Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 28

Russell Blake’s Six Things Successful Indie Authors Have

Great post the other day by indie thriller writer Russell Blake, who manages to earn six figures a year with his self-published books. This is how he distills the habits of a successful indie author:

What do all of these authors have in common, though? All these indies who are making serious, and in some cases, insane, bank? First, they publish regularly. As in once every few months, and in some cases, once every month. Second, they work in genres that will support them. While most of the top...

“Yseult, Part I: Two Women” now finally free on Amazon

As I mentioned a while back, in September I embarked on an experiment: splitting my almost 200,000 word monster book Yseult into episodes and making the first one free.

The problem was, Amazon wasn’t cooperating. The book was free on iTunes, B&N, Google Play, you name it — but no matter how many times I clicked on “tell us about a lower price” and how many people I asked to tattle on me, the price refused to budge, sitting there stubbornly at 99c. I published the first two episodes within day...

eBooks Could Finally Inch Past Print In 2018

Ruth Nestvold:

Of course, this is only for the US market, which the article states. Here in Germany, the ebook market is still a fraction of the print market.

Originally posted on TechCrunch:

PricewaterhouseCoopers analysts are predicting (again) that ebooks could soon edge out print as publishers’ most lucrative products. What does this mean? Essentially that a ebook popularity and pricing stabilizes, users will spend more on bits than they will on pulp. The resulting switch could be the final...

German translation of Viking Warrior now available

A couple of days ago, I posted the news on my German blog, but now Jud has also announced it on his blog. So I will now announce it here on my English blog as well:

Ein Krieger der Wikinger, my translation of Judson Roberts Viking Warrior into German, is now available on Amazon.de!

More about the project is available in German here.

Almost All the Way Home From the Stars #6 in Australia

In the middle of all the turmoil, I got a little consolation prize today:

That’s right, Almost All the Way Home From the Stars is #6 in Free Kindle Books in Australia. This is not a genre list, it’s free books overall. This is what it looks like at the time of this writing:

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #6 Free in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Free in Kindle Store)

#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Space Opera

#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Scienc...

Bowing out for the time being

The Villa Diodati writing workshop in France was wonderful, but it was overshadowed by news of a medical emergency in the family that occurred while I was away. I will still try to get a report on Villa Diodati 13 up when brain cells allow, but after that, I make no guarantees for anything happening on this blog for a while. We’re in a state of limbo at the moment. As I have already learned this year, grief eats creativity, and fear doesn’t seem to be any better.

As a result, my writing progr...

FREE though Friday – story collection with Jay Lake, Almost All the Way Home From the Stars

From now through Friday, you can get Almost all the Way Home From the Stars, a collection of seven science fiction stories that I wrote with my friend Jay Lake, who passed away in June after years battling cancer.

The description:

Near future dystopia, colonies in space, galactic empires: this collection has it all! “Almost All the Way Home From the Stars” is a collection of seven science fiction short stories by award winning writers Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold. The settings range from galact...

Many words, a story sale, and then off to France!

The word production has been going quite well since I decided to do Nano again. Last week, I got 13,000 words written, and so far this week it’s another 5400. Doing word sprints has been helping a LOT (thank you, sprint pals!) No writing so far today, though — I’ve been packing and setting up my little netbook for the trip. Tomorrow I fly to Paris for the next Villa Diodati workshop. We won’t actually be in Paris, though. This is where we’ll be:

Three days and four night of writing talk and g...

An update, a new Nano project, and a change of mind

The writing continues to be slow but steady. Last week I got 4600 new words written, despite lots of other stuff going on. We finally pulled the tomato plants in the garden — all but two, that is. Let’s see if we can still get fresh tomatoes in December. *g*

I also decided to participate in Nano again, even though none of my projects is long enough. I’m going to cheat and conflate them, my goal being to get the 50,000 words and at least two new novellas done. :) First, I want to finish Facets...

Using Keywords to Show up in Searches: Review of Supercharge Your Kindle Sales

Last month, before Chameleon in a Mirror had its free run and Island of Glass was available for pre-release, I did an experiment. At the beginning of October, I got a review copy from Nick Stephenson of his book Supercharge Your Kindle Sales. While he made a great case for using keywords to help make your book more visible, I didn’t want to write a review until I had some actual results on which to base my judgment.

I’ve already pointed out in another post in the series “Starting out as an In...