Survey time

I was all set to do a post on first adolescent celebrity crushes, spurred by a remark from the mom of one of Diva's classmates: the classmate is insisting on doing tea every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Because tea is British. And One Direction is British. And this classmate, like several other girls in Diva's class, adores One Direction.

I'm still going to do that post (I told Classmate Mom that when I was her daughter's age, I only wanted to wear purple socks and I insisted that when I was old enough, I'd convert to Mormon:

This was the first album I ever owned, BTW.)

But I'm not doing that post today. Instead, today I'm going to be selfish and solicit opinions.

I'm working on a book--nonfiction, this time.It's aimed at unpublished, hopefully-soon-to-be-published, authors. I'm addressing topics I think hopeful newbies need to know before the're published so that, after they're published, they don't have to learn on the fly or from making mistakes.

It got me to thinking about what I wished I'd known when I was first about to be published; I wish I'd known more about marketing e-books, because it's not the same as marketing print books.

On the other hand, I think I had a definite advantage in that, long before she bought my first book, Angela James recommended that I join Romance Divas. It changed my life, introducing me to the world of contests and crit groups and letting me catch a glimpse of what published authors dealt with before I had to deal with it.

If you're an author, what kind of things do you wish you'd known about before you made your first sale?

A second question: if you use Word, how proficient in it are you? I tend to assume most people who use Word are comfortable working with styles, doing TOCs and bookmarks and hyperlinks. I could be wrong, though; I know Word backwards and forwards because I've been a legal secretary and a legal word processor and a law librarian for  25 years. I tend to think that stuff I'm good at, everyone's good at. But maybe I'm wrong.

So. If you care to participate, leave comments. If you're an author -- what do you know now that you wish you knew then? And whether you're an author or not -- if you use Word, do you know how to do "serious formatting" -- styles, hyperlinks, etc.?