So, The Femme Fatales book 1 – The Scorched Sky is now out and available for your reading pleasure. 

Released on March 17th, it’s been doing quite well and I’m very happy with the reception so far. It’s selling relatively well (for me at least!) and the reviews have been fab! Here’s a selection:

But DON’T WORRY all you Songbird fans. I haven’t forgotten you. Book 3, ‘TOOTH & CLAW‘ is still on target for a release soon.

Maybe a quick update on where we are on that is in order before I let you know about the Femme Fatales…

I’m aiming for a late summer/early autumn launch. Hopefully.
The book is about two-thirds written now, and I’m pretty happy with it so far. Needs some tweaking, but I’ll get to that when the first draft is done.
It’s a bit of a departure from the first two books, as the focus shifts away from the Gayle and concentrates more on wrapping up what’s going on in New Victus. War is brewing, with StormHall and his enthralled Trampyrii army, versus the Lyssa and Damian alliance. Vampyrii and Werewolf. Tooth & Claw.
Stay tuned for more news.


Right, back to the Femme Fatales.

So the book launched and sales went well. And then I got approached by Tessa Hasjarjanto (@Endalia on Twitter) who was about to run an Indie Book sale for 5 days in April. She asked if I’d like to put any of my books in there.

Well, the name of the game for an indie author, like myself, is to try and get reviews on the books. The more reviews, the better the exposure you get on Amazon. Supposedly 50 is the magic number. HUNTERS was sitting around 20 reviews, and THE SCORCHED SKY was only just starting. I put both of them in the sale.

I had the option of reducing them to 1.99, or 0.99, but actually decided to give them away as free Kindle downloads for the week. Yup. Zero.

In terms of downloads it was a HUGE success.
HUNTERS got downloaded 521 times!
THE SCORCHED SKY got downloaded 246 times!

Not too shabby. HUNTERS is still the big draw, but THE SCORCHED SKY did better than I thought. Now I just need the reviews to roll in.

How many will I get? Who knows.

The issue here is, how many people have downloaded the books simply because they’re free, but now they’ll sit in ‘To Be Read’ limbo for the foreseeable future. This is a dark and merciless area I know well, as I’m a primary offender of doing this (as my TBR list bears witness to!)

I’ll keep you informed as to where it’s going. In the meantime…

I’m already working on Femme Fatales book 2 – THE BROKEN GROUND, but in even more exciting news, I’m also working on a series of smaller single character based Novella’s which will focus on what the characters were doing in the 10 year time gap between the first two books. The first of which will focus on Knightingale.

And with that in mind, my amazing cover artist Marlena has given me the character art for one Gale Knightley, the superhero known as KNIGHTINGALE. And here it is…


I’ll give you more details on my next update. Exciting times!

That’s all for now. Until next time folks…

Love & Books

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6 Comments

  1. DannyO

    I’m one of the people who downloaded the books for free. I left a review, but it’s under a different name because I like to keep my Amazon account private, since I also order things for work. Have you weighed the data to see whether the giveaways were worth it to you? I’ve always wondered whether it’s actually beneficial to the author.

    • I’m not sure as yet. I’m hoping that I’ll get a load more reviews (thank you by the way!) and in turn that might get me a little more Amazon exposure. I’ll let you know how it turns out! 😀

  2. Huxley

    I’m not a huge comic book fan, so I was on the fence about buying The Scorched Sky. I’m glad I finally went for it. This graphic novel is a light read that kept me turning the page – especially to see what was going to happen next with Elena and Gale.

  3. Lily Cho

    Jon, your novel was a fun read with unexpected twists and turns. I love fantasy stories like yours with strong female leads. I haven’t ready Hunters, yet, but it’s next on my list to tackle.

    • Thanks, Lily
      I like writing strong female characters, but I also like to cover a wide range of characters of different backgrounds, so stay tuned for more characters to be added on the superhero roster.
      Book 2 has a 10 year time jump. The city is set up, the heroes established. The Scorched Sky was just the prologue to the Femme Fatales saga!

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