Jonas Saul didn’t wait for permission — and the industry never forgave him for not needing it.
He originally wanted to enter publishing through the traditional route, spending years querying literary agents to secure representation. It never happened. The rejections stacked up. The conferences came and went. And then, in 2011, he made a decision that most aspiring writers are too afraid to make: he self-published, believed his books were good and commercial, and committed to writing as many words as it took until his novels paid the bills. Once he removed self-doubt — what he calls the traitor that makes you stand in your own way — he was on a mission. The results speak loudly.
Over Two Million Books Sold
Jonas Saul is the bestselling author of the Sarah Roberts Series, with more than two million books sold, and has written and published over sixty thrillers. He has often outranked Stephen King and Dean Koontz on Amazon over the past decade. The Sarah Roberts Series alone now spans more than forty books — a feat of sustained creative output that few thriller writers anywhere in the world have matched.
Sarah Roberts: A Character Like No Other
The series is built on one of the most distinctive premises in contemporary thriller fiction. Sarah Roberts is a female vigilante whose dead sister Vivian occasionally speaks to her — and, when the situation demands it, takes over her body entirely to keep her alive.
Sarah is the kind of woman Jonas Saul respects: attractive, confident, self-assured. When someone disrespects her, she holds her ground. When needed, she is tough and unrelenting. Readers respond to her with a loyalty that borders on devotion. One reviewer captured the character in a single sentence that has followed the series ever since: “Sarah Roberts is one in a million. If you’re her friend, she’ll crawl through Hell to protect you. If you’re her enemy, she’ll send you there.”
After years of self-publishing, Jonas Saul’s success caught Hollywood’s attention. In 2016, he flew to Los Angeles and signed with Gandolfo Helin & Fountain Literary and Dramatic Rights Management, with film discussions following shortly after. His books The Future is Written, published by Adaptive Studios, and The Immortal Gene, published by Vesuvian Books, marked his transition into traditional publishing — the industry that once shut its doors to him eventually coming around to knock. It is the kind of arc that validates what independent publishing has always promised but rarely delivered at this scale: that a writer with the right voice, the right work ethic, and no fear of going it alone can build something the traditional gatekeepers eventually come looking for — not the other way around.
The Discipline Behind the Catalogue
He begins every new novel on a Monday. He writes the story as it unfolds, feeling his way toward an ending he knows in outline but not in detail. The result is prose that moves — urgent, propulsive, and emotionally charged in the way that only writing-as-discovery can be.
A Creative Partnership: Jonas Saul and Rania Stone
In recent years, Jonas Saul’s creative life has taken on a compelling new dimension through his partnership with Rania Stone, a psychological thriller author, co-founder of Imagine Greece Retreats, and specialist in atmospheric suspense. Together, they have co-authored a growing body of dark collaborative fiction. Their joint projects include There Will Be Blood, which returns to the world of Darwin Kostas as the mafia comes looking for a man they haven’t forgotten, and The Soulless, a high-concept thriller in which a catastrophic experiment at CERN tears open a rift between the planes of existence. The collaboration is a natural one — two thriller writers whose instincts complement each other, working from the same sun-drenched corner of the Mediterranean that informs both their imaginations.
Teacher, Editor, and Conference Speaker
Jonas Saul is regularly invited to be a guest speaker, teacher, or workshop presenter at international writing conferences and film festivals worldwide. He focuses his teaching on how to get tension and emotion into every scene and onto every page, the path to success in this business, and the pitfalls to avoid.
His conference appearances span Canada, the United States, and Europe, with repeat invitations from festivals including When Words Collide, the Surrey International Writers’ Conference, and the Vancouver Writers Fest.
Life and Writing in Greece
He currently lives in Greece, where he and Rania host writers’ retreats, as well as reading and yoga retreats. Set against the rugged, sun-drenched landscapes of the Mediterranean — from the white-washed cliffs of Santorini to the lush valleys of France — the retreats are designed to help writers find their voice through the transformative power of travel and place. Saul is also a professional freelance editor, working for several publishers and taking on private clients, with extensive testimonials available on his website.
That, ultimately, is the through-line of everything Jonas Saul does: he turns the desire to write into the act of writing, and the act of writing into a life worth living — on his own terms, in his own voice, from wherever in the world the next story calls him.
