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All Blog Posts Tagged 'write' (171)

Please check it out!

Please check out my latest novel on Kindle Fire Department.

Thanks.

http://fireapps.blogspot.com/2012/11/drop-out-kindle-book-of-day-1130.html…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on December 1, 2012 at 11:45am — No Comments

Book of the day!

Please check out my latest novel, it's book of the day on Kindle Fire Department.

Thanks.

http://fireapps.blogspot.com/2012/11/drop-out-kindle-book-of-day-1130.html…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on November 30, 2012 at 9:16am — No Comments

Absolute fun!

I’m at the absolute most fun time in the novel writing process for me. The plot of IMAGINATION is complete and tight and coherent. The characters have all been fleshed out and the settings are all detailed. Now, I spend the next few days reading fast and tweaking the tiniest details. Once that is complete I give one final, very quick read and send it off to my editor/formatter. I just contacted my cover artist and we are about to begin the process of designing a cover. I have a tagline for…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on November 28, 2012 at 9:30pm — No Comments

Pricing

I’ve been reading a lot of threads lately about Amazon and Kindle and how Amazon is changing the algorithms to promote books that are more expensive. It makes good business sense if you think about it. You need to sell five ninety-nine cent books or just one five dollar book. If you put equal amount of promotion into each book, naturally the five dollar book will make more money if both books benefit equally from the same amount of promotion. Make sense? There is also the ‘perceived value’…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on November 24, 2012 at 9:34am — 1 Comment

Black Friday

It’s here, the day when the crazy people of the world jam into stores and fight for the best bargains. Personally, I avoid that mess at all costs. That doesn’t mean black Friday doesn’t have an impact on me, it does. But from a writer’s point of view. As I mentioned in my last post, the ads for Kindles and Nooks are out of control. The ebook marketplace is definitely gaining steam and soon ereaders will be as common as cell phones. Because I believe black Friday does influence people to shop…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on November 23, 2012 at 9:33am — No Comments

Holidays are coming!

I’m just amazed at the number of Kindle and Nook ads that I’m seeing on television. It seems just the other day that people were scorning ebooks as a fad that would never take off. Well, guess what? People were wrong. Kindles and Nooks are selling by the millions now. I foresee a near future where paperback books, like music CD’s and large boomboxes, will be an oddity, a relic from the past. Now, I’m not talking about coffee table books and photography books, and the book as a work of art.…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on November 19, 2012 at 12:49pm — No Comments

In a year

I’ve been working feverishly lately trying to finish IMAGINATION by November 30th, but alas, it doesn’t appear that is going to happen (I’m about a month from completion). Between the damage from Superstorm Sandy and my wife’s cancer, my priorities have changed a bit. Had I finished the book on time it would have been a year to the day that I wrote the first sentence. When I first conceive of the plot of IMAGINATION (What if everything we perceive, all that we experience, is just…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on November 17, 2012 at 11:22am — No Comments

Changing the description

When you buy a book especially on the internet, what do you look for? Is it the cover that attracts you? The reviews? The description? The key to selling books is to have all three of these as plus’s. A good cover, good unbiased reviews, and a blurb that makes people want to look at the book. With ebooks, a consumer can’t take it off the shelf and feel its texture, skim through the pages, get a sense of the thickness and how long it will take to read. They must rely on the free sample pages…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on November 14, 2012 at 1:20pm — No Comments

Superstorm

I finally received the insurance check to fix the damage left by superstorm Sandy. Though, I count myself among those lucky enough to still have their home, the storm did a bit of damage to the roof, gutters, and some interior stuff. A power surge blew my computer, erasing countless scraps of ideas and phrases. I know I should have backed them up, but I had so many I thought I take a full day to do it. That day won’t happen now. I also lost more than two weeks of marketing online, which as…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on November 13, 2012 at 1:51pm — No Comments

Books can save you

It’s been two weeks since my last post and I’m still at a loss over the destruction caused by hurricane Sandy. Though I was away on vacation at the time of impact, I had relatives that were evacuated from New Jersey staying at my house so they surveyed the damage for us. We sustained some minor roof and siding damage and lost power for five days, which resulted in us having to throw away all of our refrigerated food. We were lucky. Sometimes it takes something as powerful and tragic as a…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on November 9, 2012 at 11:31am — No Comments

How to blog

When I first started blogging I wrote about the dumbest things. I wrote egotistical articles about how cool I was to write books and have people admire me; basic self-serving crap.

Then I started into the indie revolution in book publishing and my content changed. I spent a few months blogging about the nuts and bolts of writing, editing, designing a cover, and publishing an ebook from scratch. And lo and behold, I started getting followers. As I continued to blog every other day…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on October 23, 2012 at 12:00pm — 1 Comment

Patience, oh man.

All good things come to those who wait, isn’t that what they say? Patience is a virtue? And I totally agree. And I’ve been patient, Lord, I’ve been. But how long can I keep it up? Writing a minimum of three hours a day, everyday; marketing and promoting at least an hour a day, more if I don’t write as much, jotting down notes on napkins, and bits of paper. And it is paying off, as anyone who reads my blog or follows me on social networks knows. I have sold thousands of ebooks and given away…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on October 22, 2012 at 1:30pm — No Comments

Achieving what?

I’ve been doing the interview thing again and recently I was asked something that I hadn’t been asked before. The questioned posed to me was, “what do you hope to achieve with your writing?” Now, I had to think about that one for a bit before I could give a response. For you see, I’m actually not looking to achieve anything with my writing except to provide people with entertainment. I’m not looking to win any big awards (though I’m not opposed). I don’t think I’m going to get rich from this…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on October 17, 2012 at 1:39pm — No Comments

Who to become?

As my latest novel, IMAGINATION nears completion I am beginning to feel antsy to start a new project and my thoughts are edging toward what I should write next. In other words, who should I become for the next year? I’ve had a good time being the characters in IMAGINATION, but it’s time I put them to rest and create someone new. Should I become a psycho killer like in FROSTPROOF, DEGENERATES, and PULP? Or should I become a traveler of time and space, like in DREAM TRAVELER, AFTER, and SILENT…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on October 16, 2012 at 1:06pm — No Comments

Long Night

I generally feel the urge to blog about every two or three days, but for the last several days I’ve been silent. There’s a reason. It started with my wife having sharp pains in her side. She, being a tough woman, tried to ignore it and refused to go to the doctor even at my urging. Finally, on Monday she went. To make a long story short, three hours later she was getting prepped for surgery for an emergency appendectomy and I was sitting in the critical care unit waiting room. It was late…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on October 11, 2012 at 1:42pm — No Comments

Money to make money

Well, here I am again at that crossroads where I need to do something to push me beyond the steady, but stagnant sales of the last month. It appears blogging and posting on free sites has worn thin and most of the people who I got interested in my books have already purchased them. So, what do I do next? I already invested $100 bucks into a KND book of the day sponsorship for DROP OUT in November, and I have two more sponsorships with Kindle Boards Book of the Day in December, one for AFTER…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on October 4, 2012 at 1:30pm — No Comments

Wow, two-hundred!

Wow, I’ve surpassed the two-hundred followers mark on my blog! I want to thank all who follow me especially because I know you follow this blog because you want to. I didn’t go to any threads just to collect followers to have high numbers. I painstakingly wrote my articles and promoted my blog to writers and readers. Very few of you who follow me are my personal friends, although I’d like to think that everyone who reads my stuff is a friend. You all know what I mean, I didn’t solicit you. I…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on October 2, 2012 at 1:36pm — No Comments

It’s hard

No, mind my isn’t in the gutter right now, I’m talking about how hard it is to sell books. I’ve been writing since I learned how to hold a pencil, I’ve won contests, had a top NY agent, and have written and/or published a dozen novels. People ask me where my ideas come from and I can’t give them an answer. All I know is that ideas for stories DO come and the urge to capture them on paper is overwhelming. I’ve been known to jot down notes on whatever I can find, tiny pieces of scrap paper,…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on September 28, 2012 at 1:24pm — No Comments

Goodbye paperbacks

Nook just unveiled its new tablet today. Watching the interview on CBS this morning with the president of the company he was asked if he thought traditional paperback books will disappear in thirty years. Although, he wouldn’t give a definitive answer (because Barnes and Noble still have over 600 bookstores nationwide) it was apparent that he thought so. Though Barnes and Noble have outlived most retail book outlets, I do believe those days are numbered. Getting into the ebook revolution by…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on September 26, 2012 at 12:08pm — No Comments

Writing the end

After almost eleven months of continuous, daily writing I finally wrote ‘The End” on IMAGINATION. Well, I don’t actually write those words since it’s not industry standard anymore, but I did write the final, conclusive last sentence of the novel. Ah, what a feeling! This being my eleventh book, it still never ceases to amaze me how a story can take on a life of its own. If I were to look at my original notes on the concept for the story from last year and compare it to what I actually…

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Added by Neil Ostroff on September 24, 2012 at 1:27pm — No Comments

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