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Kindle Trends Review

Summary: Interesting data service with innovative visualizations and some truly useful info. Limited number of categories minimizes its usefulness. Cost: $15/month, or $10/month with coupon code INDYAUTHOR (if it’s still active). Kindle Trends is a fairly new service that sends weekly newsletters to your email with in-depth data about a number of genres. If it covered all the genres, it would be an immediate recommend, as you get a lot of data for the price, though as with most things data-oriented, it takes a fair amount of knowledge and work to massage that data into actionable plans. However, currently it...

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Novelitist

Welcome to my review of Novelitist. I’m actually writing it in the software itself, which just tagged the word ”Novelitist” as a spelling error. Other than that, the site works really well. So well, in fact, that I’m considering using it for some of my writing in the near future. What Is Novelitist? It’s a writing tool for novelists. It also has short story and a few other formats, but it’s primarily designed for writers of long form fiction. Novelitist lives in the cloud, so you can log in from anywhere and get right to work on your next book,...

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DS Amazon Quick View — A Vital (and free!) Chrome Extension

Tired of opening new tabs to see if a book is trad or self published? Fear not, DS Amazon Quick View is here to save you clicks, frustration, and time. Top 100 Amazon Bestsellers When doing market research, you’ll be spending a lot of time poring over the top selling books in the genres you’re investigating. And you want to spend most of your time looking at the independent books in that genre, as those are your competition, as well as your guide to what the readers want. But how to tell which of them are traditionally published and which...

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Ergonomics for Writers

Ergonomics is the study of humans in their work environment. The part of it that matters to us is how it relates to keeping us healthy and safe and avoiding aches and pains and repetitive motion injuries. A comfortable writer is a productive writer, so don’t skimp on your office setup.  Everyone is comfortable in slightly different positions. So, before we get into the “correct” ways to work, let’s look at some general advice that should always trump whatever specific advice you get if the two are in conflict.   What The Experts Say  Correct ergonomics, according to the experts, means...

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Using Vellum to Format Your Book

Though there are other tools out there, Vellum is simply the best we have found for formatting your book. Let’s walk through formatting your book using this excellent program. Start Up Start Vellum and pick either New Book or Import Word File I picked new book just to look at a clean interface before importing a Word document. You can write your whole book directly into Vellum, but it lacks robust editing tools, especially change tracking if you are having critiqued or working with a coauthor. Better to write your book in something else and then import it. There are...

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Accounting And Taxes For Writers

So you’re a self-published author. Congratulations, you are now an entrepreneur. We know, you just want to be a writer. But the “just a writer” career path is quite rare these days. Instead, you chose to control your own financial destiny, which means that you have to actually deal with some financial stuff. If you’re still single, you may wish to marry a money manager or accountant so you can avoid all of this bookkeeping stuff. If you can’t do that, then welcome to managing your own income.  Taxes and Basic Business Accounting Paying your taxes quarterly is really the...

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Help! I Need a New Computer

The days of pen and paper are long gone. Don’t even think about it. You might draft a few things with a quill pen to look cool at the coffee shop, but if you’re going to churn out enough words to survive as an independent author, you need a computer. Whether your old computer is just, well, old, or it has died and you need a new one right away so you can get back to that masterpiece you were working on about space zombies invading Kansas, we’re here to help with our guide to buying a word processing machine...

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Editing Tools

Editing tools? Like… what does that even mean? Is there something more than my keyboard and an old copy of The Elements Of Style?  Yes, dear reader, technology is amazing. While we hate content writing programs using A.I. (they’re taking our jobs!), there are a ton of intelligent software programs that can make your revision and error-checking process much faster. Some simply find typos or offer minor grammar suggestions, while others can do an in-depth read-through of your work. Try out a few, most of them have a free version. You might find something that saves you hundreds of hours...

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