Helpful Software & Sites

Using the Kindle to Edit

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When the manuscript for my novel A Reason to Live was ready to move from critique groups to professional editing, I was lucky enough to land the wonderful Alison Dasho (nee Janssen), a former editor for Bleak House Books and Tyrus Books [visit her at http://www.alisonedits.com/].

She’s in Wisconsin, I’m in Virginia; obviously, this was going to be a digital relationship. But there are a million ways to exchange documents online. How best to get my 90,000 words to you? I asked. Just send the Word document, she said, I’ll put it on my Kindle.

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Kindleboards: The Best Resource Around

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For many indie authors (and Kindle aficionados), this post will fall into the “water is wet” category of late-breaking news, but I’ve found it’s foolish to make assumptions about what others know and don’t, especially when it comes to the rapidly-changing face of digital publishing and the internet.

The Best Resource Out There
Kindleboards (www.kindleboards.com) is a site that has to be at the top of every digital self-publisher’s bookmarks list. It is a supremely helpful site that, in digital publishing terms, has been around since the Stone Age (about 3 years) providing a forum space for budding digital authors, Kindle book lovers, and geek and gadget people in general.

The forum section boasts around 55,000 registered users and several thousand are online at any one time. A subset of those are writers (detailed below), but many more thousands are readers interested in one thing: digital books.

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We Interrupt This Program

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Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!

Two events are going to put a slight zig in the zag of this blog over the next week. Even if you follow my blog religiously, you may not notice either one of them, but I think it’s good practice to have full disclosure.

Facelift
After some careful consideration and advice from friends and family, I’ll be testing out a new theme (MistyLook) and layout for the site this week. The aim is to increase readability, improve access, and to speed up the reader experience on the site. Thanks to WordPress’s almost seamless theme integration, the only thing you may notice is your own sigh of relief as you read my 600-1200 words post in regular black-type-on-a-white background instead of reverse type.

Major changes will be:

  • Black type-on-a-white background for easier reading
  • Wider central column for less scrolling
  • Homepage will be the blog (like the rest of the universe), not fluff text
  • Post summaries with “read more” links instead of entire post
  • Nicer serif to sans-serif font changes for titles vs. content areas

Nothing to do with the theme, but planned-for changes in the future:

  • Richer, more meaningful masthead graphic
  • A side-bar “Best of” list of my better blog posts for easier finding

Hiatus
My wife and I will be taking a short trip to Key West next week. I’ll be scheduling blog posts to keep up the conversation, but may not be able to thank you for commenting or add to the chatter myself. But please know I value each and every comment, “Like”, and pingback!

We’ll be back to our regularly-scheduled commentary by February 24. Thanks for your patience and thank you for following my blog.

Micro-reading: Experiments with Wattpad and Scribd

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Today marks the one week anniversary of a little experiment of mine: posting my fantasy short story Sword of Kings for free with two different mobile reading services, Wattpad (http://www.wattpad.com/3237579-sword-of-kings-part-i) and Scribd (http://www.scribd.com/doc/79242254/Sword-of-Kings).

If you haven’t heard of either service, don’t feel bad. I’d vaguely heard of Scribd before but only came across the possible sales and promotional potential of both it and Wattpad after reading David Gaughran’s attempts with both his own short stories and serially posting his novel A Storm Hits Valparaiso.

In essence, both services offer a variation on the same theme: they facilitate the process of writers finding readers. Writers post their work (though Wattpad is almost exclusively fiction and poetry) without charge; readers can download those works for free. The reasons why writers might want to offer their work for free are many: to find beta readers, to “field test” an odd-ball idea, to stimulate interest in your writing so that it leads to sales of other works, to simply spread your ideas.

While Wattpad and Scribd may seem like just another internet fad, consider that Wattpad claims 1 million users, 3 million comments/votes per month, and the average user spends 30 minutes twice a day on the site. The top stories in each genre of the “What’s Hot” category routinely register over 1-2 million reads. That’s exposure.

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