10 Pieces of Bad Advice New Writers Get from Unhelpful Friends

Bad advice and false friends can destroy a career before it starts

by Anne R. Allen

Happy Easter! I hope everybody is enjoying biting the ears of chocolate bunnies, eating expensive hen’s eggs you’ve dyed garish colors, and other fun seasonal rituals. Yes, I love them all, and I admit to nearly decapitating a chocolate bunny this morning.

But hey, I’m also celebrating by launching a new book. The Hour of the Moth is the ninth in my Camilla Randall Mysteries series. (You don’t have to read them in order: each is a stand-alone.) It’s now available on Amazon. The paper book is also available at Barnes and Noble

When Camilla allows a neighboring business to hold a “Moth Hour” storytelling event in the courtyard of her beachy California bookstore, she finds an inconvenient corpse left in the audience after the event. The deceased, a storyteller famous for his appearances on NPR, turns out to have a shady past — and a lot of enemies. Unfortunately, Camilla’s boyfriend Ronzo is one of them. When it turns out the famous storyteller has been murdered, Ronzo becomes a “person of interest,” and goes into hiding.

It’s up to Camilla — and her cat Buckingham — to discover which of the quirky storytellers who attended the Moth event is the real killer. Each story contains a clue to the mystery. One of the storytellers is in possession of some stolen diamonds, one has a strange relationship with racoons, and another, who first appears to be a helpful friend, is anything but.

Bad Advice and False Friends Can be Dangerous

What the book is really about is false friends who give us bad advice. Some are false allies, and some are false enemies. (There’s a great post from Sue Coletta this week at Story Empire on both.)

Why are we so often drawn to those bad friends, like those suicidal moths that fly into the flames that will kill them?

I’ve been thinking about how many new writers listen to the wrong people, who end up wasting their time and may lead them to give up on writing altogether.

Here’s some of the bad advice authors need to avoid, no matter how friendly it may seem.

1) Land a Publishing Contract and You Can Quit Your Day Job

I think the biggest, baddest lie about this business is that authors make a lot of money once they land that publishing contract. How many times have your friends joked, “will you still talk to me when you’re rich and famous”?

You can tell them to relax, because it’s unlikely to be a problem.

Why this is bad advice: publishing advances have been evaporating in the past decades. Agents are saying, “$10,000 is the new $50,000”. Also, it’s important to know that $10,000 comes in several installments, over a couple of years, and of course the agent gets 15% (not that they don’t earn every penny.)

Better advice: don’t quit your day job.

2) Everybody Out There Wants to Steal your Fabulous Plot, so Keep it a Secret!

It’s true that plagiarism is a big problem these days, but not of unedited, unpublished manuscripts. Pirates can lift books right off fan fiction sites or Amazon, so why would they want somebody’s first draft?

Why this is bad advice: no matter how original you think your concept is, plot theft is unlikely. The truth is that everybody’s got a story. It’s how you write it that matters.

As Anna Quindlen said, “Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.”

Since the copyright law reforms of the 1970s, copyrighting your work before it’s published has been the mark of a paranoid amateur.

Especially if you’re sending it off to agents. If you mention in your query that you’ve copyrighted the material, “so don’t think you can steal this fabulous idea and publish it yourself” you can expect instant rejection.

3) When You Have Talent, Spelling and Grammar Don’t Matter.

“You’ll have editors to take care of all that stuff,” the friend will tell you. “The only thing that’s important is creativity.”

That may be true when you’re seven, but it’s really bad advice when you’re trying to launch a professional career.

Would you hire a plumber who didn’t know how to use a wrench? Words and grammar are a writer’s tools. If you can’t use them properly, nobody’s going to hire you for the job. Not an agent; not an editor; not a reader.

4) You Wrote a Whole Book; It Deserves to be Published!

Thank your friend for the enthusiasm and support, but no. Yes, writing a book is a huge achievement, and they say only about 3% of people who start writing one will finish. You deserve major congratulations.

But your book may not “deserve” publication. Almost all successful writers have a few “practice books” hidden away somewhere. I sure do. I recently unearthed one and realized it had too many characters, too much plot, and no dominant story arc. It was like a series of sitcom episodes.

Successfully publishing book-length fiction is like getting to Carnegie Hall. It takes practice, practice, practice.

If you query too soon, or self-publish a book that has huge structural flaws, you won’t just waste your own money and time: you waste your readers’ time, and they won’t be back.

But still, writing is one of the most fulfilling jobs around. You get to create worlds. You live a life of the mind. And it’s fun.

Don’t let the bad advice take you places where you’ll only get rejection.

5) Query Agents to Get Feedback.

I often hear new writers encouraging each other to “send it out: it can’t hurt to try.” (This often comes from your critique group, who are re-e-e-e-ally tired of reworking chapter one for the sixteenth time.)

But this is bad advice because actually, it can hurt. A lot. Rejection is no fun.

And these days, most agents don’t give feedback of any kind. Even the gentlest suggestion can backfire when upset authors retaliate with nasty return emails or worse.

That’s why a good percentage of agents don’t respond to queries at all unless they’re interested, and most of the others send a one sentence generic note along the lines of “this does not fit our needs at this time.”

For more on what rejections really mean, here’s Ruth Harris’s post on the subject.

DO NOTE: Agents don’t get paid for reading your queries. They don’t owe you feedback. They only get paid when they sell a book, and if your book isn’t ready to sell, you’re clogging up the pipeline and slowing down the process for other writers (like maybe you, a couple of years from now) who really are ready to publish.

The way to get feedback is to take a class, join a critique group, or find a beta reader.

6) Start with Genre Fiction, because it’s Easy to Write.

People will tell you to start with something “easy” like a romance/ mystery/ kid’s book.  I heard that one a lot when I was starting out. So the first book I tried to write was a romance. I spent nearly eight months on it. Oh, what a disaster!  I learned the hard way that every genre takes years to learn to write well. And if you don’t love a genre and read it voraciously, you’ll never be good enough to gain an audience.

This is true whether you self-publish or go the traditional route.

Readers are just as picky as agents when it comes to choosing what they buy. They don’t want fill-in-the-blanks fiction. They want passion and originality within their genre.

Also, if your book is successful in getting a traditional publisher or a bunch of fans, they’re going to want more of the same. Whatever genre you succeed in is the one you’ll be expected to write throughout your career. Why would you do that with a genre you don’t love?

7) Write What’s Selling.

This is really bad advice because whatever is selling now — like Romantasy — will be history by the time your book comes out. Think about all the “hot” genres that have come and gone in the past decade.

Traditional publishing has smoked its last 50 Shades cigarette and sneaked out the back door without leaving a note. Dystopian apocalypses have met their Armageddon. Vampires and zombies have been safely returned to their graves, and werepersons, angel/demons and witch/warlocks have been banished to the shadows from whence they came.

The known authors in these genres may still be selling, but traditional publishing is saturated and won’t look at new writers in most of these genres. You can self-publish, but you’ll be on the tail end of a waning trend, so you’ll need to bring something original to it.

8) You Can Launch a Career with One Book.

Blame the movies: the writer-hero struggles to finish that opus, finally types the last page, sends it to an agent and voila! — he has a contract and a book tour and he’s an overnight millionaire.

This doesn’t happen anymore. If it ever did. For self-publishers, it’s almost impossible to get a readership with one book. Most successful marketing of self-published books is based on free and cheap deals to entice readers to come in and sample your work so they’ll buy more. If there’s no “more”, all you’re doing is giving away the store.

And even if you’re going the traditional route, you need at least two books. I know this from experience, too.

I landed an agent with one of my first queries, and she had it six months and almost made a deal with Bantam. But did I use that time to work hard on a second book? No. I wasted my leisure hours obsessing about stupid stuff like whether I should quit my day job.

When the deal fell through, my agent asked if I had anything else. I didn’t. So she dropped me. I thought I could regain the magic with another agent, but by then the book had been out on submission to editors and no agent would touch it.

Because this was back in the pre-Kindle days, I was back at square one with an unpublishable manuscript.

9) Don’t Pay an Expensive Editor:  Just Self-Publish and Get Feedback from Reviews

No. No. NO!! This one makes me cringe. Anyone who tells you this is giving you really bad advice. First of all, this gives ammunition to every self-publishing hater out there. You’re adding to the “tsunami of crap” indies are accused of perpetrating.

And using Amazon or Goodreads customer reviewers as your critique group is one of the worst ideas ever. Anybody who thinks they’re going to learn anything from online reviews hasn’t read them.

Could George Orwell have learned from this review of 1984?

“I highly reccomend that you DO NOT READ THIS BOOK. And please for the love of God don’t read that “Brave New World” book by Hoxley. It is twice as worse as 1984. To put it bluntly, DON’T READ ANY GEORGE ORWELL. Your just waisting your time.””

Or maybe Tolstoy could have improved Anna Karenina after reading this?

“If you see Anna for $5 at your neighbor’s garage sale, go ahead and buy it. Hollow it out, and stash a handgun in there. Leave it next to your toilet if you have unwanted guests. Beat your disobedient child with it. Put it in your fireplace and have a nice glass of vodka. Just don’t read it! You have been warned.” 

There are places to get useful feedback — like critique groups. But even they can’t polish that book to a professional level. We all need editors.

10) Don’t Waste Time on Short Fiction: It Doesn’t Pay

This is another one I fell for. I spent way too much time working on unpublishable novels instead of honing my craft with short fiction that could build a list of credits and establish my brand.

It’s true that the big, slick magazines that used to publish fiction are long gone. But plenty of literary magazines remain. And now, there’s self-publishing.

Here are some reasons to write short-form fiction

• Short stories are the best place to hone your skills.
• Short stories can make money these days, both as stand-alone ebooks and in anthologies. (And anthologies are great marketing tools.)
• Publishing credits for short fiction and essays makes you more attractive to agents, publishers, and readers.
• Winning a story contest gives your self-confidence a boost. (And you might even win a little cash.)
• It’s a whole lot easier to traditionally publish a short story than a novel: there are thousands of literary magazines and contests in the US, but only five major book publishing houses.

And the good people at Authors Publish are offering a FREE book on how to place your writing in literary journals.

Happy writing, everybody, and remember that non-writers are likely to give you bad advice on writing, no matter how good their intentions.

by Anne R. Allen (@annerallen, @annerallen.bsky.social) April 20, 2025

What about you, scriveners? Did you get any of this bad advice when you were starting out? Did it hold you back in advancing your career? What’s the worst advice you got when you were a beginning writer?

Apologies for the glitchy tech! Images keep disappearing. But our intrepid webmaster is on the case! 

Launching This Weekend!!

Ebook and paper book available at Amazon. Paper book also available at Barnes and Noble

NPR fans, there are Easter Eggs in this story just for you!

When Camilla Randall allows a neighboring business to hold a “Moth Hour” storytelling event in the courtyard of her beachy California bookstore, she finds an inconvenient corpse left in the audience after the event. The deceased, a storyteller famous for his appearances on NPR, turns out to have a shady past — and a lot of enemies. Unfortunately, Camilla’s boyfriend Ronzo is one of them.

And for readers on the Central Coast of California, you can hear professional actors read scenes from the book–and several others–next weekend

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featured image: Gratisography from Pexels Free Images.