Nick Russell on December 10th, 2011

Nobody was more surprised than I was to learn that my mystery, Big Lake, had risen to number 23 in the Paid Kindle store, number 4 in Bestsellers in Mysteries & Thrillers, and even more amazing, it was listed at number 76 on the New York Times Kindle Bestseller List! The book has been in [...]

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Nick Russell on November 22nd, 2011

I’ve always been a firm believer in setting goals, and then working out a plan to achieve them. And more often than not, if I set realistic goals, plan right, and work that plan, I accomplish them. Sometimes I even exceed them. And once in a while, the results blow me completely away. Last month, [...]

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Nick Russell on November 20th, 2011

The good news is that Amazon revolutionized the world of publishing when it introduced the Kindle e-book reader and began its Kindle Direct Publishing program, which has allowed authors and self-publishers to bring out their e-books in a quick and easy format. This has been a win-win for everybody but the big traditional publishing houses. [...]

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Nick Russell on November 10th, 2011

I wrote my mystery novel Big Lake back in 1998, and the only people I showed it to were my secretary and my wife, who both encouraged me to publish it. But even though I had made my living as a newspaper editor and publisher, and had done some magazine work from time to time, [...]

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Nick Russell on November 3rd, 2011

In late August, I wrote a blog post titled The Importance of Setting Goals, in which I said that  when I uploaded my first e-books to Amazon’s Kindle bookstore in late May, I had a goal of earning $300 a month from e-book sales within six months. The September sales report is in, and I [...]

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Nick Russell on October 15th, 2011

Since I talked about freedom of speech in yesterday’s Bad Nick Blog, I decided I’d go ahead and post some thoughts on freedom of the press as well, because a lifetime in the small town newspaper business taught me that it is probably one of our least understood rights. For our purposes, the press is [...]

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Nick Russell on September 19th, 2011

Many are sure that in this age of information overload, where we can read about a typhoon in Malaysia or an earthquake in Chile on our computers, or even our telephones as it happens, the traditional big city newspaper is becoming a dinosaur. And they are correct. Big newspapers lost their identity to corporate publishing [...]

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Nick Russell on August 23rd, 2011

All of my life, I have believed in setting goals, both personally, and in business. I have always felt that if you don’t have a goal, how can you know where you are going, and which path to take to get there? I also believe that goals have to be specific. It’s easy to say [...]

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Nick Russell on August 4th, 2011

This week I received my first electronic payment from Amazon for my Kindle e-book efforts, covering sales made during the last 10 days in May. It was only $107.53, but that’s money I didn’t have before. I now have five e-books available on Amazon’s Kindle bookstore, as well as a sixth book, The Step-by-Step Guide [...]

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Nick Russell on July 29th, 2011

As self-publishers, we often think of our books as our children, After all, we created them – they come from inside of us. And just as with our children we love them unconditionally, and tend to overlook their flaws. Unfortunately, this can be a mistake. Because just as with children, some grow up to be [...]

Continue reading about Know When To Hold & Know When To Fold