Former Hong Kong reporter Jojo Moyes on her big break as a hit novelist

Jojo Moyes didn't quite believe she'd hit the literary stratosphere until she received an unusual Facebook message. In it was a photograph of a young woman's wrist with the tattooed words, "Just Live". Moyes raised a hand to cover her mouth in surprise: it was a line from one of the last chapters of her 2012 international bestseller Me Before You.

"I just wanted to respond, 'Oh, my God, is that permanent?'," says the author, who has written 14 books. Moyes has since received many more snaps of wrists, shoulders and ankles inked with lines from the book. "I've been told that a lot of people have decided to change their lives radically as a result of reading MBY," says Moyes, 46. "But when they send photos of their tattoos, I just want to say, 'Please don't do that because of me'. It makes me come over like someone's mum."

Yet, three years after publishing the unlikely hit about a quadriplegic love story - a novel that "was supposed to have killed my career" - the mother of three has had to get used to it. As one of her British literary friends told her, "You've written one of those books."

Indeed she has: not only have six million copies of the book flown off shelves, Moyes recently wrapped up work on Me Before You the film, for which she wrote the screenplay and rewrote lines on the set, which she describes as a learning curve. She spent weeks in England and France consulting on the MGM production. There, she buddied around with Sam Clafin ( The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) and Emilia Clarke ( Game of Thrones), who star as Will Traynor and his paid companion Louisa Clark.

Being on the set was one of the many dizzying and surreal moments the once-struggling author has experienced in recent years.

"To arrive on set that first day and see your characters sprung to life and walking, talking, breathing in front of you - that's mind-blowing," says Moyes, a former South China Morning Post reporter, who lived in Hong Kong during the mid-1990s.