Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 10

The KU Conundrum…

I’m not following the drop in pages read as much any more, since I pulled all my books from Kindle Unlimited, but it looks like the problem is far from fixed, according to this post.

Ruby Madden

I’m re-assessing how I run my publishing business for 2017 and wanted to share some of my frustrations as an Author.

Recently, many authors have noticed that over the last few months, the pages-read numbers for our eBooks that are borrowed at Amazon and read, have decreased dramatically. Some say it...

Tales of the Rose Knights: Smooth Angel

A new Tale of the Rose Knights that I wrote with Jay Lake went up on Daily Science Fiction today, “Smooth Angel.” Here a short teaser:

Smooth Angel came out of the uttermost east, across the great Sea of Grass into the lands of the Roses. She traversed the farthest kingdoms, crossed the Ivory Mountains by hidden passes, and descended through Hy Rugosa, already arrayed as a knight with her pale banners the color of the first orange of sunrise. Her armor was lacquered in the manner of the Sal...

Advantages and Disadvantages of Self-Publishing

I am finally (finally!) compiling my “Starting Out as an Indie Author” series into a book, and since I started this weekend, I’ve noticed a couple of things I still need to add. Since the first part of the book revolves around the question, “Is Self-Publishing For You?” I realized I had to write my own version of the consideration of the pros and cons of indie and traditional publishing. (I have a few more things up my sleeve that I will probably blog about in the next week or two.)

So with...

Over 100 great SFF ebooks this weekend for only 99c each!

The monthly specfic promo is here again, this time with over 100 ebooks in science fiction and fantasy, all for only 99c!

Choose your poison — the promo page includes convenient links to the retailer of your choice, so you won’t end up frustrated by books you can’t get.

Call to Arms: Year-long survey reveals which book advertiser offers best value for money

Great info from Nicholas Rossi’s advertising survey. I was quite surprised by AMS (Amazon Marketing Services) coming out as the leader of the pack. I tried them some time ago and had absolutely no luck. And now that I’m no longer in Select, I can’t test them anymore. Ce la vie!

Anyway, good info there — check it out!

Last year, I shared with you the result of my Call to Arms, on my very popular post, Book Marketing Results 2015. I now have collected enough data to follow up with this year’s r...

A Chronicle of the Amazon Page Flip Controversy: Or, how to piss off a ton of your vendors all at once

For the past several weeks (and in some case months), authors publishing through KDP Select have been noticing a massive decrease in the pages read (KENP = Kindle Edition Normalized Pages). I blogged about his before here and here, mostly about how it has hit me personally. In this post I would like to attempt a summary of what’s been going on and what the authors affected think might be causing it.

Most of what I know comes from a discussion thread on Kboards, a forum for indie authors. The...

Jutoh Page-Flip Hack

If you need to make your books non-page flip compliant in Jutoh, here’s a quick lesson.

Source: Jutoh Page-Flip Hack

Note: I haven’t tried this myself, since I don’t have Jutoh, but I have unpublished Yseult for now, since Amazon hasn’t allowed me to get out of KDP Select. I can’t do that with Shadow of Stone, since I have a promo I’ve committed to coming up. But for me, Yseult is the main culprit for lost pages, since it is over 900 KENP long. That’s a lot of money lost when reads only count...

More “Tales of the Rose Knights” up on DSF starting today!

Daily Science Fiction is starting a new round of stories in the Tales of the Rose Knights that I wrote with Jay Lake. Today, “Descanso Dream”:

Descanso is the smallest of the Rose Knights, and perhaps the strangest. He is a dream made flesh, a pale man with skin the white of the ocean’s dead, riding a horse of fog and silk. His banners trail behind him like a wind from the Orient. His smile gleams of starlight and the gentle thoughts of a loving woman.

Read more.

(c) Rakel Leah Mogg, Creati...

Bye, Bye, KDP Select; Or, How I Got Screwed by Amazon (and You May Have Been Too)

I blogged a couple of days ago about how some kind of software glitch seems to be swallowing authors’ pages read, and posted the email I sent to Amazon about it.

Well, two days later, still no answer. Two days with a total of 24 pages read, when my daily average is closer to 1000. For all of October, I have have had less than half the pages read that I usually have in a single day. My pages read have flatlined, my rankings have tanked, and my sales have come to a halt. It looks like I’m going...

Amazon KDP Select authors are losing page reads, apparently due to software glitches

Here’s another, longer report than the one I did yesterday on the present Amazon glitch in pages read.

I love Amazon’s KDP Select almost as much as I love Buster, my 13-year-old Pekeapom, a mix of Pekingese and Pomeranian, the dogyou see to the right.

But my rescue pup dirties up the carpet every now and then. And in a way that’s exactly what KDP has been doing lately.

Last month, some alertauthorssmelled mismatches and oddities in the reporting of their page reads from subscribers toAmazon...