If you like literary fiction this is a must read!

Pick a colour (my favourite is blue). Pick a fabric (okay, silk). Sprinkle it with your favourite fragrance (mine is Light Blue by D&G, no kidding!) Draw the material to you, inhale, clutch it to your face and neck. How does it make you feel? Good, isn't it? That's how I felt while reading Blue Mercy by Orna Ross.

I somehow ended up with this book on my kindle, one of a number I'd loaded up for the summer break. Within a few pages I was hooked. The story starts with heavy baggage. Three generations of a family have reached the end of the road and the book is all about unfolding the events that led there. The main vehicle for this is the Blue Mercy Manuscript, a memoir left to the daughter when her mother dies. I'm not going to try and summarise the events of Blue Mercy. Calamitous occurrences, major life choice mistakes, dark secrets and tragic bad luck, it all happens to Mercy and her daughter Star. The mother has the benefit of hindsight as she revisits her journey from rebellious teenager to flower child, single mom and quite suddenly an old and ailing woman. She acknowledges her own weaknesses and strengths, conveys the despair of trying to raise a daughter with serious behavioural problems and carries her beauty, wherever she goes, like a deadly weapon over which she has limited control.
The contrast between Mercy and Star is acute. They're physically very different and that's important to the story. Star's bulk casts a shadow throughout and her self-loathing is palpable. Mercy is gorgeous but she hates herself for being weak willed. The two women are at irreconcilable loggerheads, putting up a united front only when three men enter their lives at different times, each leading to a different kind of disaster.
There's a twist in the tale. In fact, there are two twists. If you see them coming you're more perceptive than I was. Cruel fate indeed.
Blue Mercy is wonderfully written. Orna Ross, it turns out, is a mainstream published author turned indie. I wish, can only hope, that one day I'll be able to write like her.
There's a moral in the story of Blue Mercy. Life is not a rehearsal, this is it. You have one life, live it.


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Pick a card, any card

Pick any card and I bet I can tell you what it is. Is it The Crucible?

Okay, so I don't have a Nook (yet) but I do have a Kindle, a Kobo, an iPhone and a very clean proof copy of The Crucible in paperback and that means the paperback release date is being brought forward by one month. The knock-on effect of that is the Goodreads giveaway of 2 paper copies of the book is also being brought forward by a month to 10th September 2012. So, if you want to enter the draw for a free paperback copy of The Crucible Part 1 (some great reviews starting to come in already) then clickety click below!

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Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Crucible

by Ruby Barnes

Giveaway ends September 10, 2012.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win
 

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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A Goodreads Giveaway - pre-launch paperbacks of The Crucible

One of the great things about getting reviews for your novels is to find out exactly what it is you've written. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and readers know best. I have learnt so much about my own writing from reader reviews on Goodreads, LibraryThing, Amazon and elsewhere.

The book pages on this blog not only serve visitors to summarise reviews of Peril, The Baptist, The New Author and The Crucible Part 1, they also provide me with a single source of reader input that I use as a guide in marketing existing work and planning new projects.

The Crucible Part 1 has had its first two reviews from Ignite (an Amazon top 1000 reviewer) and Tammy (The Self-Taught Cook). I was a bit nervous as I've deviated from my first person, present tense narrative style and stepped out of the crime / psychological thriller genre into political thriller (in fact I'm still genre bending as you can tell from Tammy's review). The body count is high (Rapture proportions) and the novel deals with themes that readers may well hold strong opinions about - religious fundamentalism, AIDS and far right & left politics. These first reviews are encouraging and so I've decided to go straight to paperback with a launch date of 8th October (when I've recovered from my 50th birthday party!) It's a great opportunity to do a Goodreads Giveaway and there are two paperback copies up for grabs below.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Crucible

by Ruby Barnes

Giveaway ends October 04, 2012.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Now, Ruby is going to be a bit quiet for a couple of weeks, writing up Allen's Mosquito - The Crucible Part 2.










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Peril gets a KindleBookBlast!

Ger Mayes loves attention and he's getting some on KindleBookBlast today Saturday 4th August.

This is a nice site for authors, promotes your book well for a day and is a neat way to get RTs for your work too. If you sign up for their newsletter you'll receive email whenever the door opens on a new promotion opportunity. Go take a look.











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!