Track your book's sales!

Whether your book is self published or traditionally published, it’s easy to track your Amazon sales on the website NovelRank. First, go to your book’s listing on Amazon and copy the link. Next paste the link in the box at NovelRank. The site then gives you your book’s sales rank for Amazon.com, .co.uk, .ca, and .de. You can check a box to add to add France, Japan, Italy (.it), China (.cn), and Spain (.es). Once you have added your book to the site, Amazon begins tracking sales. The site notes that historical data prior to listing your book to the NovelRank site is not available from Amazon, only NovelRank tracking data going forward. Once tracking begins, you will be able to see sales made per month. The free site also includes a FAQ link and a blog.

Create strong passwords!

If you are like me, you may have a hard time keeping track of your passwords to your online accounts.  I try to create a new password for each new account, just to protect them from hackers.  Many folks create one password and use it for multiple accounts, however (you don’t really do that, do you?) because they have a hard time remembering multiple passwords.

Recently, I watched a tutorial on how to create strong passwords at Explainia. In a nutshell, the tutorial advises that a strong password should be at least eight characters and include small letters, capital letters, numbers and punctuation marks.  It might look something like this: miN@5_2k?

According to this month’s AARP Bulletin, among the easiest to guess and steal passwords include: password

 123456

 12345678

qwerty

 abc123

Now, you haven’t really used any of these as passwords, have you?

A tool to create print documents from your blog or website text.

Yes, it seems that the world is going paperless, and that is a good, green thing, but sometimes you just need a print version of a web text.  Why? Maybe you need a promotional piece to take to a book bookstore or library visit.  Or perhaps you need your website bio in print as a speaker introduction to a book talk.

One free tool in the cloud that allows you to instantly convert any web site text to a print version is printfriendly. At this site, you simply type in the URL of the page you want to make print friendly. In my case, I needed a print bio to send to a writers’ directory, so I typed in my website home page www.marilynwseguin.com and this is the print version   I got.  No need to transcribe the text from the website!

There is also a free widget you can embed  into your website or blog if you want visitors to have the ability to print directly from your site.  And just as soon as I can figure out where to place the HTML code, I plan to embed the widget into this blog!

Use Google Alerts for Research

Is there a topic, person or location that you frequently search for when you are writing?  Create a Google alert for the search term.  When your search term appears on the web, Google will send you an alert to your choice of email or RSS feeder. 

Think this isn’t useful to a historical researcher?  Think again.  Most local newspapers carry columns from historical societies.   I entered a regional search term into Google alerts, and I regularly receive emailed links to articles written by local historians.  It is true that Google alerts might be more useful if you were, say, trying to keep up with the news on your favorite athlete or monitoring a developing news story.  But every historical researcher knows that the best info sometimes comes from unlikely sources.  As a historical researcher, cast your nets wide and see what you can haul in!

Send personal documents to your Kindle Library

I have completed a first draft of a historical manuscript and have let it sit long enough so that I can look it over with a fresh eye.  I could print it out of course, but I am a big fan of the Kindle as a reading device.  I also have a Kindle app on my iPad and iPhone, so I can read my Kindle collection anywhere, anytime. So how to get my Word manuscript to my Kindle device?

Send to Kindle is a free Windows program from Amazon that lets you send a document from your computer to your Kindle Library.  First, you install Send to Kindle on your computer.  Then when you click on a saved document, you have an option to “send to kindle” so that you can read it on your mobile device.  That is what I did with my story draft, and I was able to read through the ms without having to sit at my desk to read it on the computer screen.

Beware Anachronisms

A writer friend of mine recently told me that one of her readers called to tell her she had mistakenly used a word in her historical novel that was not in usage in the particular place and time about which she wrote.  Of course, she was embarrassed.  We all would be.  Her anecdote put me in mind of a warning I included in my book, Writing Historical Fiction: Digital Age Advice.  It appears in chapter 3:


 Be wary of anachronisms.  Anachronisms place people, events and things in the wrong time. Would your character have a wrist watch in 1800?  Was Maine a state in 1820? How many prisoners did General Robert E. Lee take during the incident at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia in 1859? (None. Lee was not yet a General in 1859; he was a Col.  Also, Harper’s Ferry was in Virginia in 1859.  West Virginia broke off and became a state in 1863, taking Harper’s Ferry with it. See how easy it is to make mistakes when doing historical research?)

Procrastination

This winter I am trying to finish a book about Marie Peary, the daughter of the Arctic explorer. Fact is, I’m not making very much progress. Too many distractions. First, there is the holiday rush to contend with—present wrapping, cookie baking, and so on. The biggest distraction of all, though, is the technology I am using to finish researching and writing the damn book. Yesterday went like this:

I woke up and decided to devote the entire morning to writing chapter 4 (I told you I hadn’t got very far). I sat down at the computer, opened up a new file, and titled it Chapter 4. Hmmmm. How to begin? I reread the draft of Chapter 3 and fiddled with a few sentences there. This all took about 20 minutes and I still couldn’t think of how to begin Chapter 4.

So, I decided to check in on my email. Three messages---all from students wondering about their final grades. It only took five minutes to read the messages, but one student gave a link to website she wanted me to review as a follow up for her final project. That took another 10 minutes. Oh yes, and while I was on the internet, I decided to check my Face book posts. Oops, someone posted something controversial on my wall—I then needed to post and upload a video and link in order to make a rebuttal. First, I had to find the link. Another fifteen minutes.

I decided to knock off for lunch at 11 a.m. and after that I had to watch the news and after that, I was a little sleepy so I took a walk to wake myself up. The walk made me tired, so I decided to take a little nap, and when I woke up, I didn’t feel like writing anymore. Therefore, I decided to devote today to working on Chapter 4, and here I am writing this blog post. Now that it’s done, I think I’ll have lunch because it is 11 a.m. After that, I’ll work on Chapter 4.

Technology tools you can use

One of my favorite email subscriptions is called “Free Technology for Teachers.” This daily message outlines three or four web tools that teachers K-12 can use for teaching and learning.  Although I teach college, I can usually find an application for higher ed in using these tools. I write about some of them in this blog, giving applications for using the tools for researching and writing historical fiction.

Last week, one of the tools in the mailing was a video showing how to sit at the computer if you are doing serious work—not just browsing the internet.  Here is the link directly from the Free Technology for Teachers, so you can check out both the video and the blog.

Mobile device apps for writers

Have a mobile device?  Can you recommend a good writing app?  For the iPad, Apple’s Pages is a great full featured word processor with plenty of templates and some basic editing tools. Its $9.99 price may be a bit pricey, but this app is definitely the one to choose if you plan to do much writing on your device. If you want a less expensive app, particularly for capturing great ideas, making lists, or capturing quotes from readings, then Clean Writer may be a good choice for you.  It is a mere 99 cents.  Other good apps for writers include:  Advanced English Dictionary and Thesaurus (free) and Grammar App HD.  Do you have a favorite writing app for your mobile device?  If so, tell us about it here.

Researching old newspapers and the American old West

Recently I found a great website that is a product of the collaboration between journalists and scholars. Stanford University’s Rural West Initiative is a goldmine of credible research information for writers of historical fiction about the American West.  According to the site’s home page,

“The Rural West Initiative aims to create a unique collaboration between journalists and scholars to investigate the forces transforming the rural west.  We are generating reports and stories ourselves and will commission more from reporters, scholars, researchers, and students across the West. Our work uses extensive data visualization as well as text, video, and still photography to tell our stories.”

One of the links I found useful is the interactive map of the growth and decline of U. S. newspapers. So if you are wondering what your historical American characters were reading as early as 1690, you can find out at this site.

Set your goals in writing historical fiction

I like to make lists to keep track of things I hope to accomplish in a day, week, month, and year. That’s why I was tickled to find a free task tracker called LazyMeter, which helps track my progress on a writing project. It is essentially a checklist that uses metrics to show you visually how much you have accomplished compared to what you set out to do.

There is a good article on the LazyMeter blog that explains how the tool can help you track your productivity, and why6 you just might prefer it to the old-fashioned pen and paper method.

Mind map your story

Links to help with your research

Technology tip:  Living historian and reenactor groups, like good historical novelists, try to be as honest as they can in portraying their characters, and we can learn much from them.  They have studied everything about the period of history they portray, right down to the material from which their buttons are made.

The web page of a group devoted to the Middle Ages can be found at http://www.sca.org/

The Civil War Reenactors home page is

http://www.cwreenactors.com/index.php

Reenactor.net at http://www.reenactor.net/

Is a site that includes reenactor groups from ancient times to the present.

Information is powerful

Know how computer viruses infect your files?  Here is a short video 3-minute video by Commoncraft that explains in layman's terms how you can prevent getting computer viruses and spreading them to others. Important information for the digital age!