Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 30

Some good news, and more from Facets of Glass for #WIPpet Wednesday

As those who follow this blog know, I had a fairly successful free run for my time travel novel Chameleon in a Mirror last week. Nonetheless, my summary of the results were a bit on the skeptical side, and I predicted that CIAM would soon drop out of the Top 100 lists that it managed to get into again once it went back to paid.

I am happy to announce that I was wrong — so far. *g* Since Sunday, it has been slowly climbing in the rankings rather than falling. Here is where it was when I checke...

Results of free run for Chameleon in a Mirror and further experiments

I promised to report the results of my free run last week with my time travel novel Chameleon in a Mirror.

In one word: mixed.

Altogether I managed to give away over 2000 books, many in places where I’ve never sold anything before. The only Amazon store where CIAM didn’t get any downloads was Mexico. And that was all without spending a dime, only announcing the free run on my blog and through the free sites listed here. On Amazon.de, CIAM even managed to stay in the Top 100 free overall for o...

Giving “Free” another chance with Chameleon in a Mirror

Some time ago, after a series of very disappointing free runs that hardly seemed to bump the visibility of the respective books at all, I decided to give up on temporary free runs as an advertizing method. Instead, I tried to increase interest using permafree offerings.

Let’s just say that hasn’t gone so well.

I haven’t been doing a lot of marketing for some time, and it has really been showing in my sales figures. Admittedly I didn’t have a lot of time while I was working on the translation,...

A mostly marketing update, and more mirror for #WIPpet Wednesday

With the cover reveal for Island of Glass yesterday, the first free run in almost a year that I’ve organized for one of my books, and a lot of work on the big translation project, I haven’t had much time for actual writing so far this week. What free time I’ve been able to devote to my writing has been taken up with marketing.

But that is going VERY well! I want to thank you all so much who participated in the cover reveal for Island of Glass. The book isn’t even out yet, and it has already c...

Cover reveal for Island of Glass

My YA fantasy novella, Island of Glass, is now available for pre-order for only 99c! It will come out on October 28, 2014.

Synopsis:

Seventeen-year-old Chiara Dragoni is a master glassmaker of Venice, a position that is both a privilege — and a trap. For the glassmakers of Murano are forbidden to ever leave the islands of the Venetian lagoon.

When Chiara’s uncle is caught on the mainland and thrown into the dungeon of the Doge’s Palace, she must use all her talents, including magic, to help fre...

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...