7 Top Writer Resources

Guest Post
By John Carey

Improving your writing is a continuous cycle of three steps: 1) writing, 2) editing, and 3) learning from others so you can do a better job of writing and editing. There are many web destinations packed with exercises, ideas, courses, writer forums, and many other helpful tools for the aspiring writer. I’ll cover some of the best I have found. Continue reading “7 Top Writer Resources”

Free Service Makes Lovely Landing Pages for your Books

Booklaunch LogoAuthors who need polished landing pages for their books can get them free with the web service Booklaunch.io. A landing page is a webpage designed to provide a splashy, glamorous look at your book that funnels readers to purchase the book.

Landing pages are particularly great when you publish to several different websites through a distributor. If you’re using the same file for Kobo, Apple, and Barnes & Noble, you can’t put vendor-specific links to your other books in that manuscript. However, if you put links to a landing page, purchasers can purchase your book from whatever vendor you want. Continue reading “Free Service Makes Lovely Landing Pages for your Books”

Block Those Comment Spammers

Guest post
by Gordon Long

For those of you who run blogs (and don’t we all?) and are getting a lot of spam emails and attempts to put up garbage in your comments section, I’ve been doing some work on it. Last month I got trouble from my website host for too much database use. In trying to figure out why, I discovered that I had over 10,000 spam emails in my mailbox! In one month. Sort of fills up the disc space.

So what can you do about it? Most of us think, “That’s too complicated,” but I found out I could at least get started. It’s a learning process we all should take a stab at.

Continue reading “Block Those Comment Spammers”

No Names, No Jackets

Today I am interviewing John Rickards who has recently launched a new website dedicated to the discovery of good books merely (and I use that term ironically) by the writing. From the website: No Names, No Jackets (aka 3NJ) is a book discovery service with an innovative twist: all you see here is one chapter from a story without knowing who wrote it, whether it was self-published or traditional, its synopsis, its title, or what its cover looks like. We all say that good writing should be the only thing that matters, not good salesmanship or high profile. 3NJ aims to make that a reality … Continue reading “No Names, No Jackets”