My Must-Have Digital Media Tools: 2020 Edition
My favorite digital media tools that have enhanced my productivity and creativity as a teacher, author, and entrepreneur.
Category Archives: Digital Media
How to Effectively Use Live Video (Even If You Fear the Camera) to Reach Readers
With low barrier to entry, livestreaming can be a great way to give your audience a chance to fall in love with you and your message. Here are some essential tips from the team at Best Seller Builders.
How to Start Blogging: A Definitive Guide for Authors
How authors can blog successfully for long-term platform and book marketing efforts, with tips for online writing, strong headlines, and good SEO.
Unpublished Writers and Websites: Should You Have One and What Should It Say?
If you plan to pursue writing as a professional, long-term career, I recommend starting and maintaining an author website even if you’re unpublished.
Using Patreon and YouTube to Grow a Writing Career: Q&A with Jay Swanson
Author Jay Swanson discusses how he’s succeeded with Patreon, which allows fans to pledge monthly financial support to his creative efforts.
MailChimp Alternatives for Authors
Is MailChimp the best choice for your email newsletter? Here’s a breakdown of the pros & cons of the three biggest email service providers that authors use.
6 Common Sense Steps to Secure a WordPress Website
For a platform that powers a quarter of the websites in the world, Wordpress is surprisingly insecure. The default settings leave a site open to being hacked a half-dozen different ways.
What Belongs on an Author Website Homepage? 4 Key Elements
Whether you’re an emerging author or one that is well-established, it can be challenging to figure out what belongs on your website’s homepage and what to say about yourself on the front door to your online presence.
The WordPress Plugins I Can’t Live Without
Plugins are one of the most wonderful and useful things about Wordpress. Here are some of my favorites for writers.
5 WordPress Themes for Professional Authors
One of the first choices you have to make for your author website is determining its theme or template. It sets the tone and even defines the site.
How to Get 10,000 Visits to Your Blog in One Day with No Platform
Getting traction for your online presence—especially a new blog—can feel like an impossible task when you’re an unknown writer. But it can be done.
My Pop-Up Strategy, Part 2: The Autoresponder Series
How do you treat subscribers after they sign up for your email newsletter? An autoresponder can usefully and effectively welcome people to the community.
Why I Started Using Pop-Ups on My Website
Pop-ups have long been despited by the Internet world, but the difficulty is: They work. Here’s how to implement them in a way that won’t annoy visitors.
5 Common Mistakes That Even Longtime Bloggers Make
Wondering why you don’t have more blog traffic—or if it’s worthwhile to continue your blogging effort? Here are the mistakes that commonly afflict authors.
An Alternative to ACX for Audiobook Production and Distribution
If you’re looking for an alternative to ACX and more control over your audiobook production and distribution, then ListenUp Audiobooks is worth a look.
Using Video for Author Marketing: What Beginners Need to Know
In my latest post over at Writer Unboxed, I discuss what writers need to know if they’re considering video as part of their marketing and promotion strategy. In brief, here’s what writers should avoid: Don’t do book trailers. Don’t talk at length in a static shot. Don’t post unedited video longer than a minute or […]
Building an Author Website on WordPress: How to Start Smart
If you’re considering WordPress as your platform of choice, here’s what you should know as you prepare to build on it.
Creating Easy Branded Images for Your Blog and Social Media
Kirsten Oliphant details how to find, create, and edit branded graphics for blogs and social media.
How a Website Redesign Solved an Author’s Identity Dilemma
Author Gigi Rosenberg describes how she redesigned and relaunched her author website primarily on her own, only hiring assistance at the end.
5 Steps to Creating a Great Audiobook
Jay Swanson, the creative mind behind real-time fantasy blog Into the Nanten, explains how to develop a compelling audiobook.
Geek Out With Me: LIVE Chat on Product Hunt!
Join me to discuss digital media tools and publishing this coming Thursday (December 10) at 3 p.m. Eastern, at the Product Hunt site.
Before You Launch Your Author Website: How to Avoid Long-Term Mistakes
3 ways to avoid long-term pain and suffering if you’re preparing to launch your first author website.
How to Sell Digital Products & Services Directly from Your Website: Advice for Authors and Freelancers
To sell products and services directly through your website, here are a few services and tools to get up and running fast (no coding or tech help required).
5 Ways to Quickly Improve Your Email Newsletter Performance
How to improve the effectiveness of your email newsletter through very specific changes to your sign-up forms and content.
How to Choose the Right WordPress Theme for You
Here are 10 questions to ask before you choose a Wordpress theme for your site.
Email Newsletters for Authors: Get Started Guide
Everything you need to know to start sending an effective email newsletter.
How to Repurpose Your Book or Blog Content for Profit and Promotion
Blogger and author Nina Amir explains how to turn your blog content into books and other information products.
The Basic Components of an Author Website
What exactly goes on your author website—especially if you’re unpublished?
Could You Benefit From a Website Redesign?
Today’s interview is by contributing writer Kristen Tsetsi (@ktsetsi), who does every-other-Wednesday interviews for the 5 On series. Anyone who pays any attention to my Facebook feed knows that I’m more than a little happy with my newly revised website. I didn’t understand why, at first. After all, the previous (and free) template I’d been using did […]
How to Create Picture Ebooks for Kids
Amazon’s Kids’ Book Creator allows the average Joe to create illustrated children’s books for the Kindle and upload them directly to Amazon.
10 Resolutions for a Saner Internet—and Life
For me, the hardest thing about being online is remembering what I think and the “why” that I’m working for. The multiplicity of voices can make you forget your center.
5 Free WordPress Themes for Writers
If you have a WordPress-based site, then you know that one of the first choices you have to make (and then live with) is your choice of theme. A theme drives the aesthetics of your site—how it looks and feels—and thus its personality. But a theme also affects the functionality of your site. Some themes have more page or […]
How to Customize a Template-Based Author Website
Note from Jane: Today’s guest post is by Simone Collins (@SimoneHCollins) at ArtCorgi. See her earlier post on The Advantages of Author Portraits. Through my website ArtforAuthors.com and my company ArtCorgi, I help authors style websites and social media pages in a manner that best presents their personalities and writing style. All too often, I visit […]
Self-Hosting Your Author Website: Why and How to Do It
When it comes to establishing your author website, one of the more confusing topics is self-hosting: what it means, why it’s advantageous, and when you should do it. What Is Self-Hosting? Sometimes it’s easiest to describe what self-hosting is not. If your website has “wordpress.com” or “blogspot.com” (or the name of another service you use) in […]
4 Things I Learned From Writing on an Emerging Mobile Story Platform
Today’s guest post is by Los Angeles–based writer Kathryn Stanley (@kathrynstanley_). About six months ago, Pocket Gems, a mobile game developer, launched a new platform called Episode. It allows writers to script a story and then turn it into an animated interactive mobile story. It combines parts of TV shows, comics, and novels, and provides the […]
Why Design Matters for Your Author Website
Today’s guest post is by literary agent Maria Ribas (@maria_ribas); check out her website, cooks & books. When I was starting out as an editor, I was surprised to see just how very subjective the acquisitions process was. I think I was a little bit (well, a lot) disappointed that there wasn’t a secret equation behind […]
Do You Need to Rethink Your Website’s Key Elements?
For 10 years, I’ve been analyzing website traffic—for my own site, for Writer’s Digest (when I worked for them from 2001–2010), and now for the Virginia Quarterly Review. Every site has different traffic patterns, but what I’ve learned is that the homepage is rarely the first page that visitors see. They often end up on a story page from […]
What’s Different About Running a Magazine Today (Versus 5 Years Ago)?
Earlier this week, I was interviewed by Jason Allen Ashlock about my new digital magazine Scratch, and how things have changed in the magazine publishing world since my days at Writer’s Digest. Here’s a bit of what I had to say: It’s more difficult to turn a profit on a magazine, whether print or digital. People expect […]
Why Don’t Publishers Believe in Author Websites?
It’s not unusual for authors to be told by their publishers that author websites aren’t necessary or effective. Should their insight be trusted?
Audience Development for Writers: Your Life-Long Career Investment
In this talk from the 2013 Midwest Writers Workshop, I explain the process of growing my readership since 2008, then share a few key principles I follow to make it an enjoyable and sustainable process.
3 Reasons Why a Facebook Page Can’t Replace an Author Website
Regardless of when or why you use Facebook, never consider it a replacement for an author website you own and control. Here’s why.
3 Ways to Improve Your Website Design
Today’s guest post is adapted from Red Hot Internet Publicity by Penny Sansevieri. Between Los Angeles and Las Vegas there’s a stretch of I-15 that’s just barren desert with you, sand, a cactus or two, a few vultures hoping to get lucky, and endless billboards. Most people speed down this stretch of highway as fast […]
3 Ways to Improve Your Author Website Today
To maximize the effectiveness of your author website, it’s necessary to study the data behind how people find your website, navigate it, and use it. Here are three of the most important areas to watch carefully.
How Do You Find Time to Write, Promote, Learn New Tech, and Still Have a Life?
One of the most frequent questions I receive from writers is how to manage it all: how to write, market and promote, stay on top of new technology and tools, and still have time for a life. How is it possible to be active on several social media sites and still have time to explore […]
Find Me on Tumblr
If you’re a Tumblr user, just a quick announcement you can now find me active there. While I’ve had a Tumblr account for a couple years now (and have used it in various capacities—at VQR and University of Cincinnati), I’m now using it as a way to talk about everything not pertaining to writing advice. […]
Is Your Author Website Doing Its Job? 6 Things to Check
Today’s guest post is by Laura Pepper Wu, the co-founder of 30 Day Books, a book studio that provides marketing tools and resources for authors wanting to find more readers. Recently, I did some informal research about how authors view and use their websites, and the results were a little disheartening. Many authors have a website […]
5 Literary Journals Born of the Digital Age
Today’s guest post is by lit addict, movie junkie, writer Emily Wenstrom. A new generation of literary journals is taking advantage of technology to offer something fresh and creative to the literary journal scene. Here are five of my favorites, ranging from those with niche audiences to those with experimental approaches. Brittle Star For the […]
Plympton: A New Effort to Produce Successful Serial Fiction
In the past year, I’ve run two posts specifically related to serial fiction—a guest post by Roz Morris and a Q&A with Sean Platt. I also wrote a more in-depth piece for Publishing Perspectives on the topic last year. Last month, Amazon announced Kindle Serials: a new, formal publishing program, exclusive to Kindle, that focuses […]
5 Free Services That Help You Build Author Platform
Today’s guest post is by Matthew Turner (@turndog_million). You may remember him from a previous post, 100 Tips to Alleviate Self-Doubt. If there’s one word that fits perfectly with an author, it’s FREE. Here are five free services that can help build your author platform. 1. Twitter Let’s get this one out of the way. It […]
Building Your First Website: Resource List
When writers ask me what the most important thing they should be doing to further their career—aside from write—it’s almost always start your own website. Even if you don’t consider yourself a tech person, services have advanced to the point where an average person can establish a site without knowing code, and without hiring professional […]