Publishing and Getting Noticed

My new advice for people who want to publish - enter competitions.
I recently won the state selection for the somerset national novella competition, and as a result my love of writing has doubled and my confidence as a writer has been reborn. Thanks to this experience I'll have a contact at penguin who's an editor and can look at my work, and even if I hadn't won, writing that novella was a great experience.
Competitions are a great idea because getting yourself noticed over other authors is really all you want. You want a publishing agency to look at you and see someone who will put in the effort to make the book sell (and that's a fair bit of effort, I assure you). So you do have to prove your persistence and passion for writing for them to want you. Competitions are a great way to show this, practice your skills and try out new ideas, and they provide a reason to write (who doesn't love that?).
Because of this novella competition I got to attend the Somerset Literary festival, and there got so much wonderful advice from many authors, like sending in work to literary magazines, or never selling your copy write and using Twitter and Goodreads to build a platform for yourself and your work - a process I am steadily making headway on.
Just attending literary festivals is a wonderful thing, and you can ask the authors themselves what they did to get themselves published. Even if entering competitions and going to these places don't get you noticed, they will help build your skills and help you become a better writer. That, and honestly, the festivals especially, they're a lot of fun.

Happy Writing!