just started mining, any tips?

[Zetonegi]

Get some movies and a second monitor/nearby TV. Its a looooong rode. Also do your daily GC turn ins(under timers) and HQ them, its the best XP/effort gathering has giving decent base XP and +50% bonus XP if you turn in HQs. If you use leves for gathering, only do piety and benevolence if possible. While only 2 are offered at a time, they refresh when you complete a leve so you can just do the piety/benevolence leve and hope it refreshes into another one. These are the two leve types that can give a +25% bonus and that's the best you'll get with these. The general opinion is save your leves for crafts where they're much more efficient since you basically use 5+ leves per level in the final stretch and it isn't great at low levels either. Gathering is a good candidate for your rested XP though.

Gathering books are ok until the 30s where the XP to level starts to go past 120k(total XP you get in a book 40k bonus = 80k base). If you're gathering for a craft, you can do that but if you're gathering for XP, find the highest level thing you have a 100% hit rate for and spam that, the chain XP is worth it even if it feels slower. Unlike crafting, where you can skimp on your gear a bit and get good XP, with gathering you need so much XP to level and get so little from gathering that top of the line gear is basically needed to get respectable XP/hour. Lastly, try to only gather things with HQ% and use your skills on +attempt nodes(duh).