Archives

Home > Archives

Cool Apps For Writers by Kitty Bucholtz

July 9, 2016 by Kitty Bucholtz in category It's Worth It by Kitty Bucholtz tagged as app, It's Worth It, Kitty Bucholtz, organization, self publishing, self-publishing, Software Programs

Some of my favorite apps and SaaS (software as a service) software for writers are well-known to many, but just in case you haven’t heard of some of them, I thought I’d share.

Evernote – great for organizing and storing information. I have separate “notebooks” for self-publishing, teaching, business, and more. Within each notebook, I also have dozens of tags that I can use in lieu of filing information in multiple locations. You can use it on your computer as well as your smart phone. Add “Evernote Clipper” to your browser and you can save anything on the Internet with a single click (websites, PDFs, whatever).

BookFunnel – great for giving away your ebook(s) to beta readers, reviewers, giveaway winners, and more. What I love most about this service is that the user answers a couple of short questions about how they want to get their free ebook, and then they get a short video explaining how to get the book onto the appropriate device. No more emails from readers asking how to put the file I emailed them onto their Kindle or Nook.

BookPlanner – great for giving you a step-by-step timeline of all the steps to bring your book to publication. There are several timelines to choose from depending on your needs.

Vellum – amazing for quickly and easily creating all ebook formats. It automatically creates Nook links in the back of the Nook file for all your other books on B&N, Amazon links for all the books you have on Amazon in your Amazon file, etc. Several choices for fonts, flourishes to separate scenes, and much more. Only downside – Mac only.

MyFitnessPal – strange addition to the list? This app is directly responsible for helping me lose 24 pounds in 24 weeks. It will tell you what your daily calorie limit should be based on your age, height, and weight, and the amount of weight you want to lose per week. Hundreds of thousands of foods are in the database so you know not only how many calories you’re ingesting, but fat, protein, carbohydrates, sodium, and sugar as well. Even if you don’t need to lose weight, it’s good to know what you’re really eating. Want to track your exercise as well? Use MapMyRun for your walks, runs, bike rides, and more. Both are available for smart phones and computers, and free to use at the standard level.

Kitty Bucholtz

Kitty Bucholtz decided to combine her undergraduate degree in business, her years of experience in accounting and finance, and her graduate degree in creative writing to become a writer-turned-independent-publisher. Her novels, Little Miss Lovesick, A Very Merry Superhero Wedding, and Unexpected Superhero are currently available on Amazon. The free short story “Superhero in Disguise” and the new short story “Welcome to Loon Lake” are available wherever ebooks are sold. You can find out about her courses on self-publishing, marketing, and time management for writers at her website Writer Entrepreneur Guides.

0 0 Read more

How to Start an Online Course in Two Steps by Kitty Bucholtz

June 9, 2016 by Kitty Bucholtz in category It's Worth It by Kitty Bucholtz tagged as It's Worth It, Kitty Bucholtz, Online Class, Online Classes

You probably know that I’ve been teaching online classes for about eight years now, maybe longer. I absolutely love to teach! The “usual” tech for doing this for the last decade or more has been to have your students sign up for a Yahoo Group that you create, and then you send them emails with the lectures, the students email you questions, and you email the group back with your answers.

That was a great way to do it for a while. But I wanted to add more to the classes – audio and video and live Q&A interaction. Enter the new online class platforms.

There are a lot of websites, platforms, plugins, and course-building sites out there now. A lot. I’ve tried a few, but I’ve recently moved everything to CourseLauncherHQ. I want to tell you a little about it in case you’ve been thinking about creating an online course that’s hearty enough to satisfy the needs and expectations of your 21st century audience.

[Note: I’ve recently applied to the affiliate program for CourseLauncherHQ. That means that if you use this company to launch your online course, and you use a link I gave, or you give them my name as the person who referred you, I may get some kind of affiliate commission. Please understand that if I make a mistake here about what they do or don’t do for clients, that is my mistake. I don’t work for the company, so I may not explain everything 100% correctly. Whew! Now that that’s done, let’s continue!]

The basic two steps for creating an online course are 1) pick a platform that allows you to focus on teaching, not having to learn a lot of new technology, and 2) design your course lessons. In this blog post, I’m going to focus on step one.

First of all, the best part for me about CourseLauncherHQ is that everything is already included and integrated. All the parts are already working well together. The learning platform is LearnDash on a WordPress site, and students can pay using PayPal and/or credit cards (using WooCommerce). Then the email list is integrated into both the landing page (where people first learn about your class) and the classroom itself (after people pay – therefore separating your email list into two parts automatically – potential students and paid students).

The second best part is that the customer service is amazing!! I feel I’m pretty tech-y, but I’ve never used any of this tech. Sometimes a little knowledge can be worse than none at all. But every time I have a question, someone answers. If necessary, they arrange a video call with me to answer my questions. I can pay extra for them to do everything for me, but even though I’ve chosen to learn to do most things on my own, if I “break” my site by doing something ignorant, they’ll fix it for me! The class sites are all backed up every night so no data is lost!

And in the class they just started on Monday, you can learn everything you need to know and get your site up and running – and even start getting paid if you get students to sign up – in just four weeks! That’s what I did in December, and I’m going through the new class again now to make sure I don’t forget anything when adding in my class that I’d originally hosted on another site.

The best way to understand all this is to read the information on the page here, CourseLauncherHQ. If you decide you’re interested, you can still get into this class through next Monday, June 13. And if you mention my name, you can get in at the discounted pricing of $1597. I know, it’s a lot of money. But when I tried to put together all the little pieces myself last year, I spent more than that and had no one to help me when I screwed things up. Plus there’s a 60-day money-back guarantee!

This may not be at all what you’re interested in doing, but I didn’t want to not tell you about it and find out later (especially after the price goes up) that you could’ve used this information. Or maybe you have a friend who needs to know about this. Anyway, now you know. 🙂 I hope you find it helpful!

0 0 Read more

How Can We Write More? by Kitty Bucholtz

April 9, 2016 by Kitty Bucholtz in category It's Worth It by Kitty Bucholtz tagged as It's Worth It, Kitty Bucholtz, Speedwriting

Most of the writers I know want to write faster. They want to get more words down on the page during every writing session. I’ve been one of those writers for as long as I can remember…and I probably always will be!

Over the years, I’ve gotten faster – and without learning how to type faster! Now, I’ve had friendly arguments with writers about why your typing speed does matter. You can think faster than you can talk. You can speak faster than you can type. So if your thoughts are in the writing flow, they are moving fast. So the faster you can physically type, the faster you can get those words down on the page.

So the fact that I learned to write faster over time was more about getting my thoughts deeper into the writing flow. If I also learned how to type faster, I would be able to get even more of the story down in each sitting.

Okay, so let’s say you’re not going to update your typing skills, and you’re not ready to try dictation. How can you write faster?

There are several ebooks for writers that have focused on or touched on this one main idea: organize your thoughts before you sit down, then set a timer and write as fast as you can for a set length of time.

Let me break it down.

Why organize your thoughts first?
Even if you’re a pantser, you probably have some idea of the very next scene you plan to write. Now, what if you spent 5-10 minutes and closed your eyes or doodled or whatever you do, and you really saw the scene fully in your mind? What if you didn’t start typing until you could really see it?

You’d probably write faster.

Why set a timer?
If you have an hour and that’s it, have you noticed that you tend to really get those words out on paper because you’re hurrying to beat the clock? (Let’s assume that you’ve organized your thoughts and know what you wanted to write at the beginning of the hour.) Or if you have 30 minutes, and you know what you want to say, and it comes rushing out – partially because you have to go do something else soon? That’s why setting a timer works so well even when you have 4 or 5 hours to work.

You end up getting more words on the page.

Why pick an arbitrary time to stop?
For the same reason you set the timer in the first place – you’re pushing to get your thoughts out on the page before something (the timer) tells you to stop. You don’t dawdle. You don’t take a bathroom break and then a snack break and then answer a text during that hour (or 20 or 30 or 40 minutes). You type. Then you can take a break, answer a text, check emails, and then come back to the next timed session ready to do it again.

And write even more than before.

I hesitated to try this until recently because I hadn’t fully understood the answers to the three questions above. Once I realized how and why the whole thing worked, I haven’t been able to stop using this method! I went from a record high of 5000 words in a day to 7157 words in a day – both at writer retreats where the only thing I had on my schedule for the day was to write.

On my previously record high day, I started my writing day at 7am, took a break a few hours later to exercise and shower, wrote some more, took an hour for lunch to watch TV and give my brain and eyes a rest, then worked again until dinner around 5 or 6, and sometimes put in another hour after dinner if I had the energy.

On my new record high day at a writing retreat with my friend Elena Dillon last month, I wrote in five 1-hour sessions between breakfast and dinner and wrote 43% more than when I worked more hours!

I hope my explanation here has helped you see why this is a method you could try. If you want more detailed explanations from other writers, try Chris Fox’s book 5000 Words Per Hour (all of his books are really good) or Rachel Aaron’s book 2k to 10k: Writing Faster, Writing Better, and Writing More of What You Love. If you know of a book that could help people write faster, please mention it in the comments. 🙂

0 0 Read more

Wanna Blab? by Kitty Bucholtz

March 9, 2016 by Kitty Bucholtz in category It's Worth It by Kitty Bucholtz tagged as Author Interview, Blab, It's Worth It, Kitty Bucholtz

Have you heard of Blab? Chances are you haven’t yet. It’s a fairly new social media video platform that is still in beta, but there are thousands of people using it already.

The idea is that you can do a live video chat with up to four people in video boxes (unlike Periscope, which only allows one camera, the one on your phone). It sometimes reminds me of the old TV game show Hollywood Squares. You can allow people to leave the video box and let someone else come in to change up the conversation, or you can “lock the chair” so that only the people you want to be on video are allowed.

You can schedule a blab in advance or you can hop on and start talking. You can even choose to record a blab, but you can’t pre-record it to make it available at a certain time. Like YouTube, anyone in the world can go find your recording (if you recorded it) on the site and watch it at any time, and anyone in the world can watch your live blab.

There’s even a chat box so people watching can contribute to the conversation. Viewers can also click on the hands icon at the bottom of each video square to “give props” to that speaker (like the hearts in Periscope give love). It’s connected to Twitter so you can log in with your Twitter ID, tweet about your blab while you’re doing it, and you can get more followers from inside Blab and send them a message that you’re now live.

The frosting on the cake? It’s easy!

Go to Blab to check it out. You’ll see dozens of people chatting live at any given time. The search bar isn’t the greatest, but you can search for people or recordings, and you can follow people so you’ll be informed when they’re live.

YA author Elena Dillon and I started a new live Blab show last month called Elena and Kitty Blabbing About Books. (Come “follow” us!) We’d been thinking about doing a podcast, but there is a real time commitment to making a good podcast. With Blab, we hit the record button, interview our author guest, hit the stop recording button, and in less than an hour Blab sends us a link to the recording to download to our computer and upload to our blog and/or YouTube channel. We also send the link to the author we interviewed so they can upload it to their sites as well.

We’ve done four episodes already, interviewing Tracy Reed, Alina K. Field, Debbie Decker, and Tracy Lydia Garner. Tonight’s guest is romantic suspense author Beth Yarnell. Click Beth’s name at 7pm Pacific time to watch the show!

Elena and Kitty Blabbing About Books is a weekly show interviewing a new author every Wednesday from 7pm to 8pm Pacific time. If you’re a published author and would like to know more about being interviewed on our show, please email us at blababoutbooks AT gmail DOT com.

And if you read fiction and like to hear authors talk about their books, join us each week! It’s lots of fun and you may find a new author to try.

Kitty Bucholtz

0 0 Read more

Compete with Yourself and Win by Kitty Bucholtz

February 10, 2016 by Kitty Bucholtz in category It's Worth It by Kitty Bucholtz tagged as Kitty Bucholtz, time management, writer's tips, Writing Goals

Everyone has a few personal tips and tricks to help them write more, and most people are willing to try something new to see if it helps. I’ve found a good number of people respond well to a healthy fun competition, but sometimes I start feeling bad if I compare myself to someone who always seems “ahead of me.”

Therefore, just in case it’s helpful to you, I wanted to let you know about a quick and easy writing competition you can have with yourself. (Compete with your friends if it doesn’t make anyone feel bad!)

Over ten years ago, I found this “Don’t Break the Chain Calendar” on the Writers Store website. In the description, it says that Jerry Seinfeld once said that he would write a big “X” on every day that he wrote new material…and so this calendar was eventually born.

It has 365 numbered squares on it so you can start any day of the year on square 1. The idea is to get the longest chain of X’s you can. I actually like to use gold stars that teachers put on school children’s homework. 😉 It’s fun to see the line of stars growing. Miss a day or three? Just go to the next appropriate square and start again. If you play the Settlers of Catan board game, it’s like getting the prize for building the longest road. Haha!

One of the nicest things about the Don’t Break the Chain Calendar is that Writers Store offers it as a free PDF download! (Check out the rest of the site – cool stuff!) You can also use a regular printed calendar, but you won’t be able to see as clearly how long your chain grows over time.

Cheap, easy, and motivational – just the kind of “write more” writer’s trick you needed, right? 🙂

Kitty Bucholtz