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.”

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.

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.”

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.

Recently, my lovely editor at CarinaUK gave a talk at a book event and tweeted this photo of one of her slides. The line on the left represents how people feel the road to success progresses. The one on the right represents what it actually looks like. And I would definitely say that is true in my experience.

I’ve had a long and rocky road to publication and penned my first novel in 2005. The very first agency I sent it out to was Darley Anderson. It came back with a swift, standard rejection letter (thoroughly deserved). To my disbelief, ten years later, I have just signed with this agency, a moment of success for me. But the line of progress in between those two dates has certainly been squiggly, with ups and downs and moments where I felt I was going around in circles.

Whilst completing a first novel is a huge achievement, it represents the beginning of a long and tough journey only those with a thick skin will complete. I wrote novel after novel that got rejected. Sometimes the line of my progression halted when I declared I’d give up my dream of becoming a published author. Of course, that was like declaring giving up food or water – the compulsion to write is in my bones and I never stopped for longer than a couple of days.

Then in 2011 my line progressed a little further. I sold my first short story to a women’s magazine. I went on to sell over 50 to the People’s Friend. In 2013 publisher Alfie Dog Fiction brought out a collection of my short stories in paperback and Kindle form, called Sweet Talk. That was super-exciting and a huge boost to my confidence and my little line edged a further forwards. I even bagged a great romance agent so, on the surface everything looked like it was going to plan.

However lots of squiggly bits were happening at the same time. I failed to sell more than a couple of stories to Woman’s Weekly, for example and the first novel my agent submitted didn’t find a publisher. Despair set in time and time again. In publishing, I find that highs are often followed by lows and then circles where nothing seems to change for a while and then you might hit another high. The one constant is that words, with hope, continue to be written. Smaller successes become very important such as a lovely comment from a reader or an encouraging line from a publisher who rejected but nevertheless enjoyed your work

And then in 2013 I landed a deal with CarinaUK, thanks to my then-agent and my debut book Doubting Abbey. It got shortlisted for an award. Then my bestselling summer 2015 book Game of Scones actually won an award. For a while the squiggles straightened themselves out which was thrilling for me.

But, of course, my line still isn’t as straight as in the left of that slide screenshot. Some books sell better than others. Bad reviews still come in. I have a long way to go. In my opinion, you are only as good as your next book, not your last. A writer can never, ever become complacent. I am working harder than ever now, with my first novella out on the 11th February, How to Get Hitched in Ten Days. This will be followed by my summer novel Breakfast at Poldark’s in July and after that, who knows…

I guess that means the squiggly bits are important. They prepare you for the lows and make a writer realize that above all, determination and perseverance rule the day. So if you are going through a down or circular bit at the moment, don’t worry. Everyone has been there, it just doesn’t look like it on the surface. Look at all the rock bands who disintegrate and then re-form years later. Or the politicians who fall out of favour but make a comeback. Life is messy – just like squiggles. The important thing is that you are trying, maybe sometimes failing, but picking yourself up, learning and then moving forwards again, even though that may not be in a perfectly straight line.
As Robert H Schuller said:
“Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly.”