The Writer’s Technology Companion

For most sites, especially when they’re getting started, Google and other search engines are the #1 source of traffic, especially for new visitors who might become regulars. It helps to know a little bit about how search engines work and how to make your site “search engine-friendly” so you an make sure your site is easy for your fans, clients, and potential readers to find. Since Google is by far the most important search engine at the moment, I’m going to talk mainly about Google, though most of this will apply to other search engines as well.

Nobody outside of Google knows exactly how Google ranks it’s search results. [Read the rest of this entry…]

PlotBot is a new free web application geared towards screenwriters. Because it’s on the web, you can log in and work on your screenplay anywhere you have access to a computer.

Better yet, PlotBot allows you and any number of collaborators to log in and work on the same screenplay at the same time. You can set your script to “Private”, allowing in only the people you’ve invited, or “Public”, letting you set up open projects that anyone can contribute to. You can even do a “Showdown”, letting people write their own screenplays to a prompt you provide, useful for competitions or just plain fun.

Creating a new project is easy. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Regular readers have seen me rave about Adobe’s online word processor Buzzword before. Written in Flash, Buzzword provides a writing environment so slick that it’s actually inspired me to write more!

This week, Adobe launched Acrobat.com, folding Buzzword and a couple of other projects they’ve been working on into a somewhat integrated interface. The total package represents a nice start to what looks set to become a major player in the office suite field. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Paypal has become the de facto form of payment on the web, not just for eBay sales but for invoice payments, retail sales, and even donations. If you don’t already have a PayPal account, you need to open one if you plan to do any sort of business on the web, including client work.

PayPal offers three different kinds of accounts: Personal, Premier, and Business. [Read the rest of this entry…]

I’ve covered this before a little, but it bears repeating: if you’re a writer, you should probably be blogging. You can make some money blogging, but that’s only one reason to blog. Here are nine other benefits that blogging offers writers.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

Software for Writers: yWriter 4

Spacejock Software has released a new version of their novel-writing software yWriter. Written by a writer for writers, yWriter is a great little tool for organizing novels in progress — and just about any other long manuscript.

yWriter allows you to create a book project, add chapters, scenes within chapters, and character profiles — assembling the manuscript from these pieces at the end. You can track locations, items, and viewpoints; set and keep track of daily word count goals; and import scenes from other programs saved in Rich Text Format (useful if you write on a Palm or other mobile platform, so you can add the work easily when you get home).

Best of all, yWriter is free (as are other Spacejock Software products, including several good ones for writers).

yWriter (Free)

Today marks 60 days since the official launch of The Writer’s Technology Companion. In a lot of ways, the site has exceeded my goals. I had hoped to have 100 subscribers by the 90-day mark; I have at least 250, on some days creeping closer to 300! I had expected more visitors than subscribers, but the subscribers count is actually the bigger figure — I’m averaging about 150 daily visitors.

One thing I hadn’t counted on was the degree of personal contact with readers and support from other sites that I’ve received. Many of you have emailed me with questions, comments, and just to say “hi”, and many of you with sites for writers have linked to individual posts or the site as a whole. I love that! It puts me in the middle of a community of sites I’ve read and admired for a long time.

Another thing that was unexpected is the number of people who have visited from StumbleUpon. MY post 22 Sites Every Writer Should Read was visited by well over 3,000 people over a 3-day period, and as of today has been read by well over 4,000 people. Other posts have gotten a few hundred visits each from StumbleUpon users. I’d never been all that taken with StumbleUpon before. I am now!

Writing and Productivity

Even though I write for the personal productivity site Lifehack, I hadn’t thought of this site as a “productivity” site until Tom Colvin of Becoming a Writer Seriously (who has turned out to be a good friend) referred to sites like his and mine as “writing productivity” sites. To be honest, I thought I was writing more of a gadget site — cool tools, neat software, and so on — but I like both the idea and the label of “writing productivity”. It’s something I’m going to focus on more consciously in months and years to come, even as I continue to focus on the reviews, tips, and tutorials I’ve been posting the last two months.

Before I go, I’d like to ask for your input. I’ve got months of posts planned (and many written) already, but I’d like to know what would be most interesting and most useful for you, the readers of The Writer’s Technology Companion. Leave a note in the comments, or email me, and let me know what you’d like to see me cover.

Thank you for helping to make The Writer’s Technology Companion a success in its first 60 days!

One thing that can really “punch up” the sound of your podcast is a soundtrack. However, don’t start flipping through your CDs just yet! Commercial music can be very, VERY expensive to license for podcast use — if the labels will deal with you at all. Using music from your own collection without a license can get you sued, which at the minimum is a big hassle and may end up costing a lot of money.

Fortunately, musicians know that the labels are all screwed up in the way they handle licensing. [Read the rest of this entry…]

If you’ve gotten this far, you’re probably ready to get started podcasting. But what should you talk about?

A lot of fiction authors read their own work, either a short story or poem per episode, or a chapter of a longer work. There’s even a website, PodioBooks, devoted solely to author readings of their novels in serialized form. This might be a problem if you plan to later sell your work, as some publishers may balk at paying for work that’s already available for free online, but a few authors have managed it very well. Or you might choose to podcast work that you don’t intend for publication — and later collect that work for publication when you’re better established. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Once you’ve recorded a show, you need to upload it somewhere on the Internet. You could upload it to your own site, but if your show is at all popular you’ll soon find yourself paying additional bandwidth charges — most personal and small business hosting packages charge after a gigabyte or two of traffic, and audio and (especially) video files are quite large. [Read the rest of this entry…]