Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 32

Getting closer to progress bars, and more from A Wasted Land

I want to thank you all for the tips on getting progress bars set up on my blog. I’m hoping to experiment with that in the next couple of days, and do some other tweaking to my blog as well. Hopefully you will see some changes by next week!

Progress on my various projects continues to be slow but steady. Last week, I wrote about 3200 new words. I haven’t made much progress on getting back into the marketing swing of things, however. My Mondays are largely spent writing the blog posts for “Sta...

Starting out as an indie author: Creating your own covers

Hire a cover artist or make it yourself?

Some of my covers*

I’m starting this post off with a random selection of my covers — what came up when I searched for covers in my Flickr account, since I just don’t have the time to put together a banner specifically for the purpose right now. Still, it’s a pretty good selection for what I want to explore today: how professional do you want your covers to look? What are you willing to invest to ensure that your covers don’t scream thrown together in an...

Progress but no progress bars, and #WIPpet Wednesday

My writing goals got a little waylaid again last week, but I’ve mostly managed to catch up with myself again. My total word count for the week was 3100 words. I postedthe latest installment of “Starting out as an indie author” a day late, but at least I didn’t give in to temptation and put it off even longer. (*patting myself on the back*)

In my continued battle to keep myself honest, I also looked into adding progress bars to my blog, but I couldn’t figure it out without spending sh*tloads of...

Starting out as an indie author: Why editing is important — and who can skip the expense after all.

Why hire an editor?

Hiring an editor or proofreader for your manuscript before you publish is one of the costliest pre-publishing expenses you as an indie writer can incur. For a lot of us who aren’t selling thousands of copies of our books each month, the temptation might be great to skip booking any kind of editing services for our ebooks.

But the thing is, it’s very, very important to have (at least) a second set of eyes go over your manuscript. Yes, we all have spell-checking in our word p...

Plagiarism and Petulance

Ruth Nestvold:

In case you haven’t heard about it yet, another amazing plagiarism case has come out involving Rachel Ann Nunes and someone who calls herself Sam Taylor Mullens. This post has some pertinent links. You can also read more in the comments on The Passive voice here: http://www.thepassivevoice.com/08/2014/standing-against-plagarism/

Originally posted on Pete Morin:

In the most recent display of mind-boggling dishonesty, one indie author who goes by the pen name of Sam Taylor Mullens h...

“The Leaving Sweater” finally free on Amazon!

After repeated attempts, my short story “The Leaving Sweater” is now finally free on Amazon!

The description:

So you think magic isn’t necessary in order to leave? Think again …

Victoria Askew doesn’t want to leave remote Rolynka, Alaska when she finishes high school; it’s all she’s ever known. At least not until her mother knits her the most beautiful sweater she’s ever seen, a sweater imbued with magic — a leaving sweater…

Even if you’ve already read “The Leaving Sweater” on Strange Horizons,...

In which I use fiction to deal with reality for #WIPpet Wednesday

After I stumbled upon the news I blogged about in my last post, I wasn’t intending to participate in WIPpet Wednesday today. But I found myself needing to do something with the renewed bout of pain. (This is turning into a really shi*ty summer, sorry.)

So I decided to take the pain and use it to write a scene of loss that I had planned but not yet written. I have no math today — my only math is learning about my friend’s death and using it for the scene I wrote today:

The weanling tossed her h...

Goodbye, Arden Dale, July 29, 1959 – July 13, 2014

This is turning out to be a less than stellar year for news of friends. I realized today that I’d missed the birthday of my best friend from high school, so I went to her Facebook page to leave her a late birthday greeting — only to see picture upon picture with memories and goodbyes.

Arden in The Cloisters, 1989/90

We hadn’t been part of each others’ lives for a long time, and I hadn’t seen her in about 20 years. But she was incredibly important to me during difficult and formative years, and...

Starting out as an indie author: The costs of self-publishing

A couple months back, a certain Charlotte Ashley took issue with something the wonderful (and wonderfully successful) SF indie and KBoards author Hugh Howey* said, and in order to prove how wrong he was, she posted an amazingly inflated list of the expenses involved in self-publishing. She came up with a total publishing cost for an 80,000 word novel of $1900. Her numbers have already been taken apart by the good folks who follow the The Passive Voice. If you are inclined to do so, go and rea...

Getting my research into my writing: Old Sarum

Not quite as much progress on the writing front last week as the week before, with a total of 3800 new words. It’s still more than I had been shooting for at the beginning of the round. Besides, my progress is steady, and that’s good. A friend was visiting from out of town on the weekend, and under those circumstances, I don’t even try to make time for writing.

I’ve also finally managed to start tackling some of my marketing goals. I uploaded new versions of Yseult and Shadow of Stone with th...