Goodreads asked Kelly Coon:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Kelly Coon Get a solid base of smaller publications before you start querying your novel. It's important to establish that you have some success in the writing world--even unrelated to fiction-- because it indicates that perhaps you can put words together in a somewhat coherent way.

Submitting essays and writing blogs isn't just good for cred, either. It can hone your skills by pointing out some of your weaknesses, too. If you're constantly turned down for essays because you can't focus your thoughts or struggle mightily with grammar, it's best to fix that before plunging into an entire novel and getting 56 rejections in a row.

And always, always, always try again. But when you do, be smart. Fail forward and fail better. Learn what you did wrong and fix it. In other words, be smarter than I was when I first started! I failed hard and horribly at first and didn't learn from my mistakes. When I finally started paying attention, and working very hard at honing my craft, I began to find success.

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