I’ve been running a workshop that teaches people the secrets of writing a book since 2002 now. In it, I tell them how I had the first book I ever wrote accepted by the first publisher I approached. How I was fresh out of university, it was a cookbook and that I couldn’t cook.

So, why was I successful?

Was it just a fluke?

Well, back then I thought it was, but now, 26 books on, I realise that I got several things right.

So, I go to the flipchart and start to ask the audience what they think the reasons for my success might be. It always follow the same pattern. To kick off, they suggest things like focus, a good title, the right idea at the right time, a market, a wow factor and authenticity, but then the room falls silent. They wrack their brains. Then someone says, it always happens, someone says: “There’s something else though, isn’t there?” and the rest of the audience begin to nod.

You see, the other reason I succeeded was because I believed in myself. I was 23, I was young, naive, filled with hope. I did not consider for a moment that the fact that I was not a cook and had not been published before would stand in my way. I believed I had a good idea. OK, let me get it out of the way right now, before you wonder how I got away with not being a cook – though I had not written the recipes and could not cook, they had been given to me by French families while I had been living in France. The book was called French Tarts and it was a good idea and, in the mid-eighties, it was the perfect time. I truly believed I had a good chance of the book being accepted.

I believe that self-belief is the number one requirement if you want to write a book. It should not be the last thing on the list but the first. So, what follows, are five ways that I suggest you try to develop this elusive item.

1. Ask for feedback and take it, welcome it, know that without it you will never really know how good you are. Improve your chances by suggesting how you want the feedback to be served. Say you want to hear what they liked, what they felt might be missing and how they might improve it. This kind of feedback is much easier to digest and will leave you feeling good about your work.
2. Write every day. OK, almost every day. If you have a journal and are in the practice of doing ten minutes of what Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, calls Morning Pages, then you will begin to feel like a real writer rather than an imposter. You see, real writers do something phony writers don’t – they write.
3. Read other books in your market. Devour them. Make Amazon your best friend and read everything else out there that is like the one you want to write. You’ll soon find things that you consider not to be so great about each book, as well as things you’d like to emulate in yours. This will boost your confidence in your idea.
4. Get published in a small way. Nothing will make you feel more positive about your potential as an author more than already having your name in print. So write articles, start a blog, write book reviews or theatre reviews. Get your name online and in print, build a portfolio. Not only will this increase your profile and Googleability, but will also develop belief in your writing.
5. Join a class or online program, one that makes you commit to writing, forces you to do homework and ensures you turn up at the class and the page regularly. Being in a class means you get feedback from the rest of the group, if you you are lucky, and from a professional,the teacher. Practice makes perfect and is habit-forming. Try it.

If ever I get stuck or ‘lost for words’ there are a number of books that I turn to that never fail to inspire me and have me heading for the keyboard. I’d like to share them with you now.

1. OK, so everyone knows about The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, don’t they? This 10 week course will get you writing every day, for just ten minutes and will not only get your writing back on track, but will get the skeletons in your closet nicely aired too!
2. Stephen King’s On Writing is about his return to health after this famous Sci Fi author was hit by a car. It talks about how he got his own writing back on track. He is frank at all times and pulls no punches. Just as I was having a lovely old procrastinate, telling myself I’d write my novel after I’d got a new laptop, created a ‘writing corner’ and bought a new chair in which to sit, I read about King’s own experience of this and how, in the end, where he sat made no difference at all. All that mattered was that he just did it. He wrote.
3. I guess Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg was the first book on writing I ever read. It’s about writing anywhere, writing what is in your head, and giving yourself permission to ‘just go’ with the pen. This is the perfect limbering up book for writers.
4. I am ashamed to say that it took me 20 years as a writer before I found the work of Anne Lamott. Her Bird by Bird is a fabulous journey inside the mind of someone who makes her living as a writer. It teaches you, pretty much, as King explains, to cut the excuses and just write. But more than that, it explains how you just need to write in little chunks, just as you would if you were writing a book on birds, cover one bird at a time. Liberating stuff.
5. And the other one, Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, was written in the 50s and it’s another book that aims below the belt and gets me going again. In it she suggests that if you tell yourself that you will, say, write a page a day, or ten minutes a day, and then you fail to turn up, that clearly your desire to fail is greater than your desire to succeed. Boy, did that one get me back to the keyboard.

I hope these five inspire you. Further, I hope  you promise yourself to add every single one of them to your wish list!