Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 30

Enter the Magic Mirror for #WIPpet Wednesday

Since posting my goals for this round, I haven’t gotten a lot of writing done — only 1000 words. My time has been taken up with other goals: preparing for cover reveal and book launch for Island of Glass, and getting book blurb, bio, and and various other things translated for the translation project (more on that soon — we’re almost there!).

So today we’ll be moving on very quickly to the excerpt of the day for WIPpet Wednesday. Math is super easy: 10 sentences for the 10th month of the year....

Starting out as an indie author: Using keywords for getting into niche categories on Amazon

When you publish an ebook through Amazon’s KDP dashboard, you are allowed to select two categories, such as Fantasy/Historical or Fantasy/Epic. But not all of the browse categories on Amazon are available through the dashboard. I’ve written before about how important it can be for sales to get into the right categories here and here.

Much of what I wrote in those posts, however, is now obsolete, at least as far as strategies on how to get into obscure categories is concerned. But it is still t...

Quarterly goals for final round, 2014

Hard to believe it’s the final round again already! Hope everyone has been making good progress on their goals. Mine remain much the same as last round. I’ve tweaked here an there, deleted the goals I completed, and I’m raising the weekly word count goals, since things were going well towards the end of last round.

Writing:

- Write an average of 4000 words a week.

- Finish Facets of Glass

- Integrate critiques from the Villa Diodati workshop into Recontact (novella with Jay Lake)

- Write 2 new sho...

Building A Better Industry

Ruth Nestvold:

Interesting post from David Gaughran on why indie authors sometimes criticize trad publishing — and interesting discussion as well.

Originally posted on David Gaughran:

From

BoardGameGeek.com

Mike Shatzkin is confused. He can’t seem to understand why self-publishers spend so much time documenting the ills of the publishing industry.

Or, as Shatzkin puts it in one of his typically snappy headlines, “The motivation of the publisher-bashing commentariat is what I cannot figure out.”

I...

Yes, I did forget Wednesday: More from Facets of Glass a day late

That’s not entirely true. By the time I saw the other Wednesday Wippet posts in my mailbox, it was too late and I was too tired to write a blog post. So without further ado, a day late, here are 4 short paragraphs from Facets of Glass. My math for 10/2: 1+2=3, plus the extra sentence to end the scene. This excerpt comes shortly after the one I posted last week. I only skipped a couple of spoilery parts:

The Dowager Princess put the telltale glass apple back into its box and laid it with the i...

Cover Reveal: Lower Education by A. M. Leibowitz

One of the great things about the internet is that it makes being a writer a lot less lonely. Over the years, I’ve met many, many other writers, some of whom now are among my best friends. Communities are established, we read, we critique, we help each other out. One of those virtual communities is the WIPpeteers, a group of writers who share snippets from our WIPs every Wednesday. And one of us, A. M. Leibowitz, has a book being published soon, and a cover reveal today!

Here’s the synopsis:...

Third quarter stock-taking, a Glassmakers excerpt, and a request

It’s that time of year again, time to take a look at the original list of goals and analyze how things went. I’m pretty pleased with this quarter. Here’s the breakdown:

Writing

My original goal was to get 2500 words a week written. At the moment I am regularly producing more than 4000 a week, a definite improvement from my original goal. Another writing goal was to write a detailed outline of Facets of Glass — I am now over 11,000 words into the writing of the actual novella. Of course, I also...

Starting Out as an Indie Author: Getting Your Books into Google Play

In an earlier post in this series, I mentioned that since I’d heard so many horror stories about Google Play randomly cutting prices of indie books, and Amazon subsequently following suit — with serious consequences for the incomes of the writers involved — I decided not to try to sell my books through that venue.

But then I learned (on Kboards of course) that the stories I’d heard, while true, could be avoided with creative pricing. Apparently Google discounts all books in pretty much the sa...

Late update and #WIPpet for Wednesday (Thursday …)

Can you say tomatoes? That’s one of the reasons I’m late this week. Big fat tomato harvest and the need to make stewed tomatoes and spaghetti sauce and tomato consomme and freeze a bunch so it won’t all go to waste! Add to that the fact that I’m on my own little personal writing roll, and yesterday I just didn’t feel like interrupting that for an extended blogging session … So far this week I’ve written 2300 words on Facets of Glass. For about the last month, I’ve been consistently writing at...

Part I of Yseult published – and a request

The last few days have been all about marketing, and I haven’t gotten much writing done. But I did have a fairly successful week last week, with a total word count of 4100 words. Oh, and if you haven’t seen the interview with our own Kate Sparkes that I posted on Monday, check it out!

The marketing activity this week has to do with the experiment I wrote about in my last blog post, splitting Yseult up into four parts and uploading each individually. I started on that yesterday, publishing Par...