Welcome to the conversation!

Join historical novel writer Marilyn Weymouth Seguin here every week for conversation about digital tools you can use for researching, writing, revising, publishing and promoting your work! Buy the eBook at this link.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Attract readers and book clubs

Today’s Technology tip: Start your own online book club featuring your book, and invite your friends (and their friends) to participate in the discussion.  One site specifically for book conversations is Book Club It. http://www.bookclubit.com/.

·         Got images?  Consider setting up a sharing site of your historical images, maps, drawings (be sure they are copyright free or you  own the copyright) to showcase your story in a visual way. If you do this before your book is published, you can include the URL on the cover.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

In celebration of Patriot's Day

Yesterday was Patriot’s Day in the U. S., so as I was browsing sites about the American Revolution, I stumbled across the Museum of the American Revolution site, a project under grants from The Lehrman Institute and The Hertog Foundation. One of the features at the site is an interactive timeline that allows viewers to explore important objects in American history. For example, at 1776 on the Timeline, I was able to view American currency and firearms of the period. A writer of historical fiction might find this site useful when describing objects used in an era. At the collection link on the site, viewers can observe art, manuscripts and printed works assembled by the Museum over the past century.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Search engines to maximize your research results

Technology tip: Although Google is a great search engine to use for your research, different search engines often return different results.  Why not use a meta search engine (a search engine that queries other search engines and then combines the results) to maximize your search results? Here are a few of my favorites:

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Discover the history in your neighborhood

Want to find historic places in your neighborhood—or in some other specific geographical location? The site Historic Places: All Historic Places in North America lets the user browse and locate historic places in a favorite location. Simply type in a location in the search box and the interactive map shows pins of historic buildings, objects structures and sites in the area. Click for more information about each of the pins. This site would be great for tourists, but it is also a great site for writers of historical fiction who need a general overview of the history in a particular region.   The site contains about 100,000 North American historic places listed in its database.