Lightbulb moments

1. If you acted on every request to visit a site, check out a link, comment on a blog, read a blog and read the white paper you'd decided you had to download, you'd never get any actual work done (although you would make a lot of other people happy). It follows then that you can't keep everybody happy, so choose wisely and keep a balance between other people's needs and your own.

2. Competitions and publicity are both good for the soul and useful for raising your profile, but they don't always immediately result in increased sales. You have to fly that flag!

3. Those pellet-like things in the back garden, which look a little like miniature coffee beans are not the poo of some exotic mammal. They are in fact ivy berries. And if you'd realised this early on - or better yet listened to Anne - you could have saved 15 minutes of fruitless (excuse the pun) web searching.

4. When you've finished mourning the magazines and websites you've written for in the past that have gone bust, rejoice anew because the rights to the content are yours.

5. You're a writer not a marketeer (are they the ones in the mouse hats and t-shirts?). If nothing seems to be happening, go and write something.

6. Everything has its seasons and cycles. And each of those seasons has a purpose.

7. For some reason, people really like lists that contain a minimum of seven items.