Ruth Nestvold's Blog, page 7

Ygerna is done! (Almost)

I finally finished the “fill in the blanks” draft of Ygerna, my prequel novel for The Pendragon Chronicles! It took me a lot longer than I expected, since I apparently left more blanks than I had thought. [image error] The last draft had about 85,000 words; this one has 117,000. I have created another monster …

Anyway, I was looking at the two versions of the cover I have from my cover artist, and I’m wondering now which one I should go with:

What do you guys think?

I already have several beta reader...

Amazon Has A Fake Book Problem

Despite all the things real authors have to put up with from Ama, they still haven’t solved the problem of scam authors out to get page clicks. Sigh.

David Gaughran

Fake books – powered by clickfarms – are gatecrashing Amazon’s charts. And despite being aware of the issue for well over a year, Amazon has failed to resolve it.

If you look at the Kindle Store Best Seller charts right now, and click over to Free Books, you will see that the Top 20 currently has five suspicious-looking titles.

N...

An Initial Attempt at Rebranding: A New Cover for Yseult

As much as I like the cover I already have for Yseult, the conversion rate for my ads is going from quite respectable to abysmal. Not completely understandable, since I haven’t changed the book description or cover for a long time, but given how many clicks I’ve been getting recently without sales, I decided it was time to experiment again. So without further ado, here is the first cover experiment for Yseult:

The idea for this cover is that it maybe / hopefully fits the epic fantasy conven...

Please Don’t Buy My Book

David Gaughran is back, with an interesting case study on also-boughts.

David Gaughran

I’m just back from The Smarter Artist Summit in Austin, Texas. I won’t try and capture the magic of the event – Kobo Mark does an excellent job – but I would like to talk about the big takeaway: the dangers of Also Bought pollution.

Also Boughts are probably the most important aspect of the entire Amazon recommendation ecostructure. And also the least understood.

They are much more than a little strip unde...

Author Spotlight: Ruth Nestvold

Author K.J. Garnet

Welcome to the second feature on other independent authors. We’ll throw a bit of a spotlight on how they think and create their fantastic works.

Author Ruth Nestvold

We met Ruth Nestvold through the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror (more commonly known to members as the Oh-Dub-Dub) (and yes, there are a lot of OWW alumni who are fantastic writers). From her website’s biography, “She has sold stories to numerous markets, including Asimov’s,...

Testing new Covers for Chameleon in a Mirror

Since I’ve recently had rather disappointing click-through rates for Chameleon in a Mirror, I decided to try testing some cover designers through Fiverr, just for fun. I wrote about the option in my book Starting Out as an Indie Author, but I had never used it myself. There’s a saying here in Germany, “Probieren geht über studieren.” (Trying is better than studying.) So here I am trying! Here are the cover designs I got from my first Fiverr foray into covers:

For the sake of comparison, he...

Hugo Nominees 2017

With a couple of notable exceptions (which I will not name for fear of being banned *g*), it looks like the Hugos have largely recovered from being hijacked for a couple of years by a bunch of lunatic dinosaurs:

http://www.tor.com/2017/04/04/2017-hugo-award-finalists-announced/

Yay! What a relief! What I find particularly interesting, however, is how completely Tor.com is dominating the ballot for short forms this year. The usual suspects (Asimov’s, F&SF, Analog) are absent entirely. I’m sus...

Cory Doctorow Launches a Bookstore Where Authors Sell on Behalf of Publishers – Wait, What?

This is just bizarre, but interesting in its own weird way:

Source: Cory Doctorow Launches a Bookstore Where Authors Sell on Behalf of Publishers – Wait, What?

Why successful writers need to do more than write

I stumbled across this, and since it’s right up my alley, I had to share.

The Azure Window on Gozo is gone

I was on Gozo over a decade ago with my daughter, so we were fortunate to see the Azure Window before it collapsed.

Now it has been destroyed by a storm. More pictures and links here:

https://petapixel.com/2017/03/08/maltas-famous-azure-window-rock-arch-collapses-photographers-mourn/

So sad.