What's Going on with E-books and Readers?

How are people going to read their books in the future? What's the way ahead? Somebody tell me so I can lay my handkerchief across a puddle in the path with one hand and humbly reveal my growing list of titles with the other. If you're a reader then please join my mail list and I'll drop you my newsletter when the hankie is going down. If you're an author then read on about why you should pause to consider the future.

Get the WIP out and get on with it, Ruby!

Over Christmas I shared the first 38k words of the sequel to Peril with my beta reader and things are looking good. Now I need to knuckle down and get it completed. Peril has reviewed well on Goodreads, Amazon dot com and UK. I've learned a lot from those reviews and hope readers will enjoy the sequel just as much or even more. In the meantime Peril is featured on the UK site Indie Book Bargains - please take a look by clicking the badge below.

 

If you've enjoyed reading Ruby's blog then please sign up to Ruby's News for freebies, advance review copies of upcoming novels and occasional updates. Thanks!

Taking Your E-readers for Granted? E-readers 101

The other day I was delivering the first session of 'Join the E-revolution - Self-publishing an E-book' in Carrick-on-Suir library, South Tipperary. We had fifteen participants, more than enough for the small room, and it was an intimate, informal atmosphere. I had brought my gadgets with me - kindle, Kobo, iPhone and laptop (plus a bit of old fashioned paper).

A few people in the room owned e-readers themselves but for many this was a first look at e-books.

There I was, blabbering away about front matter in the mobi or something, when I noticed a few heads bobbing but many more had the 'what on earth are you talking about' expression on their faces. It's only too easy to forget that not everyone is already surfing the wave and all this e-book revolution is still new for a lot of readers and authors.

Then someone asked me if they had to buy an ebook from the Apple store to read it on their iPad or could they buy it elsewhere or even on Amazon. Another wanted to know if I needed to buy multiple copies to view the same book on all my different devices, and why did I need all those devices anyway? 

Rantidote

According to Bill Gates, or someone, the average human mind can concentrate on a maximum of eight things at one time. In this world of technology we often have eight or more windows open on our computer and many more in our minds. Throw in the day job, a tribe of kids wanting taxi service, pets chewing things they shouldn't and a leaking tap in the kitchen. Add the never-ending stream of spam and scam emails, facebook ads (no, fb, I'm not looking for twenty-something gorgeous single women in my area - or, I should say, they're not looking for me), robo phone surveys and door to door callers. Yes I have broadband. Yes I would like uncongested broadband. No I don't believe you when you say you have cheaper uncongested broadband. No I don't want a genuine oil painting. Hey, let go of my puppy. Okay I'll buy it, just put the dog down on the ground unharmed and I'll sign. Slams door.

Pricing strategies for eBooks? Like a flag in the wind!

If there's one thing that does my head in about being an independent eBook author it's pricing strategy. It makes me feel like this:

The ePublishing demon barks in my ear. Down, demon, down.

So, time to vent. When I started out as an indie in March 2011 with the launch of Peril, I went for 99 cents / 77 pence, the minimum. My focus was on gaining readership. The book slowly gained a bit of exposure, sales were modest and positive reviews started to come in.

I went through early crises of confidence with the title, the book cover and the blurb, all of which didn't help the book's initial impact.

 

Then, in the autumn of 2011, I had an epiphany (unlike John Baptist, my epiphany didn't involve multiple murder by drowning) - I'm lucky, I have a day job, I don't need eBook revenue to eat.

Whether it was an altruistic move or just a tactic to gain readership (and a dumb one with only one title published) I figured people didn't have to pay for my 90,000 words. So I decided to go free and, via Smashwords, B&N and Kobo, forced a zero price on Amazon in November 2011. That resulted in 16,000 downloads, reaching #12 in the Amazon.com top 100 free titles and producing some follow-on sales (all this happened before KDP Select existed).

Reviews, Triberr and Feed140 make life bearable

Since release of The New Author at the end of March 2012 I've been beavering away on new projects. I've set about rewriting a series of two action adventure novels called The Crucible and Allen's Mosquito, whilst also pressing ahead with the sequel to Peril (working title Yellow Ribbon). Who says men can't multi-task?
My release schedule looks like this: The Crucible Part 1 will be released this month, part 2 in autumn 2012 and hopefully Yellow Ribbon in winter 2012.

All this writing, rewriting, editing and proofing is good stuff but what about the marketing? Don't indie authors need to market the bejaysus out of their books, to raise themselves above the noise of obscurity? That can be a very time consuming activity.

Networking via social media is a great way to spread the word about books but it can drain time and energy like a dementor trying to suck Harry Potter's soul. Throw in a day job, family, a tendency to compulsive behaviour and you have the recipe for meltdown. Nevertheless, I'm determined to do it all. And when Ruby is determined then he does it (or he falls over in a faint).

Several months ago a brief chat on Twitter with someone drew my attention to a crucial point: producing good content is the key. Not just novels but also for blog posts and tweets. If a blog post is interesting and helpful to your target audience then its utility doesn't evaporate just because it's disappeared off your front page. With a few exceptions (e.g. seasonal or event themed posts) you can re-use that blog post. In fact, unless your social media network size is static, any new people in your network are unlikely to have seen those great posts you put so much work into.

A few months back I gave some figures about development of my social media network. Here's the latest:

• 96 blog posts, 30,500 views since March 2011 (yeah, some people visit multiple times, some stay for seconds, some for an hour)
• Twitter followers - 3,400
• Facebook friends - 822
• Goodreads friends - 1,374 and numerous groups
• LinkedIn connections - 184 (networked to 3,333,823)
• Triberr - 3 tribes, 52 tribemates, 160,596 reach

and some other stuff. Fairly standard fare for a self-published author after a year and a bit.

Oh, and I've sold some books. Not a huge number and I don't count them religiously any more, but earnings are heading in the direction of funding a voluntary one-day-a-week drop in the day job (which started two weeks ago). Having three titles available out there on all channels as ebook and paperback has definitely helped.

 This social media platform is self-sustaining and it grows organically at this stage, as long as I feed it with content. And there's the rub; back to how to feed the network with good content and also keep up all those writerly project tasks, while holding down a day job (now four days a week) and playing families? Without have some kind of a breakdown. The answer lies in squirrel tendencies.

His decisions, their lives - Peril by Ruby Barnes

Since launch fifteen months ago as an ebook and three months ago in paperback, my quirky crime thriller Peril has received a good numbers of reviews on blogs, Amazon, Goodreads, LibraryThing and other places. A lot of readers have enjoyed the book, some haven't, but the main character Ger Mayes certainly provokes a reaction. He's a hedonistic anti-hero whose bad decisions lead to layers of disaster. Do I wish I'd written a less genre-bending, more vanilla crime thriller? Sometimes, yes. Other times, when Peril gets a great review like the one below, no.
I enjoyed writing peril so much that I'm now 21,000 words into the sequel, working title Yellow Ribbon.

Here's the latest feedback on Peril from John Gaynard, an Irish author living in Paris.

In line with my reviewing policy of only giving a write-up to books I have enjoyed, I now have great pleasure in making a few comments on Ruby Barnes's Peril, a novel which could also have been titled, "The Power of Positive Thinking for Feckless Scots Bent on Raising Levels of Dissatisfaction Among Irish Wives, Mistresses, Relatives, Beggars and Rail Customers Who Have the Temerity to Make Complaints".

Ger Mayes is a loveable ne'er do well from North of that Border uniting Scotland and England. Married to an upright modern Irish woman who, needless to say, indulges in quickies with her personal trainer, Ger is paid what seems to be a reasonable salary by the complaints office of Irish Railways. His minimal investment of time, and low respect for his customers, makes Ger a poster boy for the most negative, biased sorts of comments made by Dubliners about immigrant labor. Ger's only self-questioning comes from the wonder and anger generated when he does not get promoted over the heads of some, admittedly obnoxious, colleagues who do, however, respect reasonable standards of productivity, putting in an hour of work and a full five hours of gossip and back-biting on the days when they're in the office--and not taking their statutory sick days off.

Although Ger is more than a bit of a wine and food snob--and should know that after two or three glasses his taste-buds will have had as much as they can reasonably enjoy--when out with the lads he has a habit of drinking himself into that state of mindlessness where his head stops working but his feet keep walking. One night, in a city of Dublin that could pass for the capital of the Chechen Republic under attack by the Russians, he wanders befuddled and lost, finding it impossible to suss his way to the train station and back home to the outer suburbs, where he can reconnect with the middle-class way of life as it developed in late 20th and early 21st century Ireland: memorization of suburban railway time tables, calculating which train will get him into work just after time and out of work just before time, formal dinners where he can whimsically analyze--in the company of mortgaged-up-to-the-hilt neighbors--the merits of different types of pasta, tomato sauce, red wine, white wine and Indian or other take-away dishes while ogling and caressing the knees of his wife's best friend.

Ger stumbles into a fight with a Romanian beggar, kills the man and flees the scene. The next day, unsurprisingly, the murder does not trouble his conscience. Its consequences only begin to concern him when he realizes he didn't dispose of the murder weapon so that it couldn't be found. His worries are compounded when it turns out that another member of the beggar clan saw him do it. The only one of the ten commandments that Ger respects is the eleventh one, "Thou shan't get caught", but, when he does get found out, every problem becomes an opportunity, in line with his innate approach to life, that of the devil-may-care chancer. Any event that would render a less hedonistic man catatonic with fright becomes something to flip to his advantage in his only serious quest: how to satisfy every one of his five senses, every day, in every way.

From vanity to pride

This post first appeared on the Have Your Say section of multi-story.co.uk (a great site for competitions and writing resources). Enter their short story competitions for great prizes - 2,500 words June 30th closing date £500 first prize, 4th - 6th places get a copy of The New Author by Ruby Barnes

George Orwell said All writers are vain, selfish and lazy. The ebook revolution panders to these vices. Anyone can call themselves an author, throw a bit of a story together as an ebook and plaster their name, title and homemade cover across the internet within a day or two.

Want your pulp fiction made available in the old fashioned way? Run that manuscript through one of the many print-on-demand (POD) platforms and your paperback will be sitting on Amazonian virtual shelves before you can properly pronounce the name of a Welsh 19th century publicity stunt (Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch).

It's the ebook revolution, haven't you heard? Blog posts have swarmed globally about the predicted demise of traditional publishing due to the epublishing revolution but spare a moment to pity some poor souls who are really down in the dumps; vanity publishers. They who used to graciously take a few thousand quid from the hands of frustrated writers (vain, selfish and lazy Orwellians) who couldn't get past mainstream publishing's gatekeepers. Said unfortunate writers then carting piles of books around in the boot of an Austin Maxi and foisting those dubious creations upon members of the over-eighties walking club and other captive audiences at a tenner a throw. That time has gone. POD and ebook digital technologies now satisfy the vain, selfish and lazy without filling their dining room with fifty cardboard boxes of vanity. RIP vanity publishers. And good for the environment.

Just a minute. Are you an independent author and proud of it? If so, your hackles are probably raised by now. Independent authors are vanity fodder? No, these sweeping accusations of poorly presented, terribly titled and hopelessly unedited work don't apply to you. That's because you have a cover designed to rival the top 100 ebooks on the 'Zon. It shouts out to browsing readers and visually summarises the premise of your novel. Your product description blurb is the ultimate précis, memorable and relevant to its genre, converting passersby into readers. As for the manuscript itself, there's hardly a hint of word echo, your narrative voice is clear, dialogue resonates through the air and the whole thing is wrapped up in a well-paced plot so tight that, were it an arse, you would just have to smack it. Your digital manuscript appears on all reading devices exactly how you intended. You know that because you've checked (and avoided words like the famous Welsh train station). Grammar and spelling are impeccable. You're just one of several people that have proofread the thing before moving your fastidious document control to final. This novel of yours is as good as it can get. Or is it?

Did you put on the blinkers when some of your peers groaned as they trudged through your porridge of a blurb? Were you able to extract genuine opinion from test readers about your cover or did you take their damning faint praise as something more? Have you dressed your pride and joy in beige? Has your editing discipline been the best or have you really settled for good enough and can't face reading the thing through again for the umpteenth time?

According to the marketing crowd an independent author should be self-assured and assertive, fearless even. A kind of literary warrior. Before you climb up on your war horse to engage with the market, let your natural humility have rein for a few moments and consider this; your independent novel might not be as shiny as it could. Cover, blurb, content. Best efforts, please. You've invested a chunk of your life in writing this thing and you owe it to yourself not to eat the cow and choke on the tail. Stand above the noise of opportunistic amateurs and turn vanity into pride.



The New Author is a non-fiction self help guide for writers, social media marketers and self-publishers. Available in paperback and various ebook formats through a wide range of internet stores including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords et al (see Ruby's Shop for full details).

If you've enjoyed reading Ruby's blog then please sign up to Ruby's News for freebies, advance review copies of upcoming novels and occasional updates. Thanks!
 

From vanity to pride

This post first appeared on the Have Your Say section of multi-story.co.uk (a great site for competitions and writing resources).

George Orwell said All writers are vain, selfish and lazy. The ebook revolution panders to these vices. Anyone can call themselves an author, throw a bit of a story together as an ebook and plaster their name, title and homemade cover across the internet within a day or two.

Want your pulp fiction made available in the old fashioned way? Run that manuscript through one of the many print-on-demand (POD) platforms and your paperback will be sitting on Amazonian virtual shelves before you can properly pronounce the name of a Welsh 19th century publicity stunt (Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch).

It's the ebook revolution, haven't you heard? Blog posts have swarmed globally about the predicted demise of traditional publishing due to the epublishing revolution but spare a moment to pity some poor souls who are really down in the dumps; vanity publishers. They who used to graciously take a few thousand quid from the hands of frustrated writers (vain, selfish and lazy Orwellians) who couldn't get past mainstream publishing's gatekeepers. Said unfortunate writers then carting piles of books around in the boot of an Austin Maxi and foisting those dubious creations upon members of the over-eighties walking club and other captive audiences at a tenner a throw. That time has gone. POD and ebook digital technologies now satisfy the vain, selfish and lazy without filling their dining room with fifty cardboard boxes of vanity. RIP vanity publishers. And good for the environment.

Just a minute. Are you an independent author and proud of it? If so, your hackles are probably raised by now. Independent authors are vanity fodder? No, these sweeping accusations of poorly presented, terribly titled and hopelessly unedited work don't apply to you. That's because you have a cover designed to rival the top 100 ebooks on the 'Zon. It shouts out to browsing readers and visually summarises the premise of your novel. Your product description blurb is the ultimate précis, memorable and relevant to its genre, converting passersby into readers. As for the manuscript itself, there's hardly a hint of word echo, your narrative voice is clear, dialogue resonates through the air and the whole thing is wrapped up in a well-paced plot so tight that, were it an arse, you would just have to smack it. Your digital manuscript appears on all reading devices exactly how you intended. You know that because you've checked (and avoided words like the famous Welsh train station). Grammar and spelling are impeccable. You're just one of several people that have proofread the thing before moving your fastidious document control to final. This novel of yours is as good as it can get. Or is it?

Did you put on the blinkers when some of your peers groaned as they trudged through your porridge of a blurb? Were you able to extract genuine opinion from test readers about your cover or did you take their damning faint praise as something more? Have you dressed your pride and joy in beige? Has your editing discipline been the best or have you really settled for good enough and can't face reading the thing through again for the umpteenth time?

According to the marketing crowd an independent author should be self-assured and assertive, fearless even. A kind of literary warrior. Before you climb up on your war horse to engage with the market, let your natural humility have rein for a few moments and consider this; your independent novel might not be as shiny as it could. Cover, blurb, content. Best efforts, please. You've invested a chunk of your life in writing this thing and you owe it to yourself not to eat the cow and choke on the tail. Stand above the noise of opportunistic amateurs and turn vanity into pride.



The New Author is a non-fiction self help guide for writers, social media marketers and self-publishers. Available in paperback and various ebook formats through a wide range of internet stores including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords et al (see Ruby's Shop for full details).

If you've enjoyed reading Ruby's blog then please sign up to Ruby's News for freebies, advance review copies of upcoming novels and occasional updates. Thanks!
 

It's Read an E-Book Week!

This year I've decided to participate in Read an Ebook Week.
If you head over to Smashwords between 4th and 10th of March, you can grab all kinds of ebooks in all different formsts at discount prices.
Ruby's $2.99 novels are 100% discounted for the week with coupon code RE100
To take advantage of this just click the following links:
Peril Smashwords page
The Baptist Smashwords page

Guess who's coming to town? And it ain't Santa.

My new serial killer e-book will get an airing on Amazon and Smashwords next week, so I'm moving all things Baptist to the new page for The Baptist. In my defence, I was having a lot of strange dreams at the time of writing and I'm not sure where all the darkness comes from, but I know where it goes.

The Baptist won fourth place in the YouWriteOn Book of the Year Award 2011.

Here's the Amazon 'Click to LOOK INSIDE' preview

Nineteen reviews - time to clear the decks with a new page for Peril fans

It's nearly ten months since Peril was launched as an e-book and there have been nineteen reviews posted by readers on various public access websites (Amazon, Smashwords etc). So, to decrease clutter and stop me blowing the Ruby trumpet, I've created a new page for Peril reviews to keep the blog clear for general articles.

The summertime has come (and gone) and the hills are softly blooming

As Gary Newman (who?!) would say, it's a burning car. The cool autumn draws in and our citizens resort to the traditional method of generating warmth. Pic taken recently by a mountainviews.ie member near Bohernabreena, County Dublin.

Well, there hasn't exactly been a summer here in Ireland, but I've finished my free giveaway of PERIL on Smashwords. If you downloaded it then I hope you enjoy the trials and tribulations of Ger Mayes. All reviews gratefully received - the good, the bad and the ugly.

P.S. If you're a LibraryThing member, look out for PERIL as a member giveaway.


If you've enjoyed reading Ruby's blog then please sign up to Ruby's News for freebies, advance review copies of upcoming novels and occasional updates. Thanks! 

The novel contortionist: genre-bending to fit a pigeonhole

I first saw pickled eggs many years ago in a fish & chip shop called Chophards. A huge glass jar squatted on the counter, the kind of jar that might contain unspeakable specimens in a nightmare laboratory. It was a permanent fixture, as though the contents needed to mature for a century. Those eggs swayed in a light yellow fluid and were things of terrible mystery and horror.

Random people ordered them with their fish and chips over the course of the years. There was no typical pickled egg consumer. Young, old, affluent, breadline. A gasp in the queue always followed that rare occasion when someone said 'Cod and chips please. Oh, and a pickled egg.'

Back to the future and I found a jar of pickled eggs in a local supermarket. Had to have them.

'Are they raw when they're put in the vinegar?' asked my 10 year-old daughter. 'Do they still have the shell on? Why are they pickled? Who eats them? Why? I mean, why would anybody pickle an egg, Dad?'

'Try one,' I said.

We both bit into the cold white. It was resilient with a mild pickle taste. The yolk was a contrast, crumbly and vinegary. Within a few hours the two of us had consumed all of the things.

A couple of days later and I decided to reorganise the bookshelves, as I couldn't find a particular book (again!). I'm not particularly obsessive about keeping things in order, and often can't remember book titles or author names, so sorting into genre made sense. It seemed manageable. Just genre, no alphabetical order of authors or titles.

Classics, crime thrillers, action adventure, chick lit, literary fiction, non-fiction (sub-section on Africa), fantasy, childrens. Then the leftovers. Those leftovers included nearly all of my favourite books. They defied genre. Not enough pace for a thriller. The crime aspects too incidental. Language not sufficiently literary. Maybe a classic when I'm long gone, but not yet. No chicks or chocolate. My favourite books, all genre benders. Misfits. Pickled eggs.

Not everyone would agree. Some might say that John Irving's 'A Prayer for Owen meany' is literary fiction.The same for Ian McEwan's 'Enduring Love' or Steve Toltz's 'A Fraction of the Whole'. But they don't fit comfortably into the company of John Banville's 'The Infinities' or Salman Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses'. Nevertheless, that's where you'll find them in the bookshop, alongside Cormac McCarthy and the heavy lads.

My favourites shelf is a shelf of quirkiness. Inexplicably enjoyable, not sufficiently aligned to any one genre. The books that I remember most fondly are all a bit weird in one way or another. They're pickled eggs, well, some are gherkins or onions. Little wonder, then, that my first ebook, Peril, is undeniably a pickled egg. There's too much of me in it to be anything else.

Tutors, mentors and peer groups are likely to advise an unknown author to stay within the genre rules. I did try and write within a genre - two action adventure novels. Unfortunately I was belly prone on the authorial learning curve and the results were quite deplorable. When I found a voice the genre rules had been thrown to the wind and writing became a true joy. But the result didn't fit a pigeonhole.

Many writers' seeds of inspiration germinate and nudge tender green shoots up through fertile soil and into a warm sun. Some find themselves in the midst of a humid jungle. It's crowded, competitive for the sunlight of attention. The young plants flourish, blossom and bloom.

Out on a dry plain another seed follows nature's call to be greeted by a scorching heat. Tumbleweeds roll rootless across the wilderness, driven by a dessicating wind. Our brave new shoot develops a tough skin and puts out prickles to dissuade predators. The young cactus flourishes in that baking desert. A prickly pear. Maybe that would have been a better analogy than a pickled egg, but cactii are few and far between in rainy Ireland.

Genre rules aren't hard to find on the internet and in tutorial guides. I'm not a big fan of 'how to' books but maybe I should become one. I prefer the 'how not to' type of tongue-in-cheek guide eg. 'How Not to Write a Novel' by Mittelmark & Newman. That particular book is great entertainment but trying to write with rules (or don't rules) can make the author self-conscious of style, stymie their spontaneity, crush any creativity and generally over-alliterate.

Are you a reader or writer of genre-challenged novels? Does an 'inappropriate' mix of crime, thriller, mystery, romance, murder, intrigue and naughty bits do it for you? Have a pickled egg. Surprising and lovely.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you've enjoyed reading Ruby's blog then please sign up to Ruby's News for freebies, advance review copies of upcoming novels and occasional updates. Thanks!