Category Archives: Tech tips for writers

All kinds of tricks writers can use in writing and selling their books

How To Set Up An Amazon Giveaway

Just what I needed! I was hovering over the Amazon Giveaway screens for King of the Roses and discovered I didn’t know how the odds-setting worked. This post, from February of this year, explains it! This is Nicholas Rossis’s “secondary blog” that shows a reblog button, but you can access the original, with many informative comments, here. Now watch for my Giveaway, coming up next week!

Nicholas C. Rossis's avatarNicholas C. Rossis

Amazon has recently started offering everyone the opportunity to offer a giveaway. What’s interesting about this is that you can run one for pretty much any item in their inventory – except for ebooks. So, you can run a giveaway for your print edition, but not your Kindle one.

Alternatively, you could go all the way and offer people, say, a Kindle. Or, indeed, an item that is somehow related to your books. For example, if you’ve written a cookbook, you may give away kitchen gadgets or aprons. The key here is to be imaginative and original.

So, how would you go about it? Here’s the complete how-to.

Step 1: Find your book

Right after the reviews, you will see a “Set up an Amazon Giveaway” button. If you can’t find it, press Control-F (for Find) on your browser and enter the word “giveaway”…

View original post 645 more words

6 Comments

Filed under Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, business of writing, ebooks publishing and selling, Free Books, indie publishing, King of the Roses, Marketing books, Money issues for writers, Print on Demand for fiction writers, Self-publishing, Tech tips for writers, V. S. Anderson, Virginia S. Anderson, Writing, writing contests, writing novels

Amazon Categories and Rankings? This Helps!

Learning to market my books: deer in headlights!

Here’s what I sometimes feel like as a marketer: Deer in the headlights!

Well, I bought the book. I’ll report back on how much it helped me in my goal to begin taking marketing seriously. In the meantime, this article on how Amazon rankings and keywords differ in helping me sell my books provided some really useful distinctions.Can you add to this advice?

2 Comments

Filed under business of writing, ebooks publishing and selling, indie publishing, Marketing books, Money issues for writers, Print on Demand for fiction writers, Publishing, Self-publishing, Tech tips for writers, Writing, writing novels

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO GOOGLE DOCS FOR WRITERS (+ WORKFLOW VIDEO & PDF CHECKLIST)

Everything you want to know about Google Docs. I plan to learn more about this platform, and this post will be a go-to source!

Chris The Story Reading Ape's avatarChris The Story Reading Ape's Blog

Extract from an article by E.A. Deverell (Eva) founder of the Lady Writers League:

I’ve been learning so many new Google Docs features as I work on THE STORY CHALLENGE, that I felt I had to document them and share them with my fellow writers!

I’ve created a detailed workflow which you can download at the end of this post and use as the basis of your own experimentation.

I think you’ll still be surprised by some of GD’s secret features.

You can now watch the workshop below!

Hopefully it’ll help to see the features rather than just read about them.

To read the full (long and detailed with lots of related useful links), click on the link or image below:

Google Documents for Writers

googledocs

View original post

Leave a comment

Filed under indie publishing, Self-publishing, Tech tips for writers, Writing, writing novels

All About Google+ For Writers | Savvy Book Writers

It looks as if it’s time to get serious about Google+. Let me know of your experiences with this platform. What do you find works best?

Christoph Fischer's avatarwriterchristophfischer

More than 625,000 People join Google+ EVERY DAY, according to Digital Buzz and Huffington Post statistics.  Before I even joined Twitter, GooglePlus (Google+) was my first Social Media network of c…

Source: All About Google+ For Writers | Savvy Book Writers

View original post

6 Comments

Filed under blogging, business of writing, ebooks publishing and selling, indie publishing, Marketing books, Print on Demand for fiction writers, Self-publishing, Tech tips for writers, Writing, writing novels

How you can avoid my mistakes

Check out these software tools from Jean. Do you use any of them? What was your experience like? Do you have others to recommend?

Jean M. Cogdell's avatarJean's Writing

And boy do I make a lot of them. Or so it seems.

I hope by sharing with you, these posts will stand as a reminder to myself, not to repeat the same mistakes over again.big mistakes

Why? Because mistakes are costly.

Mistakes cost when you have to do something over and over, not just in time but often in money too.

How you can avoid my mistakes…

  • Use the right software for the right job.

I tried to use “workaround” software but that only make the job harder and take longer. You know what I mean like using a shoe to hang a picture instead of hunting down that long-lost hammer in the garage.

  • A little investment is worth your time and sanity.

No one software does everything. Pick the one that works best for each task.

Listed at the bottom are some of the ones I discovered and love.

View original post 379 more words

Leave a comment

Filed under business of writing, ebooks publishing and selling, indie publishing, Self-publishing, Tech tips for writers, Writing, writing novels

Tech Tips for Writers #116: How to Screenshot

In addition to the very helpful hints in this post about taking screen shots from Jacqui Murray, Mac users can try the Grab utility. The only real advantage I see to Grab is that it opens your shot in a separate window so that you don’t have to hunt for it on your desktop. However, this process is faster than opening Grab from your Go–>Utilities menu. Enjoy!

Jacqui Murray's avatar

Tech Tips for Writers is an (almost) weekly post on overcoming Tech Dread. I’ll cover issues that friends, both real-time and virtual, have shared. Feel free to post a comment about a question you have. I’ll cover it in a future Tip.

Q: I need to take a screenshot with my Chromebook.

Here’s the shortkey: Hold down the Ctrl key and press the Window Switcher key. The screenshot is placed on the clipboard and in the download folder. If you have trouble finding the Download file, click Alt+Shift+M to open the File Manager. Download will be one of the options on the left sidebar.

In case you use a different digital device, here are the screenshot shortkeys for other platforms:

View original post 166 more words

2 Comments

Filed under blogging, Tech tips for writers, Writing