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!

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 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.

 

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! 

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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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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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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Join the ebook revolution!

I've been asked to run a series of small workshops here in rural Ireland on ebook publishing and social networks for authors. The basis of the workshops will be Ruby's top ten tips from The New Author:

1. You’re going to need a good book, one you believe in, one that has your author’s voice. That unique voice communicates your individual talent as a writer.
2. Test your book on honest people before you consider releasing it. Make it the absolute best you can. Don’t regret, be proud.
3. Ready to publish? Forget about it until you’ve considered the next two marketing steps of platform and brand. You can ignore them and still be successful. That will make you into a folklore hero whose name is on everybody’s lips, but they’re few and far between (and I’m not one of them).
4. You need a social networking platform. Ebook readers are internet users. That’s where you need to focus (and make sure you start that ball rolling before launching your ebook).
5. Brand is to an author what location is to real estate. Make your name your brand. Everything you do needs to enhance that brand. Exert caution at this point because, if you do it wrong, retracing your steps is difficult.
6. Now let’s publish. A cover, title and description that tells a potential reader what’s inside is worth reading. A digital manuscript that won’t cause that reader to trip over systemic errors in prose, grammar or format. If you baulk at any of this then pay someone who can do the uncomfortable parts for you (it can be less expensive than you might think). And keep backups and version control for everything that you write.
7. Aim to build a readership that will provide reviews, recommendations and support. Don’t be precious about initial pricing.
8. Leverage your social networking platform to gradually increase exposure of your book. Use subliminal marketing and influence strategies when you enter into the mêlée of the marketplace.
9. Build your brand team. Remember at every step that each virtual friend, follower and reader is your team. Never alienate, even when in receipt of negativity. Radiate positivity and calm confidence. People don’t just read your ebook, they also digest your blog posts, forum comments, tweets, facebook updates, everything that you write on the internet. Those readers read, enjoy and recommend. Word of mouth sells ebooks. This is the key.
10. Are you writing the next book? Never stop writing creatively. Always have a project in the first draft or edit stages. Blogging, tweeting, chatting and whatever is new, all good but you are an author and you must write. Allocate time for making friends and marketing. Ring-fence time for creative writing. Do both, in parallel, with an element of self-discipline. A satisfied reader asks for more. The reader market is effectively infinite and so is their appetite for good books.

You’ll find useful and proven content in the 44,000 words of The New Author by Ruby Barnes to help you with all of these ten tips.

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!
 

I hear typos - a story of sensory deprivation

[Note: all typos in this post are intentional]

It's taken nearly half a century but I've finally decided to stick my head up over the parapet and shout 'Yes, I have an earring disability. I have mild Google translate between ears and brain.'

What? What did you say? Can you repeat that, please? What? Yeah, yeah, very funny. Not.

I'm partially deaf. Always have been and, without assistants (sic), always will be. Thank God and modern science for bionic ears.

The first definitive sign of a problem was way back when. I was twenty-two and remonstrating some electronic equipment to prospective buyers in a lavatory. Ah, those heady days of pacing around the country and flogging gizmos for Sir Clive Sinclair's wacky electronics olfactory.

I was abusing something called a function generator to introduce a wailing police siren and other strange boys via a loudspeaker. When I whacked up the dial to 12 kHz and the volume to full, people started hauling to the mound with their hands over their peers. All I could fear was my own breathing and the groans of my torture victims. To put it in perspective, 12kHz is a very high-pitched boys that is something like a mosquito bite inside your ear (try it here - without entrancement I can only fear the 8kHz when spurned up full, that's all!)

On reflection, there were earlier sighs. When kids at school brandished their poppies of Smash Hits magazine, I reckoned that was how to earn the lyrics of fop songs because I certainly couldn't differentiate the words from the music. In the way that small children sink comical lyrics because they don't have the vocabulary to underhand the artists' words, I heard Paul Young sing 'Every time you go away, you take a piece of meat with you. Ooooh-ooh'. The Bangles sang 'Talk like an Egyptian'. After a few singalong humiliations I learnt to hum quietly to myself.

As a teenager at discos and in pubs I couldn't mould a conversation. Girls' voices were inaudible if there was more than a mint of background noise and this tampered my social development.

Over the years the social isolation grew. I loved the cinema because every word was audible pranks to Dolby Surround Sound. Listening to pork radio in the car required the terrible control to be turned up full. Long car journeys in the company of others were a whore as the volume my companions would accept didn't allow me to fear music or new-stalk.

One thousand self-publishers share their thoughts

In February 2012 I came to hear (via The Vandal - Derek Haines) of a self-publisher survey being carried out by Taleist, an interesting writers' resource website. As one of the 1,007 respondents I was fortunate to recently receive a complimentary copy of Not a Gold Rush, the report from the Taleist Self-Publishing Survey.

What would you like to know about the report? Well, if you want to read it then you'll have to buy it, but the title story of Not a Gold Rush is about the 2011 earnings of the respondents. Their average earnings for the year was just over US$10,000. So, where's your 10k? Where's mine, for that matter. I shifted a lot of books but many were free copies of Peril with Amazon's price comparison (Peril reached #12 Amazon.com free on kindle in November 2011 in the days before KDP Select). Well, the earnings are distorted by a minority of 10% who earned buckets of money. The median (middle) income was $500. So if you earned less than that then you're in the company of half of the self-published author community (assuming the 1,007 respondent sample was representative of all of us).

The report is entertainingly written and well-balanced, clearly pointing out assumptions and sample limitations whenever any conclusions are drawn. There are one or two lighter moments, such as one bright spark of a correspondent who claimed to have published 16,000 books in 2011, probably meaning that they sold / shipped 16,000. That figure would have greatly distorted the average number of books published but the report authors took care to discount any such outlying data. What kind of twit would have made such a mistake in the survey? (I can say with some certainty that it must have been me!)

There are some indications and suggestions in the report regarding the effectiveness of different marketing methods but there's just no magic recipe to the marketing. I was gratified to find email considered as the least effective marketing tool, as I'm particularly bad at building a mail list myself.

All self-published authors are looking for the Holy Grail of epublishing success. This report doesn't reveal the location of the Grail. It does reinforce some things that we share in common knowledge - a correlation between high quality product + writing output volume and sales revenue. Financially successful authors are, in the main, writing more, publishing more and have been doing it longer than lower earners. So, back to work!


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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!

How do you write? The time, space, support continuum

An extract from The New Author

You’ve made the decision to write. So when, where and how are you going to do it? Here are some characteristic approaches.

The Hemingway - tortured author, tapping away on a typewriter in a mountain retreat. Wild hair, scant meals, sleep-deprived, continuously slightly drunk and chain-smoking.

The Media Junkie – listening to fast music on iPod or laptop, oblivious of the surroundings which might be a café, train, family TV room or workplace. Laptop has ten windows open for ‘research’ including email, twitter, facebook and Wikipedia.

The Midnight Oil – when the house is quiet and everyone else’s day is over, this one is just starting work. Typing through the tiredness and pain barrier. Pulling together the inspiration of observations and events from the preceding daylight hours. Pausing to reflect upon the words written, listening to the drip of the bathroom tap, the hum of a transformer in some electrical apparatus somewhere in the house.

The Peacemaker – a scented candle, Buddha Bar on the music system. Pilates exercises performed with control and precision, establishing the inner core. Elsewhere in the house family rampage at a safe distance, out of earshot. Writing flows from the spirit. Characters talk aloud and their dialogue falls upon the keyboard. 

The Early Bird – rising at the hour of milkmen from yesteryear, moving from bedroom to study and pushing the door firmly shut. Chapters formulated subconsciously during sleep are thrown onto the page to be edited during some lull in the day. As the family stirs, heading off to the bathroom and using time under the shower to think a way out of the present predicament of the main character.

What do you think of these approaches? I’ve tried them all at different times over the years. Any consistent method can be productive, providing you ring-fence the time and space. That needs support and understanding from the other people in your life. They need to understand and appreciate your needs as a writer.

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!
 

Now released - The New Author

Ruby's first release of 2012 is The New Author, a non-fiction self help guide for writers, social media marketers and self-publishers. Many thanks to Jim Williams, author of ten internationally published novels including the Booker Prize nominated Scherzo, for reading my book and writing an engaging foreword.

The New Author is 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!

Ruby’s top ten tips for ebook publishing

1. You’re going to need a good book, one you believe in, one that has your author’s voice. That unique voice communicates your individual talent as a writer.
2. Test your book on honest people before you consider releasing it. Make it the absolute best you can. Don’t regret, be proud.
3. Ready to publish? Forget about it until you’ve considered the next two marketing steps of platform and brand. You can ignore them and still be successful. That will make you into a folklore hero whose name is on everybody’s lips, but they’re few and far between (and I’m not one of them).
4. You need a social networking platform. Ebook readers are internet users. That’s where you need to focus (and make sure you start that ball rolling before launching your ebook).
5. Brand is to an author what location is to real estate. Make your name your brand. Everything you do needs to enhance that brand. Exert caution at this point because, if you do it wrong, retracing your steps is difficult.
6. Now let’s publish. A cover, title and description that tells a potential reader what’s inside is worth reading. A digital manuscript that won’t cause that reader to trip over systemic errors in prose, grammar or format. If you baulk at any of this then pay someone who can do the uncomfortable parts for you (it can be less expensive than you might think). And keep backups and version control for everything that you write.
7. Aim to build a readership that will provide reviews, recommendations and support. Don’t be precious about initial pricing.
8. Leverage your social networking platform to gradually increase exposure of your book. Use subliminal marketing and influence strategies when you enter into the mêlée of the marketplace.
9. Build your brand team. Remember at every step that each virtual friend, follower and reader is your team. Never alienate, even when in receipt of negativity. Radiate positivity and calm confidence. People don’t just read your ebook, they also digest your blog posts, forum comments, tweets, facebook updates, everything that you write on the internet. Those readers read, enjoy and recommend. Word of mouth sells ebooks. This is the key.
10. Are you writing the next book? Never stop writing creatively. Always have a project in the first draft or edit stages. Blogging, tweeting, chatting and whatever is new, all good but you are an author and you must write. Allocate time for making friends and marketing. Ring-fence time for creative writing. Do both, in parallel, with an element of self-discipline. A satisfied reader asks for more. The reader market is effectively infinite and so is their appetite for good books.

You’ll find useful and proven content in the 44,000 words of The New Author by Ruby Barnes to help you with all of these ten tips.

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