I tend to prefer old-fashioned pen and paper for going over my drafts and marking revisions and edits. The screen has never struck me as a good medium for reading longer works on, and I think differently with a pen in hand than with a keyboard under my fingers.
That said, Word 2007 puts a lot […]
Chances are, you’ve learned how to insert page breaks into Word documents (Insert > Page Break, just in case). This is useful for, say, adding a “Works Cited” page at the end of a document.
But you might have seen another kind of “break” while moving through Word’s menus. They’re in a different place for some […]
A book can be an unwieldy thing to write, especially on older (read: slower) hardware, and even more especially if you have illustrations, charts, and other graphic material in your file. As the document gets bigger, it gets slower and slower to open the document, to find your place, and to scroll back and forth […]
Styles are an incredibly useful feature in Word — which have unfortunately been rather hidden in previous versions. Word 2007 puts styles right on the main toolbar, so there’s no excuse not to use them.
Using styles allows you to maintain a uniform set of formatting decisions across your document. Instead of formatting individual text selections independently, you […]
No tool is as central to the modern writer’s toolkit as Microsoft’s Word. It is the word processor of choice for most writers — and of necessity for most of the rest. Even when we escape Word itself, we are forced by publisher’s specifications to save our final output in Word’s .doc format.
And, to be honest, it […]
Selling stuff is supposed to be easy on the Internet. Just put it “up there” and watch the orders roll in, right? If you stick with Amazon or eBay as your marketplace, it’s not all that hard — but they take a pretty sizable cut! Or you can set up your own shopping cart system and maintain […]
If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you’ve probably noticed a gap in the software I cover and recommend. For the most part, the software, online services, and other material (like e-books) I’ve recommended have been free. There are plenty of exceptions, of course — next week I’m gearing up to do a series on […]
If your writing takes you away from your home computer often, or if the thought of working “in the cloud” (on the web) just appeals to you, you might want to try an online submission tracking system. Luminary’s Writer’s Database (not to be confused with the desktop “Writer’s Database” I mentioned in Part 3 of […]
Although using a simple spreadsheet to track submissions can be perfectly adequate, the seams can start to unravel as you build up more and more entries. There are several good, free programs that can help you track not only your submissions but also prospective markets and the fate of your work from inception to publication. […]
The simplest way to track submissions is using a spreadsheet program like Excel. You could also use an online spreadsheet like Google Docs. Create a new spreadsheet and put the following as column headers:
Title of Piece | Length | Genre/Type | Query or Submission? |Market Submitted to | Market’s Address | Pay | Date Sent […]
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