Sat on the edge of her bed, Estelle Maskame happily types away, crafting the characters in her latest novel, researching hard-hitting topics and scouting for settings from the comfort of her bedroom.

For the last six or so years, the teenager's bedroom has been her creative hideaway, the place where she began scribbling story ideas as a child to posting snippets of her teen novel trilogy chapter by chapter on the internet at the age of 13 to some four million readers.

Now it's where the full time author is writing her first standalone novel in six years, coyly keeping the secrets of what lies in between the pages for her loyal readers to dive into when it's released in the summer.

"I was always at the library with my mum," explains Estelle, who lives in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire.

"I was always into books and I was quite creative and imaginative and I was always thinking up stories and storylines in my head so it kind of made sense to put them down on paper."

From the age of 10, Estelle was already bringing her schoolwork home; her favourite lesson would see her teacher prompt the class with an opening paragraph for pupils to transform into a fully fledged story.

But she couldn't get enough and would lock herself away on the family computer, completing her first full-length novel One Last Regret by the time she was 12.

"That was when I realised I could write novels and full stories and the satisfaction that came with writing and completing my first novel," she says.

" I just absolutely loved that and that's when i started writing a new novel - that ended up being Did I Mention I Love You?"

It was the story that changed Estelle's life, an idea scribbled in a notepad after she became tired of teen fiction focused on forbidden relationships between girls and boys in different social circles.

"I started to think of more serious reasons why two teenagers especially couldn't be together and that's when I thought about step siblings," Estelle explains.

A controversial subject, Did I Mention I Love You? (known by fans as the DIMILY series), focuses on step-siblings Eden and Tyler, who meet after the teenager visits her estranged father in the States.

Estelle admits some people responded negatively to the subject matter of her stories, but it made her all the more determined to continue writing the series, completing all three novels by the time she was 16.

As she wrote the first book of the series, she searched for storytelling sites online, trying a few before settling on Wattpad. She would release a couple of chapters a week, tweeting about her stories constantly, and soon she had a captive audience who hung on her every word.

"It was like a snowball effect," she explains. "I would tweet snippets from chapters I was writing trying to get my readers excited for upcoming chapters and it just blow up into this fan page that formed."

Soon Estelle had racked up more than four million hits on her page and had garnered over 100,000 followers on Twitter, all through self promotion on social media.

Far from being uninterested in reading, Estelle found that there was a hungry appetite for new and exciting YA (young adult) fiction. She noticed teens began sharing their favourite books online in interesting ways using bookstagram and talking about them on YouTube.

She says: "Young people are getting excited about reading and their showing it in unique ways that only young people in this day and age with all this technology. I think it's amazing."

At 16 she decided to rewrite the first novel, taking the series more seriously than she had when she initially began the series three years earlier.

"I wasn't satisfied or happy with just leaving it the way it was, and I wanted to go back and rewrite the first book especially to update the writing a little bit and to make the plotline a little more realistic.

"I ended up rewriting all three books because once i started rewriting the first one, I knew it felt right to rewrite the second two as well."

Just as Estelle was reworking her first novel, she received an unexpected call from a publisher who had read news snippets about the teen who wrote novels from her bedroom in Peterhead.

She immediately decided to leave secondary school whilst in sixth year to focus on rewriting her novels, eventually quitting her part-time job in Asda to fully commit to the project.

Black and White Publishing offered her a three book deal for the series, and soon the rights to her novels were sold in 14 territories and she was signing physical copies of her books at events across the UK.

"Getting published was always my biggest dream and I never expected it to happen at all let alone when I was 17 so while it was scary and nerve wracking," she says. "It was an amazing opportunity as well and I was so excited."

The final novel in the series Did I Mention I Miss You? Was published last summer and now Estelle has left the series behind to write her first stand alone novel Dare To Fall, which will be released in July.

While the novel, which focuses on the impact of loss on teens, is a slight change for the 19-year-old, Estelle is keen to continue writing YA books and isn't shy to tackle some tough subject matter.

"I quite like to explore different issues in my books and there's a few different issues in Did I Mention I Love You? including divorce and child abuse," she says.

"I think it's important that different issues are explored through YA and the impact of loss on young people I found that quite interesting and I just wanted to explore that a bit more."

Although Estelle will soon enter her twenties, she has no plans to abandon the YA genre that she loves so much. While she admits that some years down the line she may want to trying writing adult fiction, for now she will remain loyal to her fanbase that have followed her chapter by chapter to book by book.

"I absolutely love YA, that's what I love reading, that's what i love writing and once I finish this book, I'm probably going to take a few months to catch up on all the books that have been piling up in my bookcase for the past year now," she says.

"So i'm looking forward to that."

Dare to Fall will be published on July 27 by Black and White Publishing.