Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 31

On splitting up a big book: Turning Yseult into episodes

As many of you following this blog know, I started my career as an indie author after I got the rights back to the original English of my novel Yseult, which was published in German as Flamme und Harfe by Random House Germany in 2009.

I published the English original in January 2012 on my own with this cover from the talented Derek Murphy of CreativIndie Covers:

Since the original publisher of Yseult / Flamme und Harfe, Random House Germany, told me they were interested in a sequel (which the...

Starting out as an indie author: Interview with Kate Sparkes, author of BOUND

For this week’s installment of “Starting out as an indie author” I offer you an interview with new writer Kate Sparkes, who — to judge by her rankings in the Amazon store — “did it right.” She published her first novel, Bound, in June 2014. The novel is a YA fantasy and the first in a trilogy – and has a beautiful cover that makes me drool. :)

As of today, the book already has 88 reviews with an average of 4.7. The rankings in the Amazon US Kindle store are also impressive:

Amazon Best Seller...

Hullabaloo Steampunk animated cartoon on IndieGoGo

This looks so amazing, I just have to post it:

I haven’t decided yet what I’ll contribute, but I know I will. :) Me, I’ve only written one steampunk story until now, which hasn’t been published yet, but I get a kick out of reading them, and my late great friend Jay Lake was one of the proponents.

I can only wish them good luck!

Battling Plagiarism: The case of Rachel Nunes against Tiffanie Rushton

A few weeks ago, I posted a link to another blog post regarding a very blatant and nasty case of plagiarism. At that time, the author who had been plagiarized, Rachel Ann Nunes, did not know the identity of the person behind the the pen name of Sam Taylor Mullens, the author who had plagiarized her work.

Now she does, and she has filed suit against her. Passive Guy linked to a copy of the complaint here.* Despite the fact that it is legalese, it makes for very interesting reading.

I can only...

Success! Progress bars, a new blog design, and an excerpt

I decided I was not going to post today until I got the blog design and progress bars figured out, and I did! There’s obviously still some tweaking to do. I don’t understand what the thing is with the big white patch in the upper right hand corner, frex, since the header tool cut my image to the size it is now. I may just need a much larger image, something I will have to mess with. But not today. That’s enough formatting for one day. After this, I want to get some writing done.

Speaking of w...

Starting From Zero

Ruth Nestvold:

Another great post by David Gaughran, this time going back to basics. Highly recommended!

Originally posted on David Gaughran:

Success can seem unattainableto those starting out. It’s easy to forget that even the biggest sellers started from zero.

Amanda Hocking didn’t arrive on the scene as a fully formed sales machine. She didn’t have a platform which she had been diligently building up for years, nor did she come from trade publishing. She was unable to convince an agent to tak...

New cover for “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide”

One of the things I’ve had on my to-do list for at least a year is to upload my short story “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide” to Amazon and make it free. The story is also in my collection From Earth to Mars and Beyond, and I’ve been thinking that I should redo the Mars ebook with an excerpt from one of the stories in the collection in the back matter to entice a few readers to buy more. “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide” is hands down my biggest “seller” on Smashwords, but just sitting there as a free shor...

Slowly increasing word counts, and another #WIPpet for Wednesday

As you can see visiting my blog, I still have not gotten around to redesigning and adding progress bars. As I talked about in my last post, it took me way too long to just get my free incentive to join my mailing list set up. So be it.

At least my output is slowly increasing again, as I try to develop better habits — which mostly involves spending less time frittering around on the Internet, far too easy to do, I fear. My word count for last week came to 4600. And I largely finished putting t...

Starting out as an indie author: Creating a welcome page for your newsletter with free tools

My goal for today originally had to do with redesigning my blog and adding progress bars, using the wonderful tips I’ve received in the comments here. But before tackling the whole adding-progress-bars / blog-redesign challenge, I wanted to make what I thought would be a simple change, from a tip gleaned on David Gaughran’s blog on building a killer email list.

As a result, I have to share some experiences regarding my own email list before they disappear out of my tired old brain. I thought...

To Self-Publish and Perish: Buried Under 3.4 Million E-Books

Ruth Nestvold:

Good reading for those of you out there wondering why your books aren’t selling. I don’t quite agree with all the conclusions, but it would be fun to test the “one new book every five minutes” theory. :)

Originally posted on claudenougat:

I finally found where Amazon reveals a hidden (and juicy) statistic: the number of ebooks available in the Kindle Store. If you’re an Amazon Associate, you can easily find it too but to make it simple I took a screen shot of the page where it s...