase. Typically, sales and leads won't happen until a prospect has had multiple points of contact with you, so don't expect sales after a single blog post.

By no means did my first book sell. I took a few runs at it. You'll never see those early efforts 'cause they're burned, straight to the fireplace where they belong.

I'll have to self-publish it because unless you're on the 'New York Times' bestseller lists, anthologies don't sell all that well. However, low sales to a big publisher are a major success to a small one!