As today is World Backup Day, (yes, it’s really a thing) let’s talk about that. You only have to lose an entire book manuscript once, to learn to backup your data with multiple redundancies. Yes, I speak from experience. I can tell you that there is nothing as sick-making as the jolt you get when […]
It’s World Backup Day Read More »
I recently received an email from an author who picked up on a passing reference of mine, and asked me to explain how I copy and paste my Word files into Publisher to produce print editions. I’ve created a video that walks you through the basic process: Resources mentioned: Microsoft Publisher Microsoft Office Suite
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When you write and release lots of books, the costs associated with publishing those books increases at the same scale…or does it? How do you handle the costs of writing and publishing lots of books? Economies of Scale. When you’re producing many books, there are economies of scale available to you that two-books-a-year authors can’t
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Last week I suggested writing short stories as a way of reaffirming your love of writing, having fun, and maybe creating saleable content as a happy bonus…plus also teaching yourself to write fast, and write lots. Over at Anne R. Allen’s blog, Anne has suggested in her post “The Attention Economy: Shorter“, that indie
The first half of January, I find, is often a fallow season. Everyone is recovering from the frantic pace of holiday season celebrations and reflecting upon the upcoming year. Even if you don’t believe in new year’s resolutions — and growing research demonstrates that only a tiny fraction of people who set new year resolutions
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I talk about willpower a lot on this blog — mostly indirectly, because I think that willpower on its own will never give you the discipline you want to be as productive as you want. Willpower brings to mind the idea of white-knuckling your way through chores you don’t want to do. I think writing
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I’ve mentioned more than a few times here and there how damaging it is to your impetus if you let yourself click away from your manuscript, for any reason at all. I just haven’t formalized the idea as a strategy for getting more words down until now. Interruptions are the bane of modern offices. There’s
In the Part 1 of this post we covered the brainstorming part of plotting, where you capture everything you know, then fill in the blanks, amalgamate, then drop all that information into your favourite story structure. In Part 2, we looked at making a scene out of the beats, and time saving hacks for organizing
In the last part of this post we covered the brainstorming part of plotting, where you capture everything you know, then fill in the blanks, amalgamate, then drop all that information into your favourite story structure. This post, we sort that amorphous blob of information into a well-developed story outline that will speed your writing
I’m halfway through a series on plotting that I will finish next week. In the meantime, I have spent some time trying to explain to a pair of authors who wanted to know more, exactly, how I use Microsoft Word and why I am such a fan of it (as opposed to Scrivener, et al). It
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