Tools and Trade Secrets for Aspiring Writers
Ben Eavey yesterday commented on my last post about the soaring numbers of POD titles. He speculated that most of them probably have single-digit sales. He’s probably right.
As it happens, I’ve actually been thinking during the past few weeks about the importance of sales and readership. This brief post has been brewing [...]
Publisher’s Weekly has recently revealed an absolutely astonishing figure for POD books in 2006 and 2007. Here’s its summary:
The production of traditional books rose 1% in 2007, to 276,649 new titles and editions, but the output of on-demand, short run and unclassified titles soared from 21,936 in 2006 to 134,773 last year, according to [...]
There’s a new, rather remarkable facility available on the internet, kinown simply as Read The Words. It’s a fabulous function for those with challenged eyesight [like me!], and for those who like to take documents with them on their iPod or mp3 player.
Essentially, it’s a website where members can indicate just what they want [...]
Yes, there actually can be benefits from a hard disk failure.
As readers will know, I’ve been struggling for 3 weeks with a troubled hard disk. Fortunately, I detected early signs of the problem, and I have survived. But it has still been a huge problem — and I have learned a lot.
Writers are, [...]
The vigilant folks at SoftMaker tracked down my post about its office suite and kindly sent in some informative comments, which I am pasting below. By the way, I decided to pay full freight for the SoftMaker version of the suite, rather than accept the discount offered by reseller Ashampoo. In future, I’ll [...]
IdeaMason is a truly remarkable, but little-known program for writers.
Why is it so little known? Frankly, the program at first sight is very intimidating: it looks different, and it performs differently. It is not easy to understand right off, even though the homepage offers lots of instructional videos. The power of [...]
Many of you may have never discovered the blog’s PRODUCTIVITY STORE. It is powered by Amazon, but the contents are totally mine; I am the one who has stocked the store’s shelves. I periodically scour Amazon offerings in 15 categories of interest to writers and add them to the Productivity Store for your [...]
Chances are that you have never heard of the word processor TextMaker. While I’ve come across the name a few times, I never paid attention to it until recently. It is now in the race to become my word processor of choice. I am incredibly excited about it.
First, some background. The [...]
I’m pretty good about backing up my data: I have several routines, some automatic, some manual, that provide me with multiple backups secured at various locations. Here’s one of my earlier posts about backup strategy. But yesterday I discovered that’s not enough.
Over the weekend, I installed and activated a new file management [...]
While this blog was on “cruise control” for a week, with several pre-posted articles, it also went silent for almost a week, as some of you may have noticed. The amazing thing is that during these two weeks, subscriptions have soared over 300, Technoriati has finally taken notice of the blog [counting links from [...]