Can you get something for nothing?

There's no such thing as a free lunch, right? 

I've been offering The New Author for free as an e-book for the past few weeks as part of my haphazard marketing strategy. This isn't a KDP Select freebie, it's a price-matched affair. The New Author freebie has resulted in several thousand downloads on Amazon US and UK (and possibly Barnes & Noble etc but who knows with the slow Smashwords reporting). A few free downloads have occurred on Amazon DE and ES where it's also gone free. Has it stimulated sales of my novels? Difficult to say but things are a bit quiet on that front for me as for many other indie authors. What has surprised me is the Amazon paperback sales of The New Author which have consistently beaten my novel e-book sales during this 'experiment'. (I hesitate to call it an experiment because, like I said, I'm like a flag in the wind when it comes to pricing strategy. Maybe I should increase my novel prices? Hey, yeah. See what I mean?)

Another by-product of this 'freeness' is the fairly continuous presence of The New Author in top ten genre rankings alongside paid books and established freebie must-haves like Smashwords Style Guide and Write Good or Die. It's a rare event for me to get into a genre listing (although Peril did manage to get into a UK Drama listing this week) and I'm enjoying the vainglory of The New Author achieving that in a niche genre that requires just a few dozen downloads a day for a listing.

Reviews are starting to appear, as well, and a particularly interesting blog review turned up yesterday from one Michael N. Marcus. He loved The New Author but thinks I'm throwing money away by giving it for free and here's his blog post on the subject: http://www.bookmakingblog.com/2012/12/can-you-get-something-for-nothing-yes.html

So, whadya think? Should I put The New Author e-book back to priced? Is it the dumbest marketing strategy you ever heard? Am I flushing money down the toilet in a fit of genre-listing narcissim, 'cos nobody will buy my novels on the back of a piece of non-fiction? 

Let me know and I'll email you a free e-copy of ... oh, wait a minute, that's what got me into this fix in the first place!

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It's a long way to Tipperary, but let's go!

Okay, so South Tipperary might not be the most convenient global venue for a double workshop on e-publishing, but it's free! A series of two workshops on the e-revolution and how to self-publish your novel or non-fiction as an e-book (warning: contains humour and mild peril).
23rd and 30th November in Carrick-on-Suir library, places limited to 15. Registration is required but the course is free of charge. See pic for contact details.

 

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Have you got what it takes? Write that book!

I’ve always felt I have a novel inside of me. When I hear someone say this, a mental image appears of surgery being performed on the speaker to extract their story. Dripping with the experience of life, it emerges from the donor, be it memoir, fiction or a travelogue of sub-Saharan Africa.

There is almost no one on this planet who has led a totally uninteresting life. Even then the reason they have led such a life might in itself be interesting. A twenty-first century glut of celebrity memoirs and novels shows everyone is capable of producing a story of sorts (although we know they sometimes get a little help along the way). The trick is in the writing. Does it engage the target audience? Fact or fiction, there is an art to storytelling. In Ireland a shanachie is a gifted verbal storyteller. To hear one is to never forget the story or the shanachie (Niall de Burca is a good example). A novel author should look to leave the same impression.

Unless you are trained in writing, it’s unlikely that you will produce a best-selling masterpiece with your first attempt at writing a novel. Those that do often have an education and career in journalism behind them, having written to the moon and back.

Disheartened? Well, there is another alternative. Pick up one, or why not several, of the renowned How To books on writing. Read them all, digest and internalise the content and apply immediately to your writing. Wait a minute, isn’t that writing by numbers? Will the result resemble a picture painted by numbers, similarly lacking in spontaneity and creativity? More than likely, yes

So now we come to the crux of the matter. As a new author if you want to write a good novel then, in almost all cases, you need to build your experience of writing. You might be a marathon writer, throwing yourself at an entire novel. Alternatively you’re a sprinter and that means short stories. Either way, a literary athlete. I hope you’re dressed appropriately.

This post is an extract from The New Author by Ruby Barnes, 200 pages of tips and guidance on writing, social media and e-publishing. Available at all good e-bookstores.

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Tweet dreams are made of this

So you want to know how to keep your blog content alive, re-use your twitter microblog moments of glory and broaden your social media reach? Bear with me, I'm going to take you off on a hygiene products tangent.

You're walking down a corridor at work, a hotel lobby for an event, the final few steps to the wine bar for a date. Did you remember to put on anti-perspirant deodorant? Doesn't matter, you're cool. But now you start to worry about whether you forgot to put it on and the sweat begins. Even if you put it on now it would be too late. What's that odour? Body or fear? That's how I feel about all the things I have to do to keep my social media platform running. I've forgotten something essential, my weaknesses (social armpits) are exposed and the strange smell in the room is me. How can I keep things sweet, make sure the toilet paper is hanging the right way everywhere I go and maintain my sanity with everything else going on?

Social media fads come and go. Remember MySpace? A few months ago Google+ was going to be the next sweet little number. Since its flotation the predicted demise of Facebook has had people scrabbling for footholds on Pinterest, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon and goodness knows where else. Everything is a whirling blur of social networks, blogs, photo collections, discussion forums, online chat and update feeds.

How about Twitter? What is the point of a 140 character message which might not get read by anyone before it sinks into the 340 million daily tweets? Maybe you use it for a kind of global chat. Are you a microflash wizard who gets favorited every five minutes and manages to send tweets viral? Twitter doesn't seem to offer much to those of us mortals who don't have spare hours to follow the streams of consciousness. Unless you're a blogger.

Content is the key to good blogging. Some folk blog about their routine daily life, others about a book release, product review or maybe a competition. Authors engage in round-robin writing challenges, give updates on their WIP and share writing tips. People tend to follow or bookmark the blog if the content has value for the reader: well written, entertaining and pertinent. They skim and immediately forget uninspired posts.

Size does matter! Keep it small. Tiny.

Please tell me you all have the same problems as I do in this internet-based world that we live in. It's all driven by usernames, passwords, URLs, cookies and crumbs or something. An infinite number of web places with wondrous free things awaiting if you just register, sign up, log in, tune in and trip out. Maybe there's a log in with facebook option, or twitter or something? It all just seems to work. Until it doesn't.

This person is saying terrible things about you ... A friend has tagged you in a photo ... I can't believe this is you in this video. You click the message and, hey presto, someone has hacked your twitter, your facebook and who knows what else. You might not even know you've been compromised, unless a kind friend who has received spam from your hijacked account decides to let you know. Do you use the same username and password for internet banking and social media? System meltdown.

Almost as bad is when someone munches your cookies. You go to Goodreads, facebook, twitter, Google, webmail or whatever and hit the first letter of your username. It doesn't fill in the rest like it usually does. You type it in and wait for the long forgotten password to automatically appear as a row of asterixes. It doesn't. This can happen accidentally (using too broad a brush when clearing out internet history so no-one knows you've been looking at cute puppies), deliberately (if you let comeone else use your computer and they trash your cookies while eradicating their forensic trace evidence, because who can you trust these days?) or inadvertently (e.g. when you start using a new browser or your employer does an upgrade that wipes the slate clean or your hardware / software spontaneously combusts because it just knows your life is becoming dependent upon it). But when those cookies are gone, they're gone.

Is twitter driving you demented?

I have a guest post today over on Sweet Louise Wise's blog.

It describes how Feed140 and Triberr can help you regain your sanity in the world of blogging and twitter.

Please go on over and have a gander / butcher's ;-)

http://www.louisewise.com/2012/09/is-twitter-driving-you-demented.html#.UFrwx67neSq

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So, you've written a novel? Hurray! Go edit.

Completion of a novel is a great satisfaction in itself. Celebrate that achievement and then put the book aside for a period of time, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months if you can stand it. Start another project, keep writing, but let your completed manuscript be for a while. When you come back to it, you do so as a reader instead of author and you'll have a much more objective take on what works and what doesn't.

So, putting on your editor's hat, what should you be looking for? Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King is a very useful book that contains detailed guidance including checklists, exercises and techniques for editing your novel into shape. The chapter headings of the book (e.g. Show and Tell, Characterization and Exposition, Point of View) reveal editing for what it really is. Editing is the process of realigning your novel with best practice. You read your work through, compare it with The Rules and then adjust as best you can.

How you accomplish this task depends upon what works for you. Here are some characteristic approaches.

The Reiterator likes to edit on the hoof whilst writing the manuscript. S/he writes a paragraph, reads back the paragraph, adjusts, rereads, tweaks. Once the manuscript first draft is finished, The Reiterator may feel that the job is complete. Nevertheless, a holistic view is needed in editing that first draft to ensure the perfect pieces of the jigsaw meld well together. A disadvantage of The Reiterator is completion of the first draft can take a very, very long time compared to other approaches which are more tolerant of imperfection.

The Salami Slicer takes a knife to the manuscript and severs slices of less than perfect writing according to each of The Rules. The Salami Slicer places the narrative voice hat upon their head and reads the manuscript through for consistent and appropriate narrative point of view, adjusting as necessary. Then the dialogue hat is donned, the show-not-tell hat and so on. This approach means a new read through for every rule but is very thorough. One pitfall is The Salami Slicer can become fixated on a particular aspect of The Rules and overdo the editing. For example, the word that is often overused by new authors and can be eliminated unless essential for the meaning of a sentence, but such a narrow focus can lead to a mechanical approach and leave readers tripping over sentences where that is actually needed but has been cut.

The Jack of All Trades applies all the rules at once as s/he reads through the manuscript, spotting discontinuities, point of view slips, structural and grammatical problems etc. as they arise. This is the fastest and most holistic way to edit but requires a high degree of alertness and flexibility. If you can do this then perhaps you have a future career sideline as an editor!

The Listener prefers to hear the manuscript read aloud. A traditional Listener will lock themselves away and read the book out loud to themselves, but the 21st century Listener uses a text-to-speech facility on their e-reading device or laptop. There are numerous text-to-speech voices and accents available free on the web, but even the robotic default MS voices do a good job of exposing missing commas, word echo, unintentional alliteration and stilted or unnatural dialogue. A good Listener can sense, from the cadence of spoken word, the mood and emotions of the piece. That's if they can concentrate and stay awake for the duration of the reading.

The Outsourcer wants to be done with the manuscript once the first draft is completed and have a third party (sometimes more than one) take care of slapping the novel into shape. Depending upon the level of financial investment you are willing to make, this may be an option. Some novel writing books advocate passing your manuscript through the hands of different types of editor e.g. developmental, copy, proofreading. The advantage of this is you can whisk your manuscript off to the third party as soon as it's finished, no time wasted. The disadvantage is the author doesn't gain the learning themselves from having self-edited. In addition, editors can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. If, as an independent author, you do want to outsource your editing then you need an element of confidence that your writing has reached a level that makes paid-for editing worthwhile.

Self-editing is a learning experience. Being able to spot what works and what doesn't, and learning how to fix the deficiencies, eventually leads to an increased sophistication in the author's writing. These skills can be further developed by participating in writing groups where you will also have the opportunity to edit the work of others.

The above is an extract from The New Author - a self-help guide to novel writing, publishing as an independent ebook author and promoting your brand using social networks 


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Park that pachyderm! Elephants, writers, readers and SEO

An extract from The New Author

At time of writing my blog page views have just passed 23,000. There was a time when I thought nobody was ever going to read my blog. Then I wrote a post about Compulsive Communication Syndrome (which isn’t a clinical condition, I made it up). The number of views on my blog increased dramatically. However, after a few weeks of feeling like I had actually written something that people from around the world were interested in, it came to light that 75% of my visitors were looking for pictures of elephants. Their average stay was just over 2 seconds. I had used a picture of elephants and an elephant joke in my post. Therein lies a lesson – a lot of people like elephants. If you can leverage your blog content to match topic popularity with the top interests of your potential readers then the traffic volume becomes much more meaningful. Therein lies a second lesson - I should write a novel with elephants (although they do tend to trample the keyboard).

The next breakthrough was when I took a family holiday and had to survive without internet for a week. I had started using a twitter tool called Hootsuite (more on that later) and what I did was to pre-schedule tweets during that week, pointing to blog posts that I had written in the previous months. The result was more than one hundred hits per day, every day, but half of them were still short-stay elephant hunters.

I was enjoying the blog traffic (a pointless obsession with numbers) but really wanted to up the quantity of hits from genuinely interested readers and writers. So I started to research SEO on the internet, made some changes, ran my pages through an SEO analyzer and tuned things up a bit. I managed to get a mention on the Smashwords blog and more traffic came to my blog from there.

The result is that my blog traffic is now predominantly viewing my posts rather than searching for elephant pictures. Visitors stay minutes rather than seconds and sometimes for more than an hour, moving from post to post and page to page. I get a feeling for whether folks are looking at my shop, either of my two book pages, my New Author post, the shop or the main blog page. 

The reason I shared this little insight of blog statistics is analytics are important. There are basic analytics built into most blog platforms that tell you the total number of views per post and page, the traffic sources (including referring URLs, referring sites and search keywords) and the geographical audience. You can set up your blog for deeper information through tools such as Google Analytics to gain a more in-depth understanding. Know your audience.

Search Engine Optimisation SEO for your blog / website

You’ve decided on your blog style, layout and content. Now you need to make sure that you’re getting found on Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. SEO is the method of making your web presence easily found through giving it a high profile in search engines. Try typing Peril by Ruby Barnes into a search engine and scroll through the results. All the ebook marketplaces feature strongly in those results as they are designed in a way that promotes their products through SEO. I’m a self-confessed non-expert in SEO but there are some basic things you can do to optimise your search results. If you already know about SEO, html and meta tags then look away now! What follows is for beginners, which is the place I started from.

Your blog has a number of key places where search engines will index it against keywords. Some people may dispute this, but I know it’s correct because I’ve tested it with improbable search words.

Title

Your actual on-page blog title is the main key to visibility. Include your brand and what you do e.g. Ruby Barnes - author. The blog will automatically embed your actual page title in the html code of your page and, within a few days, it will be found by search engine spider bots and indexed so that you come up in searches. If you’re determined to label your blog page with something other than your brand then the branded URL will still come up in search but not as the first line.

HTML

The automatic placement of your blog title in the html code can be further exploited. Go to the design page of your blog and click on edit html. After the code <head> you will see your blog title e.g. <title>Ruby Barnes - author, book reviewer, blogger</title>. Note that this contains the words book reviewer, blogger which don’t appear in my on-page title, but they do appear in the search engine result for my blog. This shows that you can have terms appear in the search engine that don’t have to appear on the blog page.

I also have the words Ruby Barnes writes thrillers, reviews books, sells ebooks and advises on novel writing, social media and ebook publication bounded by the code <meta content= and  name='description'/>. Those words appear on the third line of the search engine result although they don’t appear on my blog page.

So the search engine result looks like this:

Ruby Barnes - author, book reviewer, blogger

rubybarnes.blogspot.com/

14 Jan 2012 – Ruby Barnes writes thrillers, reviews books, sells ebooks and advises on novel writing, social media and ebook publication.

The only words that are on the page are Ruby Barnes – author. The rest are meta tags embedded in the html code. 

Those are just the baby steps but it’s that easy. Except maybe you’ve chosen wording that no one is searching for. That’s another matter. One way SEO companies provide value is in their knowledge of which search terms will get results and whereabouts on your platform you should place those terms. There are seemingly limitless resources on the web for SEO. Type SEO Analyzer (yes, US spelling for a change) into Google and you will find various free tools that will analyse your web page from a search engine perspective. There are also lots of free SEO guides available on the web that will take you deeper into the art if you really want to go there.

Tags on your blog posts

When you’ve created a piece of content for your blog, don’t forget to add some suitable tags to it. Choose words that you would enter into a search engine if you wanted to find a post like the one you have written.

Text content of your blog posts

Search engines will also pick up words and phrases from your blog posts. Bear that in mind when blogging. Don’t miss a chance to mention your book or other authors. Try and use memorable hooks for your blog titles and closing sentences. For example, try typing tired old limes stand the test of time into Google. It’s the title of a post I wrote reviewing The Green Mile by Stephen King. You’ll see that the results are my blog and the next are places where my blog is syndicated to.

The above post is an extract from The New Author, 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!