Body count? Let's say a quarter million even.

In the aspiring writer circles of Kilkenny I've been accused of leaving bodies strewn across the literary landscape. That's the nature of my writing, but I thought I'd challenge the assumption and count the corpses.

Peril - let's see. Ilie the beggar, Tom the gay drug dealer, Aunt Mary the spinster, Renee the mistress. Just the four of them. How about Ger Mayes, does he survive? That's another story.

The Baptist - brother Ray, Mr & Mrs Baptist, Daly the Leaping Loony, Medwyn the Mad (well, okay, he didn't die), Joe McCarthy the failed doctor, Charles the aristocrat, those two obese tourists at the Cliffs of Moher, Alan the mechanic, then two more but that would give the game away. Eleven in The Baptist.

The Crucible Part 1 - 144,003 USA citizens (or did they survive the Rapture?), 100,000 Iranian foot soldiers, 77 Africans (mostly despots), two monkeys, a chimpanzee and a Dutchman. Let's call it a quarter of a million even. Maybe I've peaked there.

The New Author - no one dies in this one. Two hundred pages of tips on writing, building an author social media platform, and e-publishing your book. Currently free on Amazon.com

Allen's Mosquito - The Crucible Part 2 body count? Well, we'll just have to wait and see. Due for release in 2013.

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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).

Stepping away from the watched pot

Cold turkey. No, not Christmas or Thanksgiving leftovers but the only solution to compulsive communication syndrome.

I thought I had it beaten. 18 months after the launch of Peril as an ebook and with three further titles subsequently released, my social media platform had become increasingly demanding. A couple of neat tools (Triberr and Feed140) had helped me semi-automate promotion via twitter and blog. It gave me a lot more time to concentrate on writing. But I couldn't help continuously watching the pot, looking for incremental changes, following sales figures, interacting on Twitter and facebook, and surveying the virtual world for new reviews of my books. It's a common problem, this compulsion to keep your finger on the pulse of a complex system. You can read about it on any number of author blogs. But recognising and acknowledging the problem doesn't fix it.
34,000 blog page views, 3,600 Twitter followers, 5,200 tweets, 867 facebook friends, 1,429 Goodreads friends and lots more. A modest social media platform that grows organically, so I tell myself.

I was achieving my writing goals, adding between 500 and 2000 words a day to Yellow Ribbon (sequel to Peril) and rewriting Allen's Mosquito (The Crucible Part 2). So what was the problem? Why not just turn off the internet connection? I didn't have the will power.

A new kind of syndrome was developing - Indie Author Anxiety. Indie authors all over the planet are beavering away at marketing their work, clamouring for a piece of the e-revolution. What if I stopped interacting with my platform? Would Ruby Barnes's steadily building sales momentum disappear? A few weeks ago I took the plunge and dropped the day job down to four days a week, dedicating Fridays to writing, and those sales are essential to support that commitment. It all added to the Indie Author Anxiety.

If a man ploughs his own furrow in life does it eventually become a rut? Summer brought a chance to break the grind and we had a week long visit by friends from Switzerland. I balanced hosting with sneaking off to check the laptop or the iPhone several times a day. Twitter, blog, facebook, Triberr, Goodreads, around and around. That watched pot never boils. Then came the family break to Tenerife.

My backpack weighed a ton. Chargers, leads, adaptors and gadgets. Phones and laptop. Kindle and Kobo fully loaded. At Dublin airport I could see on my iPhone a couple of new Amazon sales for The Crucible and I had ordered the CreateSpace paperback proof of The Crucible online before leaving home. The plane took off for the Canary Islands.

Then nothing. Two glorious weeks of nothing.

We had no internet connection at the villa and my iPhone wasn't enabled for international roaming. Enforced exile from the virtual community. The kobo and kindle ran red hot as we devoured book after book. Some real gems came to light and I'll be adding them to Ruby's Reviews (Blue Mercy by Orna Ross, Bad Moon Rising by Frances di Plino, A Storm Hits Valparaiso by David Gaughran, The Casablanca Case by Simon Swift, The Virginia X by Keith Nichols). My laptop stayed in the backpack. Not once did I power up Old Faithful. Fourteen days of reading, eating, drinking, family and thinking. Thinking that the existing three sequel projects are all worthwhile. Discussing and designing a formulaic new series of crime thrillers for 2013. And shaving my face one half at a time. Because I could.

When we returned to Ireland last weekend I put off looking at the computer for half a day. Had the simmering pot boiled dry or the flame gone out? The results: 500 new emails, of which maybe a dozen required my action, the rest just information; blog views down to double digits per day; 50 new followers on Twitter, gazillions of new notifications on Goodreads and Facebook. One look at my Twitter stream showed I had turned off my automated tweets on Feed140 before leaving and hadn't sent a tweet for two weeks. Neither had I shared any blog posts via Triberr. Those two things accounted for the low blog views. I turned them back on and the system began to ramp up immediately.

How about sales? While I'd been attaining the 12,198 ft summit of Mount Teide had Ruby's books slipped off the radar? No. The best month so far. Go figure.

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