Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 42
November 3, 2013
Amazon trying to re-Kindle interest in KDP Select: The new “Countdown Deals”
I published my first ebook, Yseult, in January 2012, pretty much simultaneous with the introduction of KDP Select. I opted in and set my first promotion for a mere week after publication — and I didn’t have a clue how lucky I was. I got a couple of quick reviews as a result of review copies I’d given away, and my brand new little baby (or rather big fat hunking baby — the hard copy book comes in at over 600 pages) got picked up by no less than Pixel of Ink, which at the time was *the* way to...
October 30, 2013
Formatting Shadow of Stone for CreateSpace, & and an excerpt for #WIPpet Wedneday
The last couple of days, I’ve been spending most of my “writing” time putting together the PDF file of Shadow of Stone for the paperback version. I’ve been meaning to do this for much too long, but now with Christmas coming up, I really need to get it done. And the last couple of days before the craziness of Nano sets in seem to be a perfect opportunity.
The reason I keep putting off getting my books ready for paperback is all the work involved. Although I have to admit, Shadow of Stone ended...
October 27, 2013
A day off — and other things that cut into writing time
Yesterday, we had over 20 C weather in southern Germany, that’s about 70 F. I have translating and writing to do, formatting and editing, and I really need to finish a novel I’m beta reading for a fellow writer. So what did I do?
Had a spontaneous barbeque party in the garden!
We harvested tomatoes, potatoes and pumpkins, and I cut back the tomato plants that were starting to develop blight. But there are still an amazing number that are continuing to produce, even if they don’t taste quite a...
October 25, 2013
Announcing Gawain and Ragnell — and a request
I have a “new” short story in the Pendragon Chronicles series now available as ebook, Gawain and Ragnell.
To be honest, it’s been up on Amazon for almost a month, but I’ve put off announcing it for a couple of reasons.
1) It isn’t actually all that new, since it’s an expanded version of an episode from Shadow of Stone.
2) It took a while for it to get expanded distribution on Smashwords, so that it would be free on iTunes and B&N. Then, when I finally noticed that it was available, it was lik...
October 23, 2013
Villa Diodati 11, Or: Why didn’t we get this organized earler???
The past (long) weekend, I was off in the Black Forest for another Villa Diodati workshop — the first one in over a year. The last workshop was in April 2012 in southern England. But with one thing and another (most of the anothers having to do with the fact that I’ve been too caught up in my indie career and haven’t been taking responsibility like a dictator should), we’ve missed two workshop dates. Until last year, the workshop met twice a year since its inception in 2007, at various places...
Nanowrimo plans, & another excerpt from Island of Glass for #WIPpet Wednesday
No original posts from me last week — I was too busy preparing for the Villa Diodati workshop, reading the stories for critique and whipping the beginning of A Wasted Land into shape. It was wonderful, but more on that in a separate post.
I’ve decided to do Nanowrimo after all this year, and will “use” it to hopefully finish A Wasted Land. Yes, I know that’s against the rules, but anything to spur me on, right? 
Right now, the novel is at almost exactly 25,000 words, which will make it very e...
October 22, 2013
Amazon Makes Life Easier For Authors of Historical & Literary Fiction
Reblogged from David Gaughran:
There are lots of reasons why self-publishing success stories tend to concentrate around writers of "genre" fiction, but it's a mistake to assume that success is impossible if you write literary fiction or historical fiction (which tends to get lumped in with literary fiction, even though it's just another genre... like literary fiction!).
The first is demographics: romance and erotica readers were the first to switch to digital, followed by mystery and thriller...
October 15, 2013
Kobo Cull Self-Published Titles In Knee-jerk Response To Tabloid Clickbait
Reblogged from David Gaughran:
A media firestorm erupted in the UK on Sunday after a tabloid story about WH Smith selling “filth” alongside books aimed at children, which has resulted in Kobo culling huge numbers of self-published titles – most of which have no erotic content whatsoever.
It’s hard to know exactly how many titles Kobo has pulled. What we do know is that…
I was thinking about writing a blog post about this, but David Gaughran beat me to it, of course. :)...
October 11, 2013
Cover drafts for Facets of Glass, the second book of The Glassmakers
Yesterday, I got the initial cover designs for the second book of the Glassmakers trilogy back from my cover artist, the lovely and talented Rachel Cole of Littera Designs. For the first book in the series, I bought a beautiful pre-made cover:
Since I want the other books to have the same look and design, I recently hired Rachel to do covers for Facets of Glass and Shards of Glass, even though they are still only in the brainstorming phase. Here are her drafts for the second novella in the tr...
October 9, 2013
First results with Pomodoro, and an excerpt from Island of Glass for #WIPpet Wednesday
Today I’ve been applying the Pomodoro technique for the first time to try and become more disciplined about the tasks on my to-do list, and I’m quite pleased with the results so far. Once I’ve been working with it longer, I will write a post on it in more detail, assuming it continues to work for me.
Most of what I’ve been doing today, however, has been the Big Translation Project. I don’t have much in the way of new material for A Wasted Land, although I’ve spent a lot of time on it in the...
