A lick of luck and seven years of writing would be the short answer.

The long answer would go something like:

I wrote a thriller which got me a UK agent who put it up for auction but nobody bid which was funny/terrible so I tried again and wrote something else which should have been ‘same, same, but different’ but turned out to be just different and as a result lost the UK agent (understandably) but got some okay feedback from a publisher but still no interest whatsoever which left me wondering if I was going backwards and feeling pretty low for a while before I started work on two new stories which fascinated the hell out of me even if I didn’t know what they were or where they belonged and they got me an Australian agent who turned out to be incredibly generous and organised some excellent feedback on how I could improve those stories so I worked really hard to address that feedback and while I was doing it I suddenly realised I didn’t care about outcomes anymore and that I loved the creative process more than anything else and not long after I realised this – in a sort of epiphany while I was sitting in the audience of a literary festival – I found out those two stories were getting published. Go figure.