Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 32

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...

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...