Essentials
Essentials

Essentials

Advertising Basics

There are a lot of different places to advertise, and we have articles about the specifics of many of them. However, platforms change, get updated, gain and lose pieces of functionality. If you understand the basic concepts in this Essential, then you will be able to adapt to whatever platform that suits your books the best. The important thing to remember is that everything works together. There are a lot of parts in an ad campaign, and if any one of them is subpar, the possibility of profit plummets. Profitability The main thing an ad has to be is profitable....

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A Guide to Keyboards

The first rule of keyboards is that you like what you like. Some professional writers like the cheapest keyboards they can find, mushy things with keys that feel like lopsided marshmallows. Others (that’s me), love a nice clicky mechanical keyboard. The feedback, the crisp actuation, and the myriad of choices insure that you can get exactly what you like.  So if everyone just likes what they like, why am I writing about it?  Because most people have no idea what their options are, so they don’t even know what they like. You may think you like your keyboard and its...

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Grammar and Critique

Before putting pen to paper or fingertip to keyboard, there are some basic writing fundamentals we have to discuss. I will try to get through them as swiftly as possible, but they can’t be ignored. Grammar is important ​Before you can write, you have to make sure you can write. If you can’t construct a decent sentence, it doesn’t matter how great your story is, it’s going to be hard to get it across. Though you don’t have to follow the rules of grammar—most writers break them with wild abandon—you have to know them. And more importantly, you have to know...

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Point of View and Tense

Point of view (POV) and tense work together in a way to create different levels of story scope and reader engagement, often by sacrificing one for the other. Choosing which to use can be more art than science and you may feel that personal preference and ease of use trumps either of those. However, as you learn more about these two essential properties of writing and how they interact with each other, you’ll see how picking the right ones can help take your writing to the next level. POV One of the most important decisions you make when writing is...

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Storyist

Storyist does everything for an aspiring novelist or screenwriter, and unlike many other one-size-fits-all solutions, it does them all pretty well. Unfortunately, it’s only for Mac users, but if that’s you, it’s worth checking out the free trial to see if Storyist feels like a good fit.  The software includes an iOS version for iPads and iPhones so you can access your files and work on them from anywhere. And when we say that Storyist does everything, we mean everything. Here are just a few of the high points. Full Featured and flexible text editor Outlining software Plot planner with...

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Dynalist.io

Dynalist is free outlining software that lives in the cloud so you can log in from any device to see your outlines and work on them. We love the simplicity and ease of us, coupled with the ability to handle complicated outlines.  Spending a few minutes with the tutorial in Dynalist will teach you how to create simple outlines very quickly, with child and parent items indented appropriately and displayed based on your preferences. You can create as many unique outlines as you like, and customize them in all kinds of ways with checklists, colors, images, and H1, H2, and...

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