Catherine Ryan Hyde

If you can't pay it back, pay it forward.

As authors, we all have to learn not to be reactive to public statements about our books. It's really not our business what each reader thinks of them.

One of the nice things about publishing with Amazon is that the window for marketing is much longer than with a traditional publisher because these titles are not coming off of shelves.

Sometime around 2006, I decided I had missed my true calling as a young adult author.

When I write, my goal is to delve deeply enough into the human experience to find a sort of universality. Once you dig down underneath surface differences, we are all human beings. And all human beings want essentially the same things at our core. We want to love and be loved. We want to be safe. We want our loved ones to be safe.

Those who write may think they know their target market. They may even feel they can shape the work to fit it. If this is true of you, you have more control over your creative process than I do. Even so, I humbly submit that you try letting your writing shape your target market instead and see what happens.

I've been known to write 10 pages a day for 10 days running before I take a breath. I am not a disciplined writer. I'm one of those people who laughingly call themselves inspirational writers, which basically means someone who has no control over their own creative process.

Grownups have a tendency to talk themselves out of things, saying it will never work, but kids are fabulously optimistic.