Use your strategic skills in placing articles on Internet too. Even if you don't receive payment, you can use your work to your advantage. I placed a few articles on a high-profile site that allowed its contributors to post book proposals. The result is that a publisher has expressed in interest in my writing a reference book.

I also run a website that is not only a means of publicising my work but offers various kinds of support for writers too. This is an effective way of putting yourself in public domain. Do I hear some groans of despair out there? I know not everyone feels at ease with web page design and domain names and rest of it. It's okay. You can join a writers' online community and set up your web pages without needing any technical knowledge. And cost is minimal. It's all part of strategy because you can start to network. Networking is important. You need to build up a circle of people who can advise you, inform you, read your work and, eventually, commission you.

But, I hear you say, you're hardly a household name, so why do you claim this strategy has worked. No, I'm no J.K. Rowling and probably never will be. But this November I'll be holding my first novel in my hands, in print. Like a number of other British writers I stumbled across a publisher called Publish America. Now this is something of a ground breaker in publishing. It welcomes new authors. It's not Rolls Royce of publishers, more bottom-of-the-range, daily runabout model. It won't pay you an advance on royalties, it won't do any developmental editing (but then few traditional publishers do that now) and it will expect you to be active in marketing. But it is not vanity publishing and it will place your books in all big online bookstores. As far as I'm concerned, this has taken me another step along my chosen route.

Of course I hope my next novel will be taken up my a mainstream publisher so I'm still following my strategy. And it's going to plan. I have just been 'highly commended' in a competition in which I entered an extract from my novel in progress. The next stage is to complete that (no small task), then to query agents and publishers. When I do so, I will have a lot more to tell them about my publishing history than if I hadn't worked out a strategy.