on twelve years of failure & my first #1 New York Times bestseller

It’s spring 2025, and I’m sitting in a hotel room in Barcelona as a newly minted #1 New York Times bestselling author. Over the last few weeks, I’ve done book promo in Newcastle, London, New York City, Lille and Paris. The next few days will bring me to Madrid, and then home again for a few weeks of rest before jetting off again. Portugal, the Netherlands, France again. Mexico, later in the year. How am I typing this? How is anything in this paragraph real?

I’m almost 34, and I have wanted this for my entire adult life. Longer, really. Since childhood, though back then it was more nebulous than a certain bestseller list—it was just the sense that I wanted to write, and I also wanted to be read. Because in that connection, in that symbiotic relationship, is the magic.

But man, this job, this career, has taken its pound of flesh. The only way I can adequately explain how much this means to me is to tell you everything it’s taken to get here, with my tenth published novel, and the fifteenth I ever wrote.

And for that, we have to wind back a dozen years or so.

2013: After graduating top of a bachelor’s degree in journalism and feeling pretty much like I could do anything—the way you can only really feel when you’re 22—I started writing my first novel {book 1} and finished it in a couple of months, because I swiftly became obsessed. It was an adult thriller, and despite a lot (A LOT) of rejections, a Twitter pitch competition landed me my first agent at a highly reputable agency. A wild miracle appears!

2014: There were a slew of rejections, but we eventually sold that book to HarperCollins in a digital-first deal with a $0 advance (under a different pen name). Yes, zero dollars! From a Big 5 publisher? Did you even know that could happen? I sure didn’t! A few months later, I wrote another thriller {book 2}, but my agent hated it, and frankly she was right. It was DOA, and we never edited, let alone went on sub.

2015: My debut came out with little fanfare, sold a couple of hundred copies to mostly friends and family, and did little else. I pitched, sold and wrote another adult thriller {book 3} to the same imprint for the same $0. I also wrote a YA epic fantasy {book 4}, which I was convinced would be my big break. Fantasy was always my heart genre, and I thought I was finally ready to tackle it.

2016: Despite my agent’s best efforts to hype it up, the YA fantasy died spectacularly on submission. My second adult thriller came out with even less fanfare than the first. I’m not sure we even crossed the three-figure sales mark. After a few months of licking my wounds, and a few more months dabbling in another epic fantasy world, a witty teenage girl arrived in my head fully formed, and I wrote a YA contemporary comedy {book 5}.

2017: We sold The Exact Opposite of Okay for a low five-figure advance, and I thought I was the richest person in the world. That offer call still goes down as one of the happiest of my life. I also wrote a sequel {book 6} for the second book in the contract.

2018: TEOOO came out to quite a bit more fanfare, but still not a huge success (I never earned out the advance). I wrote another YA thriller called The Reasonable Doubt of Addie Blake {book 7}, but my agent didn’t love it and we never subbed. My publisher offered me a blank two-book deal for YA, plus an IP contract for two middle grade comedy-fantasy novels. I wrote the first book in that duology, And Then I Turned Into A Mermaid {book 8}

2019: The YA sequel, A Girl Called Shameless, came out and did… not great, in all honesty. The first book in the middle grade series came out and did surprisingly well—it was the first advance I’d ever earned out. I wrote a queer YA rom-com called, wait for it, The Love Hypothesis {book 9}, because TEOOO won a national comedy award and crude jokes were all anyone seemed to want from me, plus the second MG {book 10}.

2020: The pandemic tanked both the YA rom-com and the second MG book, even though I sold TV rights to The Love Hypothesis to an Emmy-winning team. I wrote a 100,000-word adult speculative novel called The Kindling {book 11} in the Notes app of my phone while nursing a newborn, and I maintain that it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. I changed agents, because I suspected seven straight years of mostly failure had eroded all faith in me.

2021: The adult speculative novel died on submission with my new agent, despite getting to acquisitions countless times, because it was too weird, too genre-blendy, and though editors loved it, sales teams didn’t know what to do with it. My heart broke anew. I wrote the last remaining contracted YA book – a sapphic horror novel called The Society for Soulless Girls {book 12} and a middle grade fantasy novel set in the afterlife called Caleb Murphy and the Great Beyond {book 13}.

2022: I changed agents again, this time to my dream agent. But the MG fantasy died on submission due to market saturation, despite the absolute powerhouse of a human behind me. We pitched more YA to my existing publisher, but they turned everything down due to low sales. A promising TV situation for TEOOO fell through. I cried in a lot of places—the kitchen table, the HarperCollins summer party, my child’s bedroom floor, my car on Soulless’ release day (after I went to my local Waterstones and realised they weren’t even stocking it).

I was 31, and thought my dream had begun and ended in my twenties. I started posting a bit on TikTok, though, and my videos took off, and Soulless blew all expectations out of the water. I got a North American deal, which I hadn’t managed since TEOOO (the sequel was never bought there). My publisher bought another YA from me, Every Exquisite Thing (advances were still in the very low five figures at this point). I had a nervous breakdown, quit my day job, remortgaged the house, and gave myself four months to write both EET {book 14} and Our Infinite Fates {book 15}. The latter was my Last Chance Book. If it died on submission, I knew I would have to go and find another day job, and that I might not have it in me to try again.

2023: Our Infinite Fates sold in a major six-figure deal within 48 hours of submission, as well as in 16 foreign territories. This is deeply unusual, for a non-debut with a wobbly sales track, but I gave the book everything I had and it broke through, somehow. I wept for about four straight months with joy and relief. With the financial pressure lifted, I finally decided to write my first epic fantasy since the heartbreak of 2016’s failed sub. This time it was adult, dark, sexy, with wands and cloaks and mages—everything I have always loved. It became Silvercloak {book 16}. Every Exquisite Thing came out and hit the UK Top 20 for Children’s & YA for the first time. Both EET and Soulless started racking up translation deals.

2024: The Silvercloak trilogy sold in a seven-figure deal, as well as over a dozen foreign territories. My hands are shaking just typing that, even though it’s been over a year now. I struggled a bit with following up Our Infinite Fates, but I wrote my 2026 YA {book 17} and started writing Silvercloak 2 {book 18}. I massively got in my own head, and experienced several months of insomnia and debilitating migraines as I worried about what would happen if OIF and/or Silvercloak didn’t sell enough copies.

2025: Well, here we are.

And it means so, so much more because of how hard-fought it all was.

If you’re a writer reading this, and you’re despairing over all the rejections, the near misses, the months and years with little promise of breakthrough, please take heart.

When I wrote this post about that first life-changing book deal, I said that I’d spent years throwing myself at a brick wall like a cartoon character, expecting it to somehow end differently. And eventually, it did. Because the thing about brick walls is that they often break before you do.

We did it, Little Me. We broke through.