Publisher Bookouture has revealed that their star author Angela Marsons has hit the five million mark of copies sold in her Kim Stone detective series.
Silent Scream was the first book in the series back in 2015 and total sales of the 16 books in the series now top five million. Silent Scream alone has sold more than 1.1 million copies.
Book 16 in the series, Six Graves, will be published in May 2022 and it went to the top of the Amazon sales charts within hours of the book going live for pre-order.
Angela Marsons’ publishing success came after she had been made redundant from her job in September 2014 and was then turned down for a job in an Amazon warehouse.
She had self-published a couple of standalone titles through Kindle Direct Publishing but her Detective Kim Stone crime thriller series had been rejected by traditional publishers who had concerns about the Black Country setting in the West Midlands of the UK, and her formidable lead character, Detective Kim Stone.
But Bookouture, which was set up in 2012 by Oliver Rhodes as an ebook specialist, loved Silent Scream and signed up Angela Marsons for the first four books in the Kim Stone series.
She says, ‘It was a lifeline for me — I didn’t have any expectations about what I’d sell, I thought maybe five hundred copies, but I just wanted to see what readers thought. I wanted them to enjoy it.’
Bookouture publisher Claire Bord says, ‘I remember reading the first few pages of Silent Scream and instinctively thinking, we have to sign this author. The launch of the Detective Kim Stone series marked with Silent Scream marked Bookouture’s first-ever crime fiction release. Angela is so integral to the success of Bookouture and we’re so incredibly proud of our publishing partnership with her.’
Angela Marsons branched out last year into romcom with If Only, also published by Bookouture and well received by readers, but she’s definitely sticking with the Kim Stone series as she’s signed up with Bookouture for a total of 28 books in the series.