1. Writing for free.

2. Being approached to write for free. (Too often.)

3. Writing in a very uncomfortable position while on a train/bus/plane/in a car.

4. Trying to write while your fur children/tiny humans are battling for your attention.

5. Falling asleep on your keyboard because you procrastinated again why do you always do this.

6. Wanting to agree to do another writing thing but oops you can’t create more hours in the day. Sad…

7. Accepting a writing gig because you want to buy a thing but can’t justify doing so otherwise.

8. Accepting a writing gig because you need to adult, even though you don’t want another writing gig.

9. Pitching something you don’t really want to write because you know it’ll circulate well.

10. Being able to quit a job you don’t like because you found a writing thing you do like — that pays.

11…

I am in no danger of having my intellectual property [IP] diddled away by some corporation waving a contract, but Kristine Kathryn Rusch* is, and her latest post was scary to say the least. Here’s a short quote:

‘Those companies can all acquire IP from stupid writers for less than $10,000 per property forever. Just say the word “movie” or “TV” and most stupid writers give away their IP for free, in the hopes of having a movie or TV show made from their property. The property they no longer own, by the way.’

But the most terrifying part was this:

‘It doesn’t matter if your copyright is registered, the expert said. They’ll register anyway, even before they’ve started production on anything. The strategy is to create confusion over who owns the copyright, and it’ll take litigation to straighten that confusion out.‘

The bold emphasis is…

By Stephanie McGrath

You have successfully published your book and it is now live on our store. Congratulations! However, you notice a typo that needs immediate attention. What do you do?

Whether it is a content change, metadata update or price change, you can make changes to a published title at any time. To do this please follow the steps below:

How to Make a Metadata Change

1. Sign into your Kobo Writing Life account. (https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/p/writinglife)

2. On on the homepage select “eBooks” to see your catalogue of titles.

3. Select the title you would like to update.

4. You will be automatically directed to the “Describe your eBook” page.

5. Make any metadata changes you wish to make.

6. If you want to make more changes to other parts of the book select “Save and continue”. If not, select “Save and return to your Library”.

How to Make a…

by Carla King  on BookBaby Blog:

While a good, professional (human) editor is invaluable to your book – the purchase of manuscript editing software can be another prudent investment.

Manuscript editing software programs do much more than the built-in spelling and grammar checkers in your word processor.

Some offer “first-pass” or “last-pass” editing to clean up mistakes in spelling, grammar, and punctuation; others make suggestions for improving your language.

These programs can alert you to overuse of adverbs, clichés, redundancies, overlong sentences, sticky sentences, glue words, vague and abstract words, diction, and the misuse of dialog tags, to name just a few.

Some of these tools will even connect you with a human editor with a click of a button.

In alphabetical order, here are some of my favorites (this is by no means an exhaustive list).

See all the programs reviewed at:

Manuscript Editing Programs Reviewed

TSRA NOTE:

I recommend that these…

Tweets aren’t just for Twitter anymore.

Here’s a neat thing you can do with those tweets right here on your WordPress blog. It’s wicked cool. And easy. 3 steps…done.

All of you lovely bloggers know I’m not a techie but I wanted to share this fun find with you.

I have visuals, too, which is awesome. Admittedly, I went a bit bonkers with the arrows but…you get the point. (I know. I’m hilarious.)

First we’re going old school with a “cut and paste” URL option, then we’ll embed an html code like we know what we’re doing.

No need to hurt your eyes squinting at the screenshots—you can click to enlarge them. Let’s get tweeting on our blogs.

Copy Link Option:

STEP ONE:

Choose the tweet you want. Click on the cute, little grey v-shaped thingy in the top, right corner.

Click to enlarge

STEP TWO:

You’ll see a drop-down…