The Writer’s Technology Companion

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 deserves it. Despite its quirks, despite the bully tactics of Microsoft, despite its proprietary format and top-secret inner workings, Word is pretty much the golden standard of word processors. You might have been happy with WordPerfect under DOS, or even WordStar, but they’re gone and Word’s still around.

The newest version, Word 2007, even manages to rise above Word’s utilitarian roots. It’s actually fun to use — or it can be, once you figure out how everything works. Most of the old functions are still there, behind the more flashy “ribbon” interface — and Microsoft has taken pains to put some of the under-used but useful features front and center in the newest iteration of Word. (As always, I can really only speak about the Windows version; from what I understand, Word 2008 on the Mac is something of a travesty.)

This week, we’ll be looking at some of those useful features. We’ll start by exploring Word’s “Styles”, which make formatting easy. Then we’ll look at some of the features that help manage all the pieces of long works (like that novel you’re planning). Finally, we’ll look at some of the ways Word can help you move from first to final draft.

Of course, Word has tons more features — a built in (but not quite ready for prime time) reference manager, the same old dreaded footnoting function, and version tracking for collaboration. Maybe I’ll come back to those in a follow-up post.

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 it and get a merchant account to process credit card orders — if you have a lot of technical know-how and some extra money. And you’ve got to market your product, which probably means advertising, which means more money.

Enter e-Junkie. For $5 US a month, e-Junkie provides you with an online shopping cart, storage for digital downloads, order processing, inventory management, email autoresponders, and a lot more.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

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 Microsoft Word 2007, for example, and I recently recommended paid backup services Mozy and Carbonite. (Update: Actually, I posted this before the post on backing up, which will be along sometime this month.) And of course any hardware I recommend comes with a price tag.

But for the most part, I’ve tried to recommend free or, as much as possible, low-cost software and services — and when possible, open-source software. There are a number of reasons for this, which add up to something like a philosophy: [Read the rest of this entry…]

Every author should belong to Amazon’s affiliate program, Amazon Associates. With Amazon Associates, you can create a link which includes your unique tracking ID to a book (or any product) and get a percentage of the purchase from anyone who clicks through to Amazon from your link. You can create links to any product on Amazon, but the essential products to link to are your own books. When someone clicks through from your site to Amazon and buys your book, you get paid twice: once from Amazon, and again from your publisher in the form of royalties.

And here’s the kicker — your commission ranges from 4% to 8.5%, which means that, depending on how many sales you achieve and what your agreement with your publisher is, you may end up making more from Amazon sales than you do from your royalties! Look: [Read the rest of this entry…]

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 this series) does everything the desktop software in Part 3 does. You can enter markets, add manuscripts (just the title, not the whole document), and track submissions. But being on the web enables a couple of other neat features that might appeal to you. [Read the rest of this entry…]

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. Because these programs are designed for writers (and usually by writers), they tend to anticipate quite well the specific needs of writers and their work. [Read the rest of this entry…]

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 | Response Time | Response (Y/N) | Accepted? (Y/N) | Due date | Publish date | Pay date | Paid? (Y/N)

You could also create another sheet with market information, in which case you can skip the “Market’s Address” and “Pay” columns. [Read the rest of this entry…]

IF you subscribe to this site by RSS (or email), you probably saw the first part of my upcoming series on Word 2007 this morning. Yesterday, I cooked up a whole stew of posts, through the middle of next month, and tried to schedule them. But my weebhosts had intermittant failures throughout the day, and I wasn’t able to get into my site’s administration console reliably, so I couldn’t double-check everything the way I normally would.

The upshot is, that post did not get scheduled properly. So I’ve taken it down, and will repost it on August 4th, along with the rest of the series on the days following. It’s a really good series (I think, anyway), with lots of good stuff for users of Word 2007 (and much of it will apply to earlier versions as well). But I’m midway through the series on submission tracking now, and I don’t want two big series running at the same time.

My apologies for the confusion.

One of the least glamorous parts of a writer’s job is keeping track of submissions. Knowing who you sent a query or a finished piece, what you sent them, when you sent it, and whether it’s been accepted or rejected is crucial, but mundane — especially compared with the far more fulfilling work of actually writing our work.

A lot of writers get by with a binder or note-book, flipping through pages and updating each entry by hand, but this can get messy pretty quickly if you’re at all prolific — and if you’re not, remembering to update your binder (or even remember where it is) when the changes you’re tracking come infrequently can be a problem. [Read the rest of this entry…]

One of the most important things writers (or anyone) can do is set clear, explicit goals about what they want to accomplish. Most of us have a bunch of vague goals, like the “one day novel” (as in, “one day, I’m going to write a novel). We want to “someday” do x, y, and z – get a big magazine assignment, find an agent, finish our book – but without clear goals, we don’t seem to make any progress. We chug along, picking at our huge projects, rarely coming any closer to finishing, and we feel horrible about ourselves.

If you don’t set goals, you won’t achieve them.

There are a lot of reasons people don’t set clear goals. Most of them boil down to a fear of commitment – and of letting ourselves down when we fail to live up to that commitment. Saying “I’m going to finish my novel” sets us up for failure. What if I don’t have any ideas? What if some life crisis happens and I can’t finish? What if, like the main character in Wonder Boys, I have too many ideas, and it just keeps growing and growing and growing…? What if something better comes along?

And on and on. We have a million ways of talking ourselves out of committing to achievement. So we avoid the commitment. We keep our options open. We dally.

[Read the rest of this entry…]