One other caution is necessary. Avoid quoting from other people's writings. With some amateurs this amounts to a most irritating mania. Now and then, an apt quotation may serve to enforce a point, but the beginner should be sparing in their use.
Remember that people, as a rule, do not care to pay for what they have already read elsewhere! Also, a publisher only reckons to purchase original matter (apart from books that are avowedly compilations).
In any case, you are not gaining practice in original writing if you are merely copying out what some one else has written.
The Reader Must Be Interested
The first essential in any publication is that it shall interest people, especially the people who, it is hoped, will buy it. Every book does not appeal to the same type of reader; but every book should appeal to some type of reader, and it should interest that type of reader, or it will prove a failure.
This does not necessarily mean that it must keep the reader wrought up to a high pitch of excitement, or squirming with laughter, or bathed in tears—though a judicious mixture of these things may contribute much to the success of your work. It means that what you propose to tell people must be something they will want to hear; and when you start to tell it to them, you must tell it in such a way that they will be keen for you to continue.
Beginners often think the main point is their own interest in what they write. It is certainly desirable that we ourselves should be interested in what we write, otherwise the chances are it will not be worth reading; but it is still more important that what we write should interest other people. I have known a book to sell well, though the author was thoroughly bored when writing it; but I have never known a book to sell well if the public were thoroughly bored when trying to read it!
If your Writings do not Grip, they will not Sell