Not everyone has the willpower to sit down and write for an hour everyday. With pop-up notifications, the siren call of the internet, and everyday life getting in the way, sometimes even the formatting bar in your word processor can be enough to drive you away from wordsmithery. This overwhelming feeling of distraction is probably why there are multiple competing software applications aimed at creating… [Read More]
Flagrant misuse of grammar rules hurts a writer’s chances for publication. Agents and editors take one quick glance and form a strong first professional impression. Don’t send up red flags and get rejected by your amateur abuse of punctuation or capitalization rules. Your email query may never be opened if you put the subject line of your message in all caps. WHEN YOU ARE USING… [Read More]
There are few feelings that compare to a broken computer – Did you save your tax records anywhere else? Do you know anyone who can fix this? What about your drafts, and photos, and important information? Is it all really gone? We live in a time when it’s fairly easy to forget to backup your information regularly. Features like autosave and document recovery create an illusion… [Read More]
If you’re an author on Facebook, you’ve certainly noticed that your personal timeline and your page exist as two seperate entities – at least on Facebook, your ‘Author-Self’ and ‘Everything-Else-Self’ are as divided as the North and South Poles. It’s not even possible to write on your own personal timeline; you can only communicate with other business pages directly. What’s a well-connected and sociable author to… [Read More]
If you really distill the many difficulties of blogging, there are two issues that are the most arduous to contend with on the regular: monitoring who’s talking about you, and coming up with fresh and fantastic ideas. Luckily, Google already has you covered. Google Alerts is a free online tool that can alert you anytime it finds a new page on the ‘net that’s related… [Read More]
Okay, there’s no real shortcut to writing, per se. Writing requires you sit down, collect your thoughts, organize them, and turn them into text. But as a writer, I sometimes wonder what button or link I inadvertently touched that made my computer do something wacky and unexpected. Then I realize my knowledge of a set of shortcuts on the keyboard may help me get out… [Read More]
If you are a writer with a book project, book proposal or complete manuscript, you absolutely must have a website. Why? Publishers and readers demand it. The world must be able to find you on Google. Writers need a professional online presence, beyond the personal Facebook profile and e-mail account. If you are going to publish, you need to have a public persona. Not the… [Read More]
Much of the labor of creating a snappy and engaging blog is visible to the outside world – your carefully crafted content, your punctual updates, your original style and creative voice… But under all of that outward cultivation lies a rushing river of information, a spring of data that you need to tap. Who is visiting your site? How long are they staying? How did they get… [Read More]
Whether you check the news on your smartphone first thing in the morning or you’d rather read the phone book than attend to anything on such a tiny screen, there’s one thing you’ve got to keep in mind – potential readers are looking at your site on mobile even if you’re not. In the same way that your website needs to be accessible to many… [Read More]
The biggest secret of the best web users is not a browser, or a program, or a web site. The biggest secret is two keys that have been on your keyboard from the very moment you got a computer – Ctrl-f. To those in the know about Ctrl-f, the idea of not knowing might strike you with surprise and pity. How, you may ask, is… [Read More]
