February 7, 2012

As of this morning, I’m delighted to tell you all that the three-book Jessica Daniel series has now sold over a quarter of a million copies.

Almost all of these have been sold in the United Kingdom with, as you would imagine, Locked In selling the bulk of that amount. That said, both Vigilante and The Woman In Black have also shifted a fair few copies too.

The strangest thing is that I hadn’t even begun writing Locked In this time last year. I started around 10 to 11 months ago – and have sold 250,000 copies in just six months since the first title was released. It’s fair to say that almost all of those have been sold through Amazon’s Kindle Store – although the combined iTunes and Waterstones sales are substantial too.

There is a lot I could write about sales figures and I get the feeling the actual publishing industry don’t have much of an idea how many copies it takes to top each of the respective charts, let alone the size of Kindle compared to everything else. Maybe I’ll keep that knowledge to myself for now…?

Then there are snobbish articles like this rather offensive and patronising one in yesterday’s Observer which seems to think authors like myself shouldn’t exist and that readers like you should be dictated to over what you should and shouldn’t like. Luckily, if you read the comments below the article, you will see that most people disagree with the writer. The piece seemed to ignore the Guardian’s Kindle app – and their numerous ebook spin-offs too. I guess innovation and creativity is fine as long as you have the seal of approval from a national newspaper?

Anyway… this is just to say thank you very much to everyone who has read and enjoyed the books. I’ve had some wonderful emails and some great tweets. I know there are hundreds, if not thousands, of you wanting news on the next book in the series. I should hopefully have something for you in the next few weeks. I have been working hard on it as my red pen would attest to. It is in pretty good shape now. I also have a complete draft of book five. I have been busy.

As ever, you can find me on Twitter or email me.