Christy Anne Jones can’t remember a time when she didn’t want to be an author.

“I just loved the idea,” she tells InReview. “I fell so in love with fantasy stories that it was the only thing I wanted – to be immersed in that world, I just wanted that to be my whole life.”

In 2020, the childhood dream got a reality check. After unsuccessfully pitching her debut novel to a string of literary agents, she had to concede that the 120,000-word manuscript – the one she had started as a teenager, and spent years writing and rewriting – was dead in the water.

“It didn’t go anywhere,” she says.

Failure and rejection is an experience common to most authors, but for Jones the vulnerability of rejection was compounded by the thousands of eyeballs watching.

Years earlier, while studying for a marketing degree, she heard a creative writing lecturer explain that, “the vast majority of people trying to get a book sold fail because they don’t have an audience”.

She turned to the YouTube channel she had started back in high school, and began posting book review videos she hoped might help land her a job in marketing or publishing. Viewers came in at a steady trickle, until she moved to Japan in 2017 and filmed a video tour of her tiny Tokyo apartment. It cracked half a million, but Jones says it was a 2019 post documenting her 5am writing routine that changed things.

“That was the one that really blew up my channel,” she explains.

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"I’ve always been really, really grateful for the people who have watched my videos, so I want to make sure I’m providing something that’s worth their time."

Many of her videos consist of slow, fly-on-the-wall shots of Jones tapping on her laptop in libraries and cafes, browsing bookshops, making breakfast, and sharing updates on her progress. In one series of videos, Jones gained hundreds of thousands of views trialling the writing routines of famous authors like Virginia Woolf, Donna Tartt, Dan Brown, Sylvia Plath, Stephen King, Ursula K Le Guin, Charles Dickens and Brandon Sanderson.

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Jones says much of her audience is drawn to the “cosy” quality of her videos, but she is also driven to make “meaningful” content – rather than selling easy solutions. 

“People engage with things that offer them value – I’ve always been really, really grateful for the people who have watched my videos, so I want to make sure I’m providing something that’s worth their time.”

While Jones abandoned her first novel, she continued vlogging as she started afresh. Having watched other creators explain often-opaque publishing industry processes – like sending queries to literary agents, or submitting manuscripts to potential publishers – this time she resolved to document the entire thing.

“I’ve always made things that I would want to watch, and I’d never seen anyone show that process in real time. There’s so much rejection, and it’s quite a process that takes many months, often years. I wanted to show that process, as well as the truth – parts of this are quite tough, and that’s fine.”

Jones kept some things to her chest, giving the manuscript the codename ‘Project Teacup’ and withholding plot details until it was ready. “I didn’t tell them anything about the story because I was just so worried that this book would also fail. But despite that, people were so beautiful, so supportive.”

"It took so many months, and there was so much rejection, for us to eventually have the fairytale."

This time, the story had a happy ending: in July 25 2026, Jones’ 430-page novel Theodora’s Tea Shop hit bookshops after landing Australian and international publishing deals with Hachette and Wildfire following a “quite competitive” bidding war.

“It took so many months, and there was so much rejection, for us to eventually have the fairytale,” she reflects.

The book, entitled Theodora’s Tea Shop, follows a young woman called Dot as she travels from her small hometown to the fantastical city of Alliaster. She’s intent on learning magic from a witchy tea shop proprietor, but there’s a wrinkle: magic is all but banned outside a privileged echelon of gatekeepers. 

It’s tempting to draw parallels between Dot’s pursuit of magic – she dreams of “archaic libraries of leather-bound tomes and her own name, printed in the papers, beside some grand magical discovery” – and Jones’ own aspirations to vault the gatekeepers of the publishing industry to join the fabled ranks of authordom.

Jones isn’t entirely convinced by my analysis, but is glad she was able to show the full journey.

“It’s a part of the process, rejection is a fundamental part of creativity. One of the big things I’ve tried to do is explore this idea that rejection and failure doesn’t mean you’re a bad creative or a bad writer.”

Ironically, Jones says her millions of YouTube views had minimal impact on the publishing deal.

“It’s been really fascinating because some content creators will just win book deals straight away if they’ve got a really large audience – and the funny thing is that my audience size is not really considered a large audience anymore.”

This might be a good thing, with other high profile ‘BookTok’ influencers drawing blowback for seeming to circumvent the long, hard grind of publishing – like former rugby player and The Bachelor contestant Luke Bateman, who recently scored a two-book deal with Simon & Schuster after his TikTok book reviews gained millions of views and likes.

For Jones, the years’ worth of videos demonstrate there’s no such thing as ‘overnight’ success. It has, however, put her in a position to work as a full-time YouTube creator – continuing to document her author journey from her first book tour to the follow-up novel she’s already drafting.

“I think I’ll make videos forever,” she says. “One of the big cornerstones of my channel is just speaking really honestly about what this process is like. Writing a novel is really hard – and that’s fine.”

Theodora’s Tea Shop (Hachette Australia) is out now