Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 31

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...

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...