From BookTok to New York Times bestseller: How Aussie teacher defied the odds

She’d spent the last few years working part-time while pursuing a writing career that had landed her on bestseller lists around the world.

Passionate about education as well as authoring, she worked hard to juggle both careers. That ended in early 2025.

“So I quit the department altogether, and just went full throttle on authoring.”

But McEwan is painfully aware that her success (and income) as an author is not guaranteed, even with one of the most powerful online communities behind her.

Aussie teacher to bestselling novellist

Born and raised on the Gold Coast, McEwan spent 11 years in the classroom.

She wrote fantasy novels on the side and tried getting a few published but was rejected again and again.

“I didn’t really know what I was doing,” she admitted.

The Australian publishing industry is highly competitive and the odds of a debut author’s unsolicited submission actually being purchased for publication are low.

Knowing that, McEwan focused on teaching until the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Like millions of Aussies, she downloaded TikTok as a way to pass the time during lockdown and was immediately sucked into BookTok, the app’s reading community.

There she racked up thousands of followers “almost overnight”.

It was her husband who suggested she leverage that budding internet fame to self-publish her first novel, a fantasy book she’d already written.

Instead, British-based publisher Angry Robot “swept in” and offered to buy it.

The power of TikTok and timing

McEwan signed her first book deal and published her debut fantasy novel, Ledge, in 2021. Two sequels followed in 2023 and 2024.

The Aussie mum of two admits she owes a lot of her initial success to TikTok and timing.

”I’m not too proud to say that if I hadn’t have put my idiot face online, that this wouldn’t be happening right now,” she said.

There’s no doubt the Angry Robot book deal was influenced by her BookTok popularity and the fact that she was pushing a romantasy (romance and fantasy) novel right as the genre was exploding.

And romantasy is its hottest subgenre right now.

“It was really just a case of perfect timing,” McEwan said.

Her first three novels became bestsellers, boosting her social profile even more.

But in the age of online hate mobs and celebrity ‘cancellations’, being a big deal on social media doesn’t always have a happy ending.

Social media’s a double-edged sword

All it takes is one move – legitimate, or perceived – for an author to get ‘cancelled’ these days.

It can make the career feel precarious, especially for breakout authors like McEwan who owe so much of their fame to online popularity.

”Being of any kind of public figure on social media feels a lot like putting your head on a chopping block and just hoping that no one swings the blade,” she said.

“It’s the wild, wild west out there and one certainly does have to be careful.”

It’s up to most authors to run their own social media accounts, promoting their books and interacting with fans while also making sure they don’t say or do the wrong thing.

Because being ‘cancelled’ can tank book sales and slash an author’s income in an instant and most don’t have huge advances or established fortunes to fall back on.

“I got an advance for [my first book], but it was a small amount and it certainly wasn’t anything that was going to set me up for the future,” McEwan said.

“I really had to rely on how well the book was going to sell.”

Back then she had her teaching career to fall back on but that’s gone now.

While she was still teaching part-time, McEwan landed a global deal with publishing powerhouse Simon & Schuster for her next duology.

The novel follows Nina Harrow and Patrick Colson, childhood friends who find themselves on opposite sides of a war fuelled by class inequality.

“I like the idea of the lower classes questioning why it is that they must remain so,” McEwan said.

Months before it hit shelves, McEwan was told she had to go back to teaching full-time or quit altogether.

She chose the latter and so far, it’s been the right choice.

McEwan just returned from the very successful US leg of her A Forbidden Alchemy book tour and you can walk into bookstores all over Australia and find her name staring back at you from the ‘bestseller’ shelves.

“I have a lot of people that I went to school with, that I used to work with, past teachers, students, [and] employers going, ‘what’s happening?'” McEwan said.

“‘Is this you, or is this just someone with your name?’ … those reactions only fuel me.”