"I just got the news that we are doing a second print run," Wills says with a big smile.

"Books are a new world to me. I can talk about jewellery, sell out quantities and things like that, but the first run we did for this was 10,000 copies which felt like a lot like 'Are we going to move that many?'.

"And then it sold out."

Wills is new to writing, but she is no stranger to success.

The Newcastle-born, Port Macquarie-raised 39-year-old is the brains and namesake behind the luxe-bohemian jewellery brand Samantha Wills.

She went from working at Prouds the Jewellers in her home town and designing her own pieces on the dining table at her flat in Bondi at the age of 21 to, after years of trial and error as a businesswoman, eventually having an annual turnover of $12 million.

Her designs have adorned big-name celebrities, from pop singers Pink and Taylor Swift to actress Eva Mendes and stars of Sex and The City, which catapulted her onto the international stage and paved the way for the brand to be stocked in 80 countries around the globe, with offices in Sydney, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Korea and Japan.

She designed 12,000 pieces of jewellery over the course of 15 years, including the top-selling tear-shaped Bohemian Bardot ring which became the label's signature piece and developed a cult following.

"We did that ring in more than 366 colour ways and sold nearly 1 million of them over 10 years," Wills explains.

Living in New York City and designing 12 collections a year for the brand, Wills had the world at her feet.

Or so it seemed.

Behind the scenes, she struggled.

In between the 100-plus flights she took over the course of a decade running the business between New York and Sydney, Wills was dealing with the infidelity of her partner, who confessed to cheating on her with "at least eight" different women, and struggling with debilitating pain that would eventually be diagnosed as stage-four endometriosis.

And on a creative level, she was burnt out.

Finding a balance between her creative life and personal life became overwhelming and, by 2018, she knew it had to change.

Rather than sell the business (which she later learned could have pocketed her $8 million), Wills announced she would close the Samantha Wills brand in January, 2019.

Three years after making that decision, Wills says she still has no regrets.

"Not at all. I look at it and at that point when I made that decision, it wasn't 'Should I sell or close?'," she says.

"I didn't even weigh it up.

"I truly did not even do the numbers on what we would get if we sold the business.

"It felt very natural to close. I had that clarity. I always wanted to retain the rights to my name. I knew I had more creativity to give around the brand name Samantha Wills, I just didn't want to do that through jewellery any more."

Wills began channelling her creativity and passion into writing five years ago after her long-term relationship ended.

"I had a lot of work to do to get my professional self-worth and my personal self-worth back in alignment," Wills says.

"I wanted to do that through storytelling. I was writing on Instagram about business and recognising that people liked that, but the character limit on there is quite small, so I thought 'I'll set up this platform and it will be a place where I talk about business'."

Wills began posting written content on her website which focused on the subject of entrepreneurship and business, and it quickly became clear that it was a conversation that women wanted to engage in.

"In the first four weeks I had the amount of traffic through the site that I thought I would have in the first year," Wills says.

Sharing her wisdom and experience led to the creation of the Samantha Wills Foundation which is an online forum aimed at empowering women in business.

When she began sharing snippets of her writing on social media, publishers approached her with offers.

"I got a few asking me 'Are you interested in writing a book?' And I said 'I'm not a writer, I can't write' and then, as the universe does keep nudging you to where you're meant to be going, when my manager asked, 'Hey, would you consider writing a book?', I kept the idea in the back in the mind."

It was in New York that Wills signed up to study at Gotham Writers Workshop.

At that point she simply wanted to learn the process of storytelling.

"When I found that creative void in jewellery I thought 'Let's go and see what this writing thing is about, see what the structure is and how you do it'.

"I did a semester at Gotham Writers and it was interesting, you know, it was very much about learning the difference between autobiography and memoir, and the emotion that has to go into memoir.

"It really resonated with me because that's the way I have always written. I've always gone on the emotional side even with my business writing, so I thought 'Alright, I'll give this a go'.

"It filled a creative void and then I followed a curiosity on it."

Released on March 2, Of Gold and Dust follows Wills' journey from her upbringing in Port Macquarie to her permanent return to Australia at the end of 2019.

She details the moments that played a role in shaping her career, from the entrepreneurial streak she showed as a 12-year-old who earned $280 in a day by washing all of the shop signs in the plaza where her parents Ron and Patsy ran a boutique, to the financial failings she faced early on making jewellery when she was $80,000 in debt.

The book is enlightening, funny and relatable on many levels for women, with up-front and honest stories about all aspects of her career and personal life.

For Wills, it's about being real and telling it like it is.

"The whole purpose in vulnerable storytelling is that we see a bit of ourselves in each other," she says.

"I like to read honest stories. I like to read the grittiness. That is what interests me in other people as well. I wanted to write a book that I would want to read, so I approached it that way.

"I think that when we seek our truth and the entirety of our truth, it allows people to relate and say 'I feel that way too'.

"People see that in my story.

"If a girl from Port Macquarie can do it, I hope it gives them an open door to follow that curiosity. I think it's important to share those things because sometimes we just see this perceived highlight reel and it seems so detached or so far away from our actual journey."

Wills is on the road with the book this month.

She launched Of Gold and Dust in Sydney before heading to Newcastle earlier this month where she spoke at a Q&A event at The Edwards.

The session sold-out weeks in advance, such is the power of Wills' fanbase which has followed her from her career as a jewellery designer to now as a motivational speaker and advocate for mentoring and connecting women in business.

Can she ever see a day when she returns to jewellery?

"There probably will come a time where I will and - don't get me wrong - but jewellery was never something I had a huge love for," Wills says.

"I had a huge love for creativity and jewellery became the vehicle that allowed me to do that. The element of creativity is what I loved most about it.

"I am not ruling out not designing jewellery ever again, but I don't think I would ever go down the production path myself. Once a business gets to the size that Samantha Wills jewellery was at, it was a logistics business at that point.

"Looking back now, I don't know how I did it. It was wild.

"I had an incredible team of people around me and my business partner was amazing. I think if it was just me, when you ever so modestly name the brand after yourself [laughs], I would still be at my dining table beading jewellery.

"It far eclipsed me a few years in."

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