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.

Thanks to @WodkeHawkinson

I was fortunate enough to be interviewed by the lovely Karen Wodke Hawkinson and the results are posted on Yahoo Associated Content. Here's a narcissistic snippet:

Ruby Barnes, author of Peril, dedicates his writing to the memory of his grandfather, the late Robert 'Ruby' Barnes. In addition to his writing, he also maintains a blog. Ruby has that unique talent for creating characters the reader both loves and hates, and simultaneously roots for and against. From the shipyards of Port Glasgow to the industrial heartland of Southern England, through the fractured reaches of mountainous North Wales and across Scotland 's bottomless lochs, Ruby has traveled and found inspiration for the misfits, rogues and psychopaths that haunt his writing. He is now based in sometimes sunny Kilkenny, Ireland. I was fortunate that Ruby graciously took time from his busy schedule to grant me the interview that follows:

Can you identify a moment when you knew you wanted to be a writer? What was that moment like?
That moment was when, as a teenager, my English teacher accused me of plagiarism over a poem I had written comparing an ancient tower with a mountainside, two sentinels observing time passing by. My parents also disbelieved that it was my own work. It was a moment of incredulity and elation. Then I was heavily marked down for suspected copying.
Read more here...