Emily Benet is an author of contemporary fiction, a journalist and an award-winning blogger. She began writing when she was a very little girl, filling notes with stories about talking animals. In her early twenties she began a weekly blog about working in her parents' eccentric chandelier shop. Thanks to the magic of social media, in other words cheekily posting her blog link on Salt Publishing's facebook page, they spotted the blog, loved it and commissioned her debut book, Shop Girl Diaries.

Her comic blog won the Completely Novel Author Blog Award in the London Book Fair in 2010 and also inspired her short film, Shopgirl Blog, directed by Chloe Thomas, and starring Katie Wix (Miranda) and Annette Badland (Cutting it). It was selected for The London Short Film Festival in 2011.

Emily followed her blog-to-book experience with another online hit. She published her romantic comedy Spray Painted Bananas two chapters per week on the story platform, Wattpad. It was met with lots of enthusiasm and racked up over a million visits well before she'd written The End. Thanks to its success she signed with Laura Longrigg at MBA literary agency and later got a contract with Harper Collins. She wrote about her Wattpad success story for Publishing Talk.

With social media having been such a central part of her career, she couldn't resist penning the novel, #PleaseRetweet, which is a comedy about our obsession with social media. It follows the story of May Sparks, the voice behind a number of misbehaving celebrities' Twitter accounts.

London-born Emily has a Welsh mother and Spanish father and has spent her life moving between Spain and the UK. Her fourth book, The Hen Party, is set on the island of Mallorca and captures Emily's love of upbeat contemporary women's fiction with multiple protagonists, twists and turns, comedy and romance. Alongside her fiction, she writes on an array of topics for abcMallorca magazine.

If you're interested in being updated about her writing news, sign up to her newsletter. She writes only when she has news to share.

For more regular updates, check out her blog. Thanks for visiting!