Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 33
August 9, 2014
“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,...
August 6, 2014
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...
August 4, 2014
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...
July 30, 2014
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...
July 28, 2014
A bit of fun
I write like
Ursula K. Le GuinI Write Like. Analyze your writing!
Fun writing game on Widdershin’s blog. (Of course, I had to try a few different excerpts until I got the results I wanted …)
Originally posted on Widdershins Worlds:
On her blog today, Kyrosmagica discovered she writes like Stephen King!
I apparently write like Dan Brown, Cory Doctorow, Vladimir Nabokov, and Mark Twain, depending on which story I offered up a sample of.
Starting out as an indie author: Smashwords, Draft2Digital, and Xinxii (Using distributors, part 2)
In my last post for beginning indie authors, I went into the reasons you might choose to publish your books through an aggregator who distributes them to various sales channels for you. In this post, I will take a look at three such sites in more detail, Smashwords, Draft2Digital and Xinxii.
When I first started experimenting with ebooks, the main options for marketing fiction were Smashwords and Amazon. Since I was a bit intimidated by all the programs needed to create an ePub file...
July 27, 2014
Starting out as an indie author: Using distributors for getting into online bookstores
Aggregators and sales channels
In my last blog post for beginning indie writers, I wrote about various ways to format your manuscript for ebook publishing and some of the more important sales channels where you might want to upload your books.
The sales channels I mentioned there, however, are only a few of the very many online bookstores that have started cropping up in the last few years, such as OverDrive, Flipkart, Oyster, Scribd, Baker & Taylor, Page Foundry and more. Not to mention the g...
July 25, 2014
Building a Killer Email List
I think my blog will soon see change — a free book offered for signing up to my (largely dormant) mailing list. :)
Originally posted on David Gaughran:
There is a lot of upheaval in publishing today and I think that’s likely to increase rather than decrease. The best insurance policy any writer can have against the future is a targeted mailing list.
I’ve written before about how the author with the biggest mailing list wins, and I’ve invited Nick Stephenson along today because he...
July 23, 2014
Questions upon questions for #WIPpet Wednesday
The writing continues to go well, 5200 new words total last week on various projects. I also made some more dents in my goals, and on Monday I started a series of articles on my blog for beginning indie authors. You can read the first one here. In connection with the blog posts about self-publishing, I have also decided to declare Mondays my official marketing day, so that I will finally get back to actually trying to sell my books again. Wish me luck. :)
On to WIPpet Wednesday. Today I’m giv...
