Happy Monday to all the Story Empire readers. It’s so good to be back with all of you once again to share a few helpful (hopefully) thoughts. Today I wanted to share a few tweaks so that you can use Dragon Naturally Speaking with Scrivener. Let’s jump right in and get to it.

Dictation with Dragon & Scrivener

Nuance created Dragon NaturallySpeaking

For those who may have missed my last few posts, I will include a few links back to those so that you can get more detailed information about Dragon. I’ve been using Dragon now for a couple of months which has allowed me to make significant progress in two novel projects. In fact, I am working on both projects at the same time as I write this post. That’s the power of Dragon; I can dictate while I’m in the car and edit the other book at nigh…

In the writing world, the word style means the way in which an idea is expressed. Style has to do with form, not content. Readers pick up a book because of content, but put it down because of style.

As a writer, you have to develop your own writing style. The way you arrange words is the nature of you. Your style should be specifically yours and no one else’s.

When developing your individual style, here are some things to consider:

1. Listen to what you write. Writing is like music. The words you write make sounds, and when those sounds are  in harmony, the writing works.
2. Mimic spoken language. Writing convey to the reader the sense of conversation. It should provide the intimacy and warmth of personal conversation.
3. Vary sentence length. Consider the following:
4. Vary sentence construction. You should always strive for clarity when you write…

Hello writers and good morning to you!

I hope you’ve all had a great week. Last week I spoke about finishing the third draft of my novel, and with the third draft done I took to printing my work in progress out. Having this physical copy was important to me for the next stage of editing, and I’d like to share 5 reasons why I believe you should print out your work in progress.

Let me know if you agree or disagree by sharing your thoughts in the comments below, or contacting me at any time.

1. It feels amazing
Writing a novel is a long process that often brings many challenges. You may love writing, but we all have days when we find it tiresome, frustrating and down right difficult. Holding your novel in your hands is an amazing feeling and it makes it all worth it. It may…

… asking Jeff Bezos to help himself and his contributing authors.

Dear Jeff,

We all know that the only thing you fear is the loss of income. I wonder if you are aware how much you are losing from non sales of ebooks in your literary section? Currently you have several million books of ours consigned to the literary equivalent of purgatory. Why? Because of your company’s ridiculous rating system, designed to consign a book to oblivion in a couple of days after it goes live on Amazon if it isn’t instantly bought in its thousands by the general public worldwide.

Someone close to you who you trust needs to make you aware of how much lost profit is currently sitting on your electronic shelves! It’s bad enough that you allowed your minions to come up with ways of saving money by changing the rules regarding the pittance paid out…

I subscribe to an Australian government website called ‘Stay Smart Online’. The site sends me notifications of current security alerts, and this is the latest:

‘As a precaution, Twitter is urging more than 330 million users to change their password after a glitch left log-in details exposed in the company’s internal computer system.

When you set a password for your account, Twitter uses technology that masks it, so no one can see your password.

The company recently identified a bug that stored unmasked passwords in an internal log. Twitter found this error itself, removed the passwords and is now looking at how it can prevent this from happening again.

Twitter has advised it has fixed the bug, and has no reason to believe the passwords left Twitter’s systems or were misused by anyone.’

Despite these assurances, however, you really should change your Twitter password now. More importantly, you should…

Extract from an article on Reedsy:

No matter what kind of book you’re writing, all self-publishing authors will eventually reach the same question: what’s the best way to market your book?

The great news is that you’re not the first indie author to face this challenge.

By following in the footsteps of those who have succeeded before you, you can create a focused and effective plan that will get people snatching up your book.

In this post, we offer up dozens of book marketing ideas that you can steal for your own promotional efforts.

Continue reading HERE

Don’t you hate it when you’re talking to somebody and they are all wishy washy? Why can’t they just come out and say it? Most of the time you know what they are getting at and want to spit it out for them. Well the same thing goes for writing.

The surest way to gain and hold a readers attention is through definite, specific, concrete writing. Don’t make me as a reader try to figure out what you are trying to say. It’s not my place to write your novel. I just want to read and enjoy. Allow me to enter the realm of your imagination without trying to figure out every little detail myself.

Examples:

The weather was dreadful. vs. It rained everyday for a week.

He was happy to take possession of his well earned reward. vs. He smiled as he placed the coin in his pocket.

I…