It pays to bear in mind that most dreams are unrealistic – the getting published bit isn’t, but it’s what we subconsciously attach to that aspiration. Your view of “getting published” might be that… you earn loads of money. Buy a big house and fancy car. Gain respect from everyone you meet. Suddenly become irresistible to the object of your affection. Never feel depressed again. End up on the Booker List. Stand on the red carpet next to George Clooney. Fit into that size ten dress. Prove to everyone who ever doubted you that their view of you was incorrect.

IT IS UNREASONABLE TO EXPECT ANY OF THESE THINGS TO HAPPEN AS A DIRECT RESULT OF FINALLY GETTING YOUR BOOK OUT THERE!

So how can us writers hold onto our happiness during such a roller coaster career?

Over the last year I’ve learn a lot from Buddhism. One of its tenets is that unhappiness comes from being attached to either good or bad things. What helps is realising that nothing is permanent. If we can do that, our life will achieve a sense of balance.

Take my 2015 bestseller Game of Scones. It reached #5 in the Kindle chart and stayed in the Top Ten for a good length of time. It won an award. Many readers loved the story. I was finally on my way to “making it” I whooped! I attached myself to that success and expected it to continue.

That was my  mistake. The next book didn’t do badly, but didn’t do as well. I felt I’d failed. I attached myself to those feelings of disappointment and wondered if I’d ever have a bestseller again.

As it turned out I did and last year Breakfast Under a Cornish Sun got to #8. However, these days I have a different perspective. I don’t become attached to the peaks or the troughs. And I have zero expectations when a book is released. I write it the best I can, with love and heart, and I promote it at the outset… but then I let it go and get on with my next project. What will be will be. There are SO MANY reasons why a book does or doesn’t do well: the publisher’s strategy, the cover, title, price, the timing of its release, the other books around at that moment… I find that if I distance myself from my successes and see them for what they are – transitory events – it gives me a much more balanced view of my career.

Remember, the path to misery is littered with expectations and senses of entitlement!

And all of this can be applied to life. Physical looks, our own and loved ones’ personalities, domestic circumstances, financial earnings, our state of health … be aware that everything is impermanent and in a constant state of flux. This makes it easier to accept your situation when the status quo changes – which it will.

By all means enjoy your highs. You have worked hard. You deserve them. And lick your wounds during the lows. But remember – neither is permanent. Work hard and keep submitting manuscripts and you will get a deal. Keep writing and learning more about your craft and those good reviews and sales rankings will once again appear. Finding working with your current publisher/editor/agent difficult? One way or another that situation won’t last forever.

In my experience, keeping detached and enjoying the good moments simply for what they are (without further expectations), and realising the bad moments will eventually pass… THAT – in writing and in life – is the secret to happiness.

Rejection Letters – below are the rejection letters I collected, from literary agents, during the eight years it took me to get my publishing deal in 2013. Each one felt like a failure, when I opened that envelope, but once the dust had settled I was able to glean something constructive. When I first started to send out those manuscripts, a common theme of the rejections was that my main characters weren’t likeable enough. This was something I really had to work on – how to convey a protagonist’s inner angst without them coming across as a whinger. Also “derivative” came up – I wasn’t producing anything that stood out.

With my first novel, in 2005, hands up, I had a sense of entitlement. I thought what an amazing feat, I deserved to be published because I have actually put together 90,000 words! However, these rejection letters taught me that putting pen to paper and sticking at it, then writing The End, just wasn’t enough. I needed to push, push, myself to create a page-turning read, with relatable characters – and prose that had been thought about, not just in terms of every paragraph or sentence, but every single syllable. My apprenticeship took a long time – a long time LEARNING, NOT FAILING, that’s how I see it now. Indeed, my first ever submission, all those years ago, was to the Darley Anderson Agency. A decade later they signed me. My continued *learning* had paid off.

Negative editorial Feedback – this could feel like a failure as well. Especially as to start with, I kept receiving the same criticism – namely, that I wasn’t showing enough emotion in my writing. I’m not sure why  – I’m a very emotional person in real life. So this is something else I have toiled over and, touch wood, over time, it seems to have paid off. I’m currently thrilled with the reviews coming in for my latest novel, The New Beginnings Coffee Club. A story about second chances and being true to yourself, I really acted upon my editor’s comments – from the past and present – about how the emotion could be ramped up. Over time I’ve come to realise that negative editorial feedback doesn’t mean I’ve failed. It simply demonstrates that an editor believes in my work – and me – enough to take the time to point out areas that need working on to make my books the very best they can be.

Bad Reviews. Yes, with my debut book they stung! But as time passed, I realised that constructive ones -without an insulting tone – were actually useful. Take my first book – Doubting Abbey – it was a Christmas bestseller and overall enjoyed great reviews. But, of course, it received its fair share of bad ones and I noticed a common theme crop up. The main character – a pizza waitress who had to pass herself off as an aristocrat – often said the word “mega”. Negative reviewers hated this! One even counted the number of times she said it – over one hundred! So that taught me that whilst people have speech tics in real life, they should be used very economically in writing because they jump off the page. So I never ignore negative feedback from readers. It can be a real eye-opener and stops me getting complacent.

Poor sales. In spring 2016 my publisher released one of my favourite own stories, How to get Hitched in Ten Days and for some reason, it just didn’t sell as well as my other books. The reviews were great and everyone loved the main character, gorgeous Mikey, every girl’s best friend and the owner of a scrumptious Fifties Diner. However it was a novella. A long one at 40,000, but nevertheless a shorter story and for some reason it failed to achieve the success of my other releases. No doubt there were a number of reasons why this book didn’t hit the spot, but at the time – and this is still true – many publishers were releasing full-length novel ebooks at 99p. So my 99p novella was having to compete with those and economically, for some readers, my 40,000 story wouldn’t have seemed so appealing. Also, I’ve kept an eye on Amazon since and, on the whole, novellas don’t seem to sell so well – the occasional hit and Christmas novellas being the exception to this rule. So this experience taught me that it isn’t worth my while – financially anyway – to invest love and time into one. Yet I certainly don’t see this experience as a failure. I put my heart and soul into that story. Readers enjoyed it. And who knows, maybe one day Mikey will appear in another story.

So I hope sharing some of my learning experiences has made you realise that you can’t fail, as long as you keep an open mind when your writing life takes a negative turn. Everything that goes wrong will eventually lead to you getting it right if you keep at it, ditch the self-doubt (I blogged about that here ) and remember Nelson Mandela. “I never lose. I either win or learn.”

I’ve always prided myself on my baking but learnt many lessons from this episode and, effectively, this failure will (hopefully) lead to success next time I attempt such a cake. And it is much the same for writing. I have failed time and time again over the years – still do – but those failures were/are essential, in order for me to learn to improve and hopefully succeed.

When I first started writing, hands up, I felt a teeny sense of entitlement – I’d written a novel. Not many people did that. Surely I deserved a publishing deal? Time and time again I’d be disappointed when rejections came back. But these continued failures eventually made me realise my expectations were not realistic. If I’d given up writing after the first book, I’d probably, still to this day, be thinking that that particular book deserved a contract. But by not giving up, and continuing to fail in this way, I eventually realised that to succeed, I needed to wake up and understand that writing a novel was just the beginning of a very long journey to finding a book deal. And I thank goodness now that my first manuscript never saw the light of day! I learned a lot from all the rejection letters, pictured below.

Also, at the beginning, I kept making the same two mistakes – I’d create a main character that came across as whiny (I thought she was simply sharing her angst) and I would also drop a lot of backstory into the first few chapters. Being told where I was going wrong, more than once, eventually made me work really hard at developing appealing protagonists and opening chapters that dived straight into the immediate action instead of giving away the plot of the whole book before I’d hardly started.

I wrote several books before I eventually signed my deal in 2013 – no, I’m not saying how many! And, I learnt so much from each “failure”. One, for example, was a totally high concept book preceded by nothing on the shelves. Agents and publishers had no idea where to place it. I’d written 100% what I wanted, without keeping an eye on the market. And I’m all for that, if you aren’t so concerned about publication or sales figures, but writing is my job, I have bills to pay, I can’t afford to take a risk at the moment. So I learnt that, whilst writing from the heart is paramount, to fulfil my own personal aspirations I must keep an eye on the current market and be prepared to make small compromises in order to make sure that any book I create will fit into a genre already out there.

In fact, that reminds me… the original idea for my bestselling 2015 novel, Game of Scones, was set in… heaven. Ahem, I can still remember my editor’s face when we discussed it. I’d failed to realise that I needed to keep within my brand. I learnt through this and came up with a different idea that I loved. It taught me to think more about readers and what they want/expect from me.

Rejections can be seen as failures. But they aren’t. They are simply the industry’s way of telling you there is more to learn. I can honestly say that every author I know, who has been determined and persevered over the years, humbly learning from their mistakes, has “made it”.

Nor should bad reviews be seen as failures. I’ve learnt a lot from the constructive ones and, hopefully, they have helped me improved my craft and inch nearer to success.

So, try to keep some perspective when you feel you have failed. You haven’t. Don’t ever think you are a write-off. No doubt Mary Berry suffered many soggy bottoms when she first started out! It is hard. I’ve shed tears. Proclaimed at the unfairness of it all. But we aren’t failing if we put our work out there. That takes guts. And the bravest part is being able to admit when we are wrong and start again.

As Colin Powell once said:

‘There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure.”