Brand New to DMing (Session 0 right now). Tips?

Hello.

I am DMing a campaign for the first time this year. I am running Ghosts of Saltmarsh and will be having a session 0 soon. Do y'all have any tips?

Thanks,

Joshua

The best tip I can give: You will mess up.  You’ll forget the relay important information.  Make a bad tactical call in combat.  Do things that might be unfair. Make rules mistakes. Even those of us who have been DMing for years and years still make mistakes; heck, Matt Mercer, the most famous DM in the world, has made some truly awful mistakes live on air. 

The most important thing you should do is not be too self deprecating, learn from your mistakes, be honest with your players, and listen to their feedback without getting upset.  

Go with what the players want. They never do what you expect, or what the book has told you they will do. You will need to make stuff up, and they might go entirely off-script because one of them decided to buy a viola and won't do anything else until they manage to acquire one, even when you are under an explicit time limit. (At least in my experience) Also, if you are a first-time DM, seriously consider if you want to allow homebrew characters, which I made the mistake of allowing as a first-time DM, and then not at all knowing how to handle them or level them up or anything. Also, make sure you are treating NPCs, monsters, and the world in general as if they are alive, which sounds stupid but can be hard to do as a first-time DM. You probably are fine with that, because you you are running from a book, which leads me to something else... READ THE WHOLE BOOK! Before you have your first session, if possible, read the entire book. Sticky notes are your friend here, especially if you tend to forget or overlook details of things. Above all, though, know that you WILL mess up, and if your players even notice, they will not care (if they are decent humans, at least), and will definitely not care as much as you will think they do. Just accept that you are new at this, and that even the pros mess up, and so long as it is at least 70% fun, you're doing great! I hope this helps, I had no idea what I was doing when I started DMing and had absolutely no resources to help me, not even the official books(or any books) at first, and it turned out okay.