Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 45
June 19, 2013
Changes in attitudes, changes in latitudes
I’m sad.
My daughter, the architect and Photoshop expert who helps me with the covers I do myself, flew to the States today, most likely for good. I’ve always been aware that I might lose her to another continent, the way my dad lost me to Europe, but realizing it might happen, then knowing it will happen, and then finally being confronted with the fact that it has happened … well, those are very different things. We’re very close, she lived next door for many years, and we would trade cookin...
June 16, 2013
Cover for Chameleon in a Mirror, and various other updates
Some time ago, I promised to post a revised version of the cover for Chameleon in a Mirror to my blog, and I’ve finally gotten around to it:
Please let me know what you think!
Since I got Island of Glass off to my niece, I’ve been working on A Wasted Land, the next novel in The Pendragon Chronicles, trying to sort through what I already have and figure out what is usable and what has to go to the trash bin. That means, I don’t have any word count to report, since I’ve been reading, analyzing,...
June 12, 2013
Using Pinterest for research bookmarks, and an update
First off, I have to thank Emily Witt for a recent post of hers which I read. It was primarily about music for characters, but she also went into using Pinterest for images for book projects. I’ve been hearing for a long time about how Pinterest is yet another great social media site where authors can reach out to their readers. All I could think was, “Oh, no, another social media site where I’ll be expected to spend way too much time reaching out to my readers.” AKA, another time sink.
I’m p...
June 9, 2013
Publishing to multiple stores through Draft2Digital: Almost All the Way Home From the Stars
A while back, I promised to blog about the process of formatting a book for all sales channels offered by Draft2Digital, including CreateSpace. Before I published this collection of stories I wrote with Jay Lake, Almost All the Way Home From the Stars, I only used D2D for B&N, Kobo, and the Apple bookstore. For that, I could upload the EPUB file that I compiled with Scrivener. For this collection, however, I also wanted hard copy, and in order to generate the PDF for CreateSpace, D2D requires...
May 30, 2013
The recent Amazon category revolution, and what it means for you
As many writers have noticed by now, this month Amazon has been playing merry with its browse categories, deleting a couple, and adding a whole lot more. In the long run, this might well be good for writers, giving us more chances for exposure, but what a lot of us saw was an immediate and dramatic decline in sales. I think this mostly applies to those who had books in categories that were deleted, or whose books were reassigned to new categories, not necessarily the best or most appropriate....
May 29, 2013
I HAS HARD COPY! *g* Yseult published to CreateSpace
After weeks of work, and ten days waiting for the proof, Yseult arrived in Germany today — and it looks gorgeous! See for yourself:
Ok, that last is a bit dusty, I admit. 
Right now, I’m happy I went ahead and took so much time to get this book right, and that I spent the money on one of Joel Friedlander’s templates for the interior. It was still a heck of a lot of work, but here’s what it looks like:
I’m ridiculously proud of myself. *g* So off I went to CreateSpace to approve the proof. Yse...
May 26, 2013
Getting back to the writing: Revisions on Island of Glass
Not a lot of progress on Island of Glass to report for the week, since revisions are hard to quantify. What I can say is that I’m in the middle of chapter four now (of ten), and during this rewrite, I’ve added an additional character as a foil for Chiara. That has resulted in about another 2500 words to Island of Glass, which is now coming in at just under 20,000 words.
It might not be a lot of words for the week, but I don’t think it’s smart to count words while revising. I’m just mentioning...
May 25, 2013
Epic Fantasy Ebook Sale Party!
Just yesterday, I found out about a group promo for epic fantasy, being organized by Vera Nazarian on the Kindle Boards. It started today, but Vera was still accepting participants, so I decided to jump right in. If Yseult and Shadow of Stone aren’t epic fantasy, both coming in at close to 200,000 words, I don’t know what is! I have a freebie scheduled this week for Shadow of Stone, so that wouldn’t qualify — the promo is for sale books between 99c and 2.99. So I reduced the price of Yseult...
May 23, 2013
Almost All the Way Home From the Stars now available on Amazon, iTunes, B&N, & Kobo
I just realized that I never posted the links to Almost All the Way Home From the Stars (the first collection of my stories with Jay Lake) here on my blog, only on Facebook. So without further ado, here are the links to the various ebooks stores where you can buy it:
The CreateSpace version is still in the works. Draft2Digital is a great service, but it’s still in Beta, after all, and the helpful folks there are working on a way to generate a Table of Co...
May 19, 2013
“Story Hunger” up on Amazon, a new mini collection – and various other updates
After getting my story collection with Jay Lake, Almost All the Way Home From the Stars, up on Draft2Digital, I decided to get one more big thing off my to-do list, and finished another collection of my own stories, Story Hunger:
Here’s the blurb:
“Story Hunger” is a short collection of two stories and one flash fiction piece: a tale from the cycle of the Rose knights; a fantasy prose poem; a story of Native American magic and of Raven in an alternate Pacific Northwest.
What these stories have...
