There is nothing like the view offered to the author of a book that people embrace, reject, love, hate, but, regardless, read. The lucky author who’s treated to this experience receives revelations in waves—about readers, herself, her book, the book industry, the wonders of the Internet, the horrors of the Internet, human absurdity, human sweetness; about what matters, but also about what matters not at all. More than anything else, what changed in my life from publishing Graceling was my view.

May I share the view with you?

Here are some things I now see:

• When you write a book, some of the people who love you and who never read books might read your book. It won’t even matter to you if they like it, because they will be so proud of you, and it will astonish you. You will feel like a star is shining inside your chest.

• You will make mistakes. If you make them in your book, they will be preserved for all eternity. For example, you will write offensive things into your books, like a disabled character who’s healed by magic—a frequent and problematic trope in fantasy that I neglected to think about while I was writing Graceling. You will learn a lot from this experience. Especially how important it is to listen, how important it is to try to do better, and how likely it is that you will make more mistakes.

• Po means “butt” in German. When your German publisher informs you of this, you will start laughing hysterically at the café table where you are hand-writing the first draft of your next book. You will scribble at the top of your notebook “PO = BUTT.” Ten years later, it will still make you laugh.

• Your story about a narcissistic, cowardly, insecure, cruel king who has the magical ability to tell lies that people believe may, unfortunately, turn out to be a fable for your times, as such stories often do. Cruelty is never new; but also, heroism is real. As you see the people in the real world around you finding their voices and their strength in opposition to cruelty and thoughtlessness, you will want to write more characters who are doing the same. Maybe it can become a positive feedback loop?

• People will tell you to your face what they think of your book, even the things they hate. Not because they’re unkind, but because they’ve temporarily forgotten that they’re talking about something you carefully crafted for years out of your own self. It will make you imagine yourself going to their places of work, standing over their shoulders as they perform knee surgery or make sandwiches, then telling them what you don’t like about the job they’re doing. Then this will make you laugh, and you’ll get over it. You are so lucky to have written a book that people read.

• Often, when people talk to you about your book, they will actually be talking about themselves. They will be showing themselves to you, making themselves vulnerable. This is an undeserved gift. You should cherish it.

• You will feel undeserving a lot of the time, actually. Just as some people will have no idea how much they’re hurting your feelings, other people—most people—will have no sense of how much they are bowling you over with their kindness; of how surreal it is to be thanked by a stranger who’s grasping your book to her chest as if she knows it belongs in her heart.

• Even though when you wrote your book, you built only one door, every person who opens that door and steps through will be entering a unique world that is largely their own creation. You will have the honor of being the facilitator of this, but you will learn how much credit goes to the reader.

• You will not know what to do with all the gratitude you feel. You will try to write an afterword one day and find yourself wishing they would just let you write the words THANK YOU, I DON’T DESERVE THIS, in big block letters spread out over the course of several pages.