RESOURCES (DunDraCon 2018 Seminar Gaming the System)
www.literatureandlatte.com – Home of Scrivener. I find this to be the single best novel writing tool out there. Once written, I move the work over to Microsoft Word.
www.office.com – Office 365 for Word, and most importantly for a free 1tb of storage space on OneDrive. You want Word because it is the most standard format for conversion, and often required for short story submissions. OneDrive allows you to literally work anywhere, anytime. (make sure you set your scrivener to save to your OneDrive folder too)
www.scribophile.com – online critique community with excellent tools for easy critiquing. Basic membership is free but pretty limited.
www.critters.org – very old-school online critique community. No easy tools, but no cost either. You’ll tend to get more ‘genre’ writers critiquing.
www.prowritingaid.com – excellent editing software. Also analyzes your writing across many metrics. You can use it full-featured for free, but you’ll only get analysis chapter by chapter online.
www.grammerly.com – also excellent editing software. What made the call for me was prowritingaid offered a great deal on a lifetime license
www.naturalreaders.com – you can also use the built in text-to-speech feature in Acrobat for .pdf. There are a lot of different ones you can use…main thing is, use one. It’s unbelievably invaluable.
www.draft2digital – this is an aggregator for wide-distribution (as opposed to Amazon.com only) but they also have great tools for creating great looking ebooks.
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G202131100 — this has a link to download amazon’s own ebook creator if you want even more control over the look/layout of the ebook. Amazon also continually improves their conversion from Word files. Their print conversion is really solid
www.calibre-ebook.com – full featured ebook creation at the html level. Allows tricks so fancy many won’t work on kindles, though they will on phones and tablets—don’t get carried away
Now that you’ve got something worth reading…ideally pay for an editor and a cover artist, then
www.thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com – A resource listing thousands of open markets for fiction, use it to track your submissions as well.
www.bookfunnel.com – This is an outside distributer for your books/stories (don’t use with amazon KU). Also have new tools to allow sales directly from your own website.
www.mailchimp.com – This is by far the best value (free) for a full-featured mass-email system up until you reach 2000 subscribers. Then switch completely or peel off subscribers to another system like MailerLite
www.goodreads.com/group/show/50920-beta-reader-group –this group is for people interested in Alpha/Beta reading for authors. Both for free and for a fee – I recommend paying … free readers can often be flaky and maybe not as thorough
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