We writers have many tools.

We have our words, the nouns and verbs and adjectives and even the woefully despised adverbs, poor dears. We have our talent, our rare gift for putting the right words in the right order to make our readers weep, laugh, thrill, buy — or just turn the page. We have our minds, straining through the days and nights to create and hold onto the ideas that fill our words with meaning.

And we have our word processors. The tools we use to actually capture those ideas and put them down in words, the software and laptops and notebooks and ballpoints. These tools aren’t quite so glamorous. They seem so everyday, so mundane, so… boring.

And yet, there are few writers that aren’t infinitely fussy when it comes to their physical tools, who don’t demand just the right pencil on just the right paper, or who don’t secretly thrill at the prospect of a new notebook computer to carry down to that oh-so-perfect café. (We’re a little fussy about places, too.)

And why not? The tools we use to get our thoughts out of our head and onto paper (or increasingly, the screen) are the medium of our calling. You wouldn’t look askance at a painter who demanded the right brand of oil paint and a canvas prepared just so, right? A word processor or legal pad is a writer’s canvas; a keyboard or fountain pen her brush.

The truth is, there is inspiration in our tools. Just as the heft of a good chisel can make a woodworker itch to carve, a well-made writing instrument — whether a fine pen or a beautifully-designed word processor — can make us long to write, drawing from us the creative spark.

There are writers who write just to feel the flow of ink on the page (I’m one of them). There are others who are inspired by the shape of a font, the feel of a keyboard, the image of their words spilling across the screen (I’m one of those, too). I’m not kidding when I say that I was so impressed by Adobe’s gorgeous online word processor Buzzword that I wrote a book. Just so I could play with it.

Of course, there are writers who claim to be perfectly comfortable with a chewed-up #2 pencil and a student’s composition book. (Granted, it has to be a Blackwing 602 pencil and the composition books are imported from a stationer in France.…) But writers as a whole are especially prone to fetishizing our instruments, and with good reason: the way we write, the look and feel and smell and atmosphere of the experience of writing itself, affects the outcome of our writing.

Gertrude Stein wrote on scraps of paper on the dashboard of her Ford (which she called “Godiva”). Neil Gaiman writes with a fountain pen, in a Moleskine notebook. Lillian Jackson Braun, the author of the “The Cat Who…” mysteries, writes only on a typewriter. Speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison is also a typewriter fanatic, whose devotion to his Olivia is well-known. Jonathan Lethem has given up his typewriter but remains committed to “the eternal Selectric of the mind” (as he told Slate in 2007) — he only writes in 12-point Courier, double-spaced of course.

And on and on. Some writers pick a specific tool for a specific book, like a musician who chooses just the right guitar for each song. Neal Stephenson wrote his epic Baroque Trilogy, which is several thousand pages in published form, in longhand with a fountain pen on cotton paper. Stephen King wrote Dreamcatcher with a fountain pen, too, saying it forced him to slow down and get into the story.

It might be irrational to find inspiration in our tools, to bind ourselves to the way a specific pen or pencil looks or feels. After all, the words, the tone, the rhythm, the meaning — these all come up from within, right? And yet we writers are irrational creatures by our very natures. Why else choose to spend long hours locked away alone as our preferred method of communicating with people?

Rational or not, investing our tools with the power to draw forth meaning from the depths of our beings is a very human, and very writerly, thing to do. It pleases us to use good tools, especially when we use them well. It’s all well and good to meditate on how we spin the raw stuff of everyday life into complexly woven tales rich with insight into the human condition, but we shouldn’t forget the less exciting but no less essential tools we use to relate those tales to the rest of the world.

They are, after all, tools of inspiration.

Whenever you work with other people on a document, whether they’re co-writers contributing changes and comments, editors recommending revisions, or even yourself adding and cutting a work for reprint or re-pitching, you run into the problem of how to compare the documents in a useful, productive way. Word’s “Track Changes” is good if you’re the kind of person who wears a hair shirt and sleep on a bed of downy barbed wire — for everyone else, it’s ugly, cluttered, and difficult to work with,  Side-by-side comparison tools exist — Word 2007 has this built in — but they rely on the writer’s ability to recognize subtle differences that are often too subtle for work-weary eyes.

TextFlow, a product now in public testing, offers a remedy to those issues. THeir product offers changes in a gorgeously colored and incrediblywell-designed format that makes it a breeze to identify, review, and accept or reject changes — even between several documents at once.

TextFlow is an Adobe AIR app, which means it will run on any system that can run Flash; if you don’t have the AIR engine on your computer already, the TextFlow installer will offer to download and install it before installing the TextFlow program itself. Once installed, using TextFlow is easy. Drag your “base” document into the TextFlow window, and once it opens, drag one or more revised files onto the same window. TextMate will take some time to scan through all the documents and compile the differences, then incorporate any new or changed text in the second documents directly into the first. Each document’scontributions are color-coded and can be accepted or rejected with a single click (hover your mouse over a change and the menu fades into view overlaid on the change itself — click one end of the text block to accetp, the other to reject).

As I said, TextFlow is still in testing, so you may well run into bugs andother problems using it. I wanted to see how well it would work with real-world documents (you can download sample documents from teir website, but who knows how they might  have been optimized for TextFlow), so I imported a manuscript I had submitted to an editor a couple months ago nad the revised text I just reviewed last week. TextFlow took quite a while to process the second document, leading me to think the app had crashed when instead, it was just working. Once done, though, it did a good job of recognizing and formatting changes so that I could quickly and easily see what I wanted to do.

I would say, give TextMate a try and see if it works for you and your way of working. At least for now, the product is free and beingupdated frequently in response to users’ problems. In fact, a new update this morning seems to promise to fix the processing speed issue I just complained about. So  try it out!

TextFlow (Free) 

It can be hard, though, to find good ones on writing. To help you out, here’s 10 podcasts about writing I think are pretty good. Where possible I’ve provided links for both your RSS reader and for iTunes; if you use a separate podcatcher, you might have to right-click on the “RSS” link to “Copy link location” and paste it into your podcatcher manually.

1. I Should be Writing: Mur Lafferty is a self-described “would-be writer” who actually has quite a few credits to her name, now. ISBW covers the ins-and-outs of writing, from coming up with ideas to self-publishing to writing queries. (RSS | iTunes)
2. Lifehack Live: Pardon me for plugging my own show, but I have lots of great writers on — as well as productivity experts, life coaches, and entrepreneurs, all of which have something to say to writers, I think. Lifehack Live is on hiatus at the moment, but there’s plenty of good stuff in the archives. (RSS | iTunes)
3. Freelance Radio: FreelanceSwich’s podcast features John Brogher, Cyan Ta’eed (co-author of the awesome book How to Be a Rockstar Freelancer), Kristen Fischer, and Dickie Adams discussing the insand outs of freelancing, with a focus on practical business-related questions like “how do freelancers get insurance” and “how do you say ‘no’ to a client?” (RSS | iTunes)
4. The Writing Show: Author Paula Berinstein tackles everything from where writers find inspiration to where writers can get published, with probing interviews of writers, publishers, editors, agents, and otehrs. There are several “threads”, including ongoing “reality show” series tracking beginning writers through the process of submitting and revising their work for publication, and more traditional “one-off” shows featuring guests talking about whatever topic they’re particularly knowledgable about.  (RSS | iTunes)
5. PerfCast: The official podcast of Performancing, covering all aspects of blogging including the business aspects, generating revenue, and promotion. Some of this might be off-topic for most writer’s blogs, but there’s a lot of good advice for turning your own writer’s blog into a blog powerhouse — and if your preferred form of writing happens to be blogging, this is required listening. (RSS)
6. Litopia: Litopia consists of two podcasts. The first, “Litopia Daily”, is a short daily round-up of news of interest to writers. The second, “Litopia After Dark”, is a longer weekly round-table dscussion of issues in the writing and publishing worlds. (RSS | iTunes)
7. The Creative Writing Podcast: Tom Occhipinti offers tons of advice for fiction writers, from tips on characterization or setting to overviews of genres. (RSS | iTunes)
8. Grammar Girl: Mignon Fogarty offers “quick and dirty tips for better writing” in this twice-weekly show on the ins and outs of English grammar. More fun than your Third Grade English teacher, by a long shot! (RSS)
9. Writing Excuses: A recent discovery for me, this podcast features three writers (Brandon Sanderson , Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells) talkinga bout various writing challenges, either amongst themselves or with guest interviewees. Short — because, they say, “you’re in a hurry and we’re not that smart”) — fun, and surprisingly helpful considering their self-professed lack of brain power… (RSS | iTunes)
10. HotForWords: I debated whether or not to add this one — it’s video instead of audio, it’s risqué, and it’s quite simply weird. A young, attractive, and often sexily-clad woman with a rich accent discusses the origin of odd words and phrases in the English language. It would be deeply offensive (and maybe it still is) if it weren’t so fascinating! (RSS | iTunes)

Hopefully you’ll find at least one or two on the list that really get you going. Go ahead and load up your mp3 player and start listening! And let me know your favorite podcasts for writers in the comments.

1. Local backup: Use either an external hard-drive or thumb drive to keep local backups.
   • Download and install SyncBack Freeware (Mac users can use the built-in Time Machine or Google “automatic backup software” to find an appropriate program — I don’t use a Mac, sorry).
   • Set up a new backup “profile”. Select the folder you store your writing in, and a folder on your backup drive, and set to backup all files and all sub-directories. (The other option is to set up a “Synchronization” profile, which will keep the files in the two folders identical. If you accidentally delete a file, it will be deleted in your backup, too — this is not a viable backup strategy!)
   • Don’t run the “simulated run”. A window will pop up listing all your profiles. Right-click the one you just created and select “schedule” to create a new schedule for your backup. Select the “scheduler” tab and enter a time to run the backup automatically. Since I leave my PC on all the time, I chose 4 am. Leave it set to “Daily”. Click “OK”.
     

     Note: On XP, the scheduler needs your windows login to run. If you’re like most people, your PC has a blank password — make sure to allow SyncBack to override XP’s restriction against blank passwords. Your password is blank if you don’t have to login when you boot your computer.

   • Your files will be backed up to your external hard drive or thumb drive (leave them plugged in all the time, by the way) every night while you sleep. If you need to recover a file, just surf to the external drive as you would open a folder normally.
2. Remote backup I: Every week, burn a set up backup discs and take them to work or a trusted friend or family member’s house. Every month or so, burn a second set and mail them to someone you know in a different part of the country.
3. Remote backup II: Use an online backup service like JungleDisk, Mozy or Carbonite. You can use Mozy for free if you have less than 2GB of files to backup — after installing the program, right-click it’s system tray icon and select “Configure”. Select the “File System” tab and choose the folders you want to back up. All these services will run automatically, making sure the latest versions of your files are saved.

With the exception of your CD/DVD backups, everything in this system is totally automated, which means you don’t have to think about making backups. If anything happens, you can fairly easily restore your lost files, whether from your local backup or from one of your remote locations — at worst, you’ll have to wait a couple days for your out-of-town contact to mail the discs back to you, and you’ll have lost up to a month’s work. That’s the worst case scenario — not too bad a trade-off for being able to salvage most of your career after a horrible disaster!

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:

1. Writers, especially beginning writers, often can’t afford expensive software. There are programs out there that promise to help you write better, faster, and clearer copy — for a price. And it’s usually a high price — some of these packages run over $200 US! If you’re just getting started, it might be months (or even longer) before you see any financial return, let alone enough to make back the cost of these programs. Why spend so much when there are plenty of free programs that do the job as well?
2. A lot of software for writers seems “scammy”. Writing isn’t easy; good writing even less so. I’m deeply suspicious of software that promises to make writing a novel or screenplay easier. Organizing notes, handling formatting, etc — these are things I expect software to do well, not make writing easy.
3. Open source software is free in more than just cost. There’s a saying in the open source/free software world: “Free as in speech”. Writers above all people have a responsibility to support efforts to protect freedom of speech (and the most to gain from those efforts), including the freedoms that are embodied in open source software — to look at and modify the code. Even if you can’t modify your software, there are programmers who can, and open source software gives them the freedom to do so. (Actually, I’d like to find more open source software specifically for writers, so if you know of anything, drop me a line.)
4. Free tools are often as good or even better than their paid alternatives. If there’s a paid program that’s really the best for its purpose, I’ll recommend it. But where free programs do the job as well, I see the cost of the paid alternative as unwarranted.
5. I can’t afford it. I’ve written largely about products I use, or would use, and cost is a factor in whether I decide to use something. I can’t afford a hundred or more dollars to evaluate a program — and even less to evaluate all the programs available for writers.
6. I don’t do the kinds of writing a program supports. For example, since I’m not a screenwriter, it’s hard for me to be fair in evaluating a program intended for screenwriters. When hundreds of dollars are on the line, it’s even harder.

There are programs that are worth the money, and I cover them when I can. There are also programs that are industry standards, like FinalDraft A/V for screenwriting. My feeling is that if you’re at the stage in your career where you need to use FinalDraft, you’re probably pretty comfortable with the technical aspects of the software — and you can probably afford (and probably need) the support material (books, classes, etc.) you need to use the software. A blog post probably isn’t going to cut it for you.

All that said, if there’s paid software that people really need to know about, let me know. Most paid software offers evaluations, and the 30 days or so they let you us the software for free is enough time to figure out most of the basics. I can also try to get a review copy from companies that don’t offer demos, though that’s a hit-or-miss prospect.

Finally, I’d be happy to post your reviews, if you want. If there’s a piece of software that you’d like to see get some attention, write a short review and I’ll consider posting it to the site (and I’ll give you credit). The ultimate goal is to help writers find out about technology that can help them, so if there’s something I’m missing that would help you or your fellow writers, I’m more than willing to figure out how to add that to the site.

• 25+ Pieces of Writing Software You Should Know About
  Ali at Daily Writing Tips offers up no less (and possibly more) than 25 applications that writers might get some use out of. There are apps for collaboration, word processing, writing novels and screenplays, organizing your research materials, and more. Some are free, some are somewhat expensive. Not all of them are apps I would recommend, but you might have a different opinion.
• The Benefits of Writing a Pillar Post
  Tay at Super Blogging pays a visit to the territory I covered in my Build Your Blog’s Traffic and Impact with Resource Posts, with 4 very good reasons to think about writing your own pillar posts, and a few examples to get you started.
• Junk for Writers
  Paperback Writer lists 10 office supplies every writer will want to clutter their writing space with. Pure office supply porn!
• 24 Rebellious Resources for Freelancing
  Quiet Rebel Writer is tearing it up lately with more rebellious resources than you can shake a stick at! (Not that you’d want to – what would that accomplish?) Here, Amy Lillard sends you off with the message that we writers, we can write ANYTHING – and gives you 24 places on the web to make that platitude a reality.
• 6 Productivity Tools for MS Word
  Ah, MS Word, the savage witch-queen of the writing profession. WE hate you, yet are compelled to bow down before your greatness. Samuel Dean at Web Worker Daily gives you a handful (if you’re polydactylic) of tips to help you tame the beast.
• The Hidden Freelance Writing Job Market
  Jodee Redmond at Freelance Writing Jobs suggests ways freelancers can find work by taking a step or two out of the ordinary.
• Could The Freelance Writer’s Most Important Tool Be The Lowly Spreadsheet?
  Tom Chandler at The Copywriter Underground tells you how to use a spreadsheet to help keep you on top of your freelance work. Spreadsheets are all mathy and stuff, and writers tend to want to forget they even exist, but as Tom reminds us, there’s some real value for writers who remember that they’re running a business, too.

And a couple of self-promoting links, if you don’t mind:

• Smithereens is holding a contest to find the wittiest twitterer on Twitter. To enter, tweet something witty and copy the tweet and the link to the comments of that post. I’m judging entries, along with James Chartrand of Men with Pens.
• James and I are judging another contest, this time at my fellow Lifehack writer Joel Falconer’s site, Joel is looking for someone to write a great post on how bloggers can use FriendFeed. Check out the post for more information. (For the record, I have no idea why James and I are suddenly the go-to pair for judging contests – we actually don’t know each other. Coincidence, I guess.)

What have you come across this week that might interest your fellow WTC readers? Or, better yet, what have you written that you want to share with the rest of us? Leave a link or three in the comments!

Nobody outside of Google knows exactly how Google ranks it’s search results. It’s a closely-guarded trade secret. But the general outlines are pretty well-known, if not the exact algorithm. Google has thousands of computers running programs called “‘bots” (short for “robots”) or “spiders” that pick a known page, index it, follow all the links on the page, index the pages linked to, follow links on those pages, index the new set of pages, and so on.

As Google’s ‘bots “crawl” the web, they assign each page a PageRank, Google’s estimation of the importance of the page. This figure is arrived at by looking at the keywords on the page, the number of times and the placement of the keywords (which help determine what the main topics covered by the page are), the relation between those keywords, and the relation of the page to other pages on the web. The last part is calculated according to the number of other sites that link to a page, and their PageRank.

Let’s say you write books about fishing. On a page about your book, “Trout Fishing in Kansas”, the words “trout”, “fishing”, and “Kansas” are going to be important keywords — you’ll have used them a lot, they’ll be in the page’s title, headings, and sub-headings, and there may be links to other pages on the web about trout, fishing, and Kansas.

If a lot of other sites that Google has already determined are about trout, fishing, or Kansas link to your site, Google assumes that you must know a thing or two about those topics — if the Kansas Trout Fishing Commission thinks your page is worth linking to, Google figures, you must be an expert. And therefore people searching for information on Kansas trout fishing would probably want to find your site — as opposed, say, to a Kansas City, MO, bookstore that sells Trout Fishing in America.

Knowing that, it’s pretty clear what you have to do to assure a strong showing for your site in Google search results:

• Write good content: As they say on the web, content is king. Writing strong content about your chosen topics will give Google lots of keywords to work with, and encourage other sites to link to you.
• Write good headings and sub-heads: Google assumes that anything marked as a header (with header tags like “h2” and “h3”) are more likely to be keywords, and rates them more highly. Choose descriptive titles for your posts rather than obscure ones’.
  • Better - The Difficulties of Trout Fishing on the Missouri River
  • Worse -Them Buggers Ain’t Biting!
• Write descriptive link text: Google gives more weight to keywords it finds in links, so when linking to other sites, describe the other site’s content well. Don’t write “click here”, write “visit Fishing World to buy Acme Fishing Line”.
• Get linked to: The more relevant links Google finds to your site, the higher your site will appear in search results, so make sure your content is worth linking to and make sure you promote it so other web writers in your niche see it.
• Put keywords in your page’s title: Every page has a title that appears at the very top of your web browser when you visit it. Most blog software will put the site’s title and the post’s title into the page title, like this “Getting Noticed by Google — Writer’s Technology Companion”. Keep that in mind when naming your site — pick something like “Mary Ann Whiting, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer” rather than “Mary’s Site”.
• Update regularly: The more often Google indexes your site, the better. Google looks at the update frequency to determine hw often it needs to revisit the site. If you update daily, it’s going to come back more often than if you update every couple of months when you feel like it. Try to update at least once every week or so, to keep Google coming back often.

There are a lot of companies out there that offer “SEO”, “Search Engine Optimization”, services. While some of these do a pretty good job (mostly by doing the kind of stuff I talk about above), they’re really intended for corporate sites (and charge accordingly!). Beware of sites that offer cheap SEO services to end users — most of them a) don’t work, and b) use questionable tactics that not only won’t work but could get your site delisted from Google entirely.

Here are some tactics that don’t work and could actually hurt your search ranking with Google:

• Getting links from unrelated sites: It pays to be selective about who you try to get to link to you. If the site isn’t well-established for your particular keywords, it’s not going to give you much of a boost. Likewise if a page is just a bunch of links.
• Link farms: Some services offer to get your site tons of links, for a fee. They build “link farms”, interlinked sets of pages with only links to sites that have bought links. Google looks unkindly on this and you’ll get dinged for it.
• Link-swapping or buying links: There are a number of link-swapping services (“you link to me, I’ll link to you”); Google tends to ignore links on sites in link-swapping groups (including non-swapped links) and may actively punish sites hosting swapped links (which means you). Same for ad networks that allow you to buy text links on other sites — which is especially galling since Google’s AdWords program is essentially a service that allows you to buy text links on other sites! But Google is the boss, here, so save your money and focus on content.
• Loading your page with invisible keywords: In olden days, people would put in hundreds of keywords at the bottom of their page, setting the text color to be the same as the background color. Search engines don’t see text color, the thinking went, so they’d see (and index) the text but nobody else would. All the search engines are wise to this, and will ding you for it.

There are tricks that will work — for a little while, until Google and the other search engines get wise to it and change how they rank pages. It’s far better to focus on writing good stuff for your human visitors and let your site grow organically than to waste time, effort, and money trying to write for the computers at Google. It might take a little longer, but if you have a strong site with well-defined keywords and people find your site useful enough to link to, you’ll gradually move up the search rankings to the top.

1. Hone your craft.: The best way to improve your writing is to write, right? A blog gives you an outlet for writing regularly.
2. Instant feedback: One thing blog readers are not is timid; if you mess up, they’ll let you know! They’ll also let you know when you’re doing a good job. It might be years before you get any feedback on the novel you just finished; a blog post can start getting commented on within minutes.
3. Develop relationships with readers: A blog lets you reach out to your readers and build enduring relationships. The people who read your blog every day are going to be people you can count on to buy your books, spread word of mouth about your work, even review works-in-progress.
4. Give your most loyal readers a “free prize”: Blogging gives you a chance to offer your biggest fans a little something extra.
5. Build awareness of your work: Blogs have a potentially unlimited audience — more than one person has discovered their new favorite writer by doing a search on Google.
6. Show your ability to write often and consistently: If you do work for clients, blogging shows that you’re able to write regularly and to a schedule — which is good news for potential clients!
7. Network with other writers: Your blog offers a platform for connecting with other writers, by linking back and forth to each other, providing a place to comment on each other’s work, and giving each other positive word-of-mouth.
8. Sell copies of your books: If you have book out, by all means plug it on your blog. A lot. Join the Amazon Associates program so you get a referral fee every time someone buys your book by clicking the link on your site. The referral fees are often as much as or even more than your royalties!
9. Attract clients: New readers can find out about you when your site turns up on Google — so can new clients! Plus, you can sell them on your work before they ever even contact you.

Of course, there’s another reason writers should blog — it’s fun! And there’s nothing wrong with that!

1. Vision: A Resource for Writers
   PDF downloads of every issue of the online magazine for writers.Topics covered in a recent issue (January 2008) included motivation, publishing vocabulary, submission tracking software, and more.
2. Mugging the Muse: Writing Fiction for Love and Money
   This massive (209 pp) e-book by novelist Holly Lisle covers the ins and outs of writing, from creating good dialogue and fleshing out your characters to finding an agent and keeping your writing career moving.
3. 60 Effective Strategies for Selling More Books
   Best-selling author Scott Jeffrey offers some effective strategies for boosting your book’s sales and building up your reputation as a writer.
4. Plug Your Book! (sample chapters)
   Steve Weber is one of the masters of online book promotion. Here, he discusses using Internet social networking to build up word of mouth about you and your writing.
5. The Easy Way to Write Short Stories That Sell!
   A good-sized (49 pages) piece on the art and craft of short stories. Opens with several pages about getting in the right mindset to write well (e.g. time management, etc.). Email list subscription required.
6. Organized Writer 2008 Calendar
   Not an e-book per se, but a downloadable 2008 calendar with quotes, highlighted dates, and todo lists especially designed to keep writers on track.
7. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Getting Published
   A collection of articles by Writersville authors about the trials and tribulations of getting published.
8. How to Write a Great Query Letter
   No surprises here; this one’s about writing great query letters. At over 100 pages, though, you can bet it’s a great deal more detailed than the typical “research your market, hook your reader, be polite, and spellcheck” howto.
9. Book Writing for Fun and Profit
   Brian Scott walks you through the process of writing and selling a book, from picking a subject and creating a title to getting an ISBN number and selling your work as an e-book. It’s loaded with ads and the layout is a little ugly, but there’s some good information in here.
10. Unleashing the Ideavirus
    Seth Godin is one of the premiere marketing experts, and writes in a clear, engaging style. Not strictly for writers, this e-book is about spreading your ideas, and is sure to help you figure out how to market yourself and your work.

The core of your site should show you and your talents off in the best possible light, and as thoroughly as possible:

• Your bio: A short description of who you are, your history, and your writing. Freelancers seeking clients might also include a description of work they’ve done, links to client sites, or even a resume.
• Your portfolio: At the very least, a list of your books, articles, and other published work. If possible, include samples or clips, as well as links to work published online.
• News and updates: A blog or other system of posting upcoming events, recent publications, major life changes, what you’re working on, your thoughts, and whatever else strikes your fancy that you think readers would be interested in.
• A way to contact you: Either post your email and mailing address somewhere, or include a “Contact Me” page with a form for sending email and an address for sending mail. If you’re hesitant to include your home address, use a PO Box, or a publisher’s or agent’s address.

Other information you might wish to include:

• Testimonials or blurbs: If you do client work, ask your best clients to write testimonials you can post on the website. If you have book jacket blurbs, post some of those.
• Services offered: Freelancers should list what, exactly, they do: copyediting, direct response, newsletters, technical manuals, etc.. If you have fixed rates, list them, but many freelancers set rates on a per-job basis and can leave rates out of their description.
• Links: A page or sidebar list with links to other authors in your niche, information on the topics you write on, or general writing information. Or all three — whatever sites you use and recommend.
• Press kit: A summary page and a few images can be useful if you’re seeking any kind of press coverage. Make sure you have the right to distribute the images — even if they are pictures of you, the photographer who took them has certain rights under copyright law.

Because you’re not limited by space, you can expand your site at will, adding sections when the need arises. That said, it’s a good idea to have a rough plan of what information you want t include on your website from the start, so that you don’t end up cluttering your site by haphazardly adding new sections and information.