However, I’ll admit it’s not been easy. My agent and editor have both helped. I’m a rather emotional person in real life (just ask my long-suffering husband!) but for some reason this doesn’t always transfer to the page. So I’ve had to push myself. I’ve had to come out of my comfort zone.  I’ve always been wary of becoming complacent and letting my writing stagnate but it can be scary trying something different. What if I fail?

It’s a bit like cooking, as a parent. You discover your children’s favourite dishes. To please them, you cook them regularly. Serve up the same seven meals every week. Eventually the inevitable happens – what was once special and unique runs the risk of becoming predictable to them, if you carry on in the same manner.

So, for want of a better analogy (well, it had to be food-related in my world!) I’m trying to avoid that by creating new recipes, with more unusual flavours, and a deeper flavour. This requires more effort. More thought. More time. It’s a risk. Some readers may prefer what they are used to. But my motto has always been if we don’t take risks in life, what’s the point?

When I look back over my own life, every time I’ve stepped out of my comfort zone it’s been terrifying. Yet those moments have led to unforgettable experiences that have helped me grow as a person. Like when I moved to France and worked at Disneyland Paris. Or when I got pregnant and gave birth to my children. There was the time I trained and completed a half-marathon. I learnt meditation. These challenges don’t have to be on a grand scale. Whether your challenge is joining a club to make new friends or changing jobs, it’s helping you achieve things you never thought possible.

A big one for me was signing a publishing deal. I’d loved being a stay-at-home mum for the previous sixteen years, so you can imagine how I felt attending my first fancy author party or visiting my publisher in London for a meeting.

Yet I got through it. I left my comfort zone. I realised that, whatever they were, dreams could come true. I’m currently undertaking a twelve week course outside of the writing world, which will conclude with twenty-four separate hours of supervised practical. It’s scary but as each week passes I am growing in self-confidence and discovering different facets of my personality. I love the quote, below, by Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran (for those of you who remember the Eighties ).

Jenny, the heroine of The New Beginnings Coffee Club, is forced out of her comfort zone, when her world comes crashing down around her ears. It’s a frightening situation, when change is forced upon you. Courage is needed, to grasp the situation with both hands, and see it as a starting point and not an end. To realise that transitory discomfort might end up making you the person life always intended you to be.

But some of us have the choice to step out of our comfort zone, so why not take a deep breath and do that with your writing? Whether that means finally being brave enough to submit your work – or to really challenge your craft if you are already established. Or to do that author talk. There is nothing to lose as you’ll learn something from the experience and use it to find success elsewhere. After years of getting rejections for my novels, I stepped out of my comfort zone to try  my hand at short stories. Rejections came in but feedback helped me improve. I eventually sold dozens. This boosted my self-esteem. Gave me much needed validation and confidence. All of this contributed towards me finally getting that novel deal.

Go on. Open the door. And take a bold step forwards. You can do it.

The good side of this? It drives me to succeed as it is my reputation and self-pride at stake. I think this applies to anyone who is self-employed. I work long hours. I strive to be my best. I do lots of promotional work and forever look to improve my writing. I write speedily to increase my output and become as prolific as possible.

But the bad side?  Recently I realised that striving to my best – for me – means striving to be THE best and that is an unattainable and dangerous goal. If a book doesn’t sell as well as the previous one, a little voice hints that I’VE failed. If I get a bad review, it feels like a huge blow to the person, SAMANTHA TONGE. If I lose followers on Twitter, I wonder what I  am doing wrong. Writing is so closely linked to an author’s ego. If I were merely tweeting on behalf of an employer such as a school or doctor’s practise, the ups and downs of that platform’s success would have little effect on me as a person.

In my opinion,  the important thing, as a writer – or artist, actor… any of those professions where you give away a little piece of yourself during the process – is to distance yourself as much as you can from the business side. You won an award (like I did for Game of Scones)? Great. Recognize it as an appreciation of your work, not your soul. It might happen again. It may never. That doesn’t mean you, as a person, have succeeded or failed any more or any less. Just received a bad review? The reader isn’t saying YOU deserve to be the target of rotten tomatoes. They simply didn’t enjoy one of your pieces of work in the way that some people love sushi (yuk) and others don’t. Not gaining as high rankings as another author? No matter. That’s the nature of the business. There are lots of contributing factors and whilst you are the face on the tin, you aren’t responsible for everything like the packaging or final recipe – or amount of luck.

Plus social media  – whilst highly enjoyable – can easily feed into a writer’s fragile ego. Are my photos appealing enough? Are my tweets and statuses funny? Why have my ‘likes’ gone down lately?

I strive to stand back and see being an author as just a job. And this isn’t as hard as it sounds, luckily for me, as I have a lovely family to enjoy time with. If I had come to writing as a younger person, without other responsibilities, the knocks might have hit harder. So my advice? To start with cut down on social media outside the 9 til 5 or during the day if your writing life starts in the evening. See your social platforms for what they are – tools to drive your career and not an indictment of the kind of man or woman you are. A little hint that you are connecting too closely with your job is what you talk about when you speak to a distant relative on the phone. How much of your news is about your work? Have you anything else to say about other aspects of your life like hobbies and trips out? Try to find an even balance.

So next time you get a bad review or your book doesn’t soar, still pat yourself vigorously on the back. Or as you launch a new book, like I will be doing soon with my summer novel Breakfast under a Cornish Sun. You are doing the hardest thing ever – putting actual parts of your soul out into the big wide world, to be scrutinised by Joe Public. That earns you the permanent judgement of being one hell of a gutsy person, who looks failure in the face – instead of creeping around it, too scared to ever dare step out of its shadow.