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.

This afternoon I went on a field trip to the Smithsonian’s Museum of National History—a virtual field trip, that is. The 22-minute video tour of the site is introduced by author David Baldacci and divided into four sections:

1.       Welcome; Lewis and Clark Compass

2.       Star Spangled Banner

3.       David Drake Pottery

4.       Lincoln’s Pocket Watch

The field trip is designed for K-12 students and their teachers who want to explore historic objects and connect them with American history. Anyone can take the free field trip and download the supplementary materials and activities at the site, however.

As a writer of historical fiction, I often use objects (such as a compass, a flag, a pot, a watch) as symbols for something going on in my plot. Exploring the objects on the virtual field trip reminds me that I should do more of that in my narrative text.

Create a pdf file of your writing!

Today I experimented on the free site simplebooklet.com. I am thinking of writing a few historical picture books to share with my little grandsons, and I was looking for an interactive website that would allow me to do that. I signed up for the free Simple Booklet account, using Firefox as my browser (IE won’t work with this site). Then I was prompted to upload a pdf file, so I uploaded the first few pages of Writing Historical Fiction: Digital Age Advice, including the preface. You can also add text, images, audio files, videos, and links to each page of your booklet, and I will certainly try that for my grandsons.

It took a few minutes for the pdf to convert to the ebooklet, but when it was finished, I was prompted to click on a button that created a custom URL so that I can share my publication. Here is the link http://simplebooklet.com/writinghistoricalfiction

My PDF has been turned into a web optimized flip booklet that I can now email, share, and post the introductory pages of Writing Historical Fiction across the web. Of course, the free account means that my ebooklet will contain ads, but for a small fee, I can have the ads removed. Now, to get busy on that historical story for my grandsons.

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?

Create a free author's website

Your book is published, but you can’t sit back and rest on your laurels.  In fact, there won’t be any laurels unless you take an active role in connecting your book to readers.  Your publisher may help with this, but there are many tasks you’ll need to do on your own.  If you self published your book, you’ll be promoting all on your own.  Here is a list of suggestions for promoting your book along with some technology tools to help you accomplish them.

·         Create an author’s  website—readers like to know something personal about the authors they read.

Technology tip: The Wix website at http://wix.com  allows you to make a free Flash website using text, graphics, links, music, video and more. The tools are easy to use and the sites look good if you can stand the ads. 

Unfortunately, WIX websites were not viewable on iPads and other mobile devices, but I recently learned that soon the problem will go away when Wix moves to HTML5.

Finding images for your historical fiction

Recently, I was looking for some public domain images in the National Archives that I might be able to include in my book about Marie Peary, daughter of the Arctic explorer.  There, I stumbled across a tool called Pathways Challenge that allows a registered user to create posters or videos of material in the National Archives digital vaults.  The free tool was probably created for educators and their students to teach and learn about primary resources and history, but writers of historical fiction (and nonfiction) will find the tool useful as well. Users can search by title or tag and they can make lists of their online collections.  I found the tool a useful portal for discovering images of the people about whom I am writing .

Tool for creating a clever book trailer

One of my students recently wrote and self published a contemporary novel that he offers for sale on Amazon.  Like most students, he is on a tight budget.  So, when it came time to create an animated book trailer, he used the free web tool xtranormal Movie Maker.  I won’t link to my student’s trailer in this blog post because it contains a few cuss words, but really, the movie is quite clever.  The site allows the user to choose character avatars and settings.  Then the user simply types in the dialogue, and the site converts the package into a movie the user can upload to YouTube. My student chose two characters from his book and created a movie from a piece of dialogue from the book.

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!

New Year's Resolutions

Here we are at the end of January, the month of New Year’s resolutions.  Did you make any resolutions about writing for 2012?  Plan to start a new project? Market something you’ve already written? Begin a blog? Update your website?

I use a free daily reminder tool called iDoneThisToday. I may have written about this tool before. I am a big fan.

Every day at 3:30, the site sends me an email asking me what I got done today.  I reply to the email (well, let’s say I reply if I have something to report) and the site records it on a monthly calendar.  In November, I pledged to write something five days a week.  I took December off. This month I resolved to take at least 5000 steps per day (I use a pedometer for this)—writers need to stay healthy to produce their best work, right? At the end of the month, I can look at the calendar to see how much or how little I accomplished toward my resolution.  I think I will pledge to write 1000 words a day in February.  What about you?

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?)

Make your own word cloud poster

Want to make a promotional poster or logo for your book?  Try the free tool at http://www.wordle.net/

Type in a list of words or cut and paste a piece of text from your book into the tool and click “go.”  According to the website, “You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.”

Here is a word cloud I created using this toy:

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.

Researching historicaL fiction details

Looking for a fast way to find out what happened in a particular year in history?  Want to add more authentic time-specific detail to your historical novel?

For example, what novel would your protagonist have been reading in 1888? What was the latest technology in 1666? To what play would your London villain have taken his mistress in 1750?

The Timesearch website allows you to search the web through timelines.  Although it is a bit awkward to use at first, the tool does allow you to search by date, area and theme.  Themes include arts, literature, performing arts, politics, religion, science, technology and war.  Clicking on a theme for a particular year and area doesn’t give a whole lot of information, but is useful for finding tidbits of info that can help flesh out the historical time period about which you write.

Icons on the web tool allow a user to find text as well as images, linking to Google and History World. Interesting tool for researchers and writers of historical fiction.

Literature Map

I happened across an interesting website one day last week called Literature Map: A tourist map of literature.  When you go to the site, you type in the name of a writer, and the site develops a word map of other authors who write books similar to the author whose name you entered into the search box.  The site is useful for finding writers in a particular genre or who write in a particular style that you write. So, for example, if you type in “Hemingway,” you get a word map that includes Salinger, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Eggers and Wilde, among others. All are writers found in the literary canon, in this case.

I typed in my own name just for fun. The site didn’t recognize me.  No surprise there.  But when I clicked “yes” to the prompt “are you sure of the spelling?” the site added me to the database for “suggest a new writer.”  So that’s something.  Site visitors are then asked to vote to include writers in the database.  I’ll be curious to see the literature map the site creates for me as a writer of historical fiction, won’t you?  That is, if I win the election.

Book trailers

One of the biggest challenges to me as a self-published eBook author was to create a book trailer.  I did not have the time to learn Adobe Flash, nor the money to hire a professional.  So I decided to do it myself (you can view may trailer on this blog). I used the free online tool Animoto.  Caveat: the free part gets you a mere 30 seconds, but I felt that was enough time to plug my small nonfiction book.  If I ever self-publish again, I will probably upgrade to Animoto Pro.

Second, since my book is pure text and doesn’t really lend itself to visuals, I chose to use words as images, except for the photo of the cover and of me.  I happen to own copyright to both those images, so I saved some money there.  Then there was the matter of music.  I chose music for which I paid a license fee—about $50 for a 30-second clip. 

Since making that first book trailer, I have discovered there are some free sources or Creative Commons licenses for music you can use in your book trailers:

“14 Awesome Open Source Music Sites for Digital Creatives”

Need a historical map?

Need a map for your historical fiction?  Trying to get a fix on a historical location for your setting? The David Rumsey Map Collection Data Base and blog web site features historic maps for many geographical areas and timelines. 

According to the site, “Popular collection categories include antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall & case, children's, and manuscript maps.  You can browse map categories: What, Where, Who, When. The collection can be used to study history, genealogy, art, explorations, local and family history.”

The data base includes over 12,000 searchable maps.

Protect your computer and your information

Keeping your information secure on the internet is important in the digital age.  Google Good to Know gives you five tips for making sure your information stays safe and your computer virus free.  The site reminds you to:

1.      Create safe passwords and change them twice a year.

2.      Enable 2-step verification of password accessed sites.

3.      Update software when prompted because updates often contain important security fixes.

4.      Beware of suspicious sites that resemble authentic ones.

5.      Scan your computer regularly for viruses and malware.

Watch a video on how to perform these five tasks at http://www.google.com/goodtoknow/online-safety/