Occasionally at meetings I bring up some
websites and things I find on the net that are either of interest to or useful
for authors. I am so sorry it has taken me so long to remember to send out an
email with these links but I finally remembered after Pat and Nancy mentioned it
at the meeting today. So here goes:
Sites to publish your works for free, connect with other writers and gain
free exposure for your work to a global audience:
1. www.wattpad.com - publish your work to the net
for anyone to read. Membership is free and you can post links to your blog or
website from your profile page. There are also forums here where you can connect
and chat with the wattpad online writing community. There are some damn good
writers on wattpad too. If you like sci fi I would check out "The Orangutan"
(Gavin Wilson) for example. :)
2. www.fictionpress.com - an older site for publishing your work
online for anyone to read. Membership is free.
3. www.goodreads.com - massive community of writers and readers
here! You can join the forums for your genre of interest, create an author
profile, list your books that you've written (and read) on your "bookshelves"
and list your books for free giveaways. When I listed mine for a free giveaway I
had 693 people sign up for it. That's 693 people who knew nothing about me or my
writing who now know about the existence of my book.... useful!
Sites for marketing (that I'm sure everybody knows about anyway):
1. www.lulu.com - publish and sell on lulu.com for free, global distribution for your
work = $75, does provide services for editing, cover design, formatting etc but
you have to pay for those. You can publish print books through lulu and ebooks
for pcs/e-readers. You can choose to have lulu upload your ebook to the
ibookstore and the barnes and noble nook bookstore for free as well as having it
for sale on lulu.com.
2. www.createspace.com - Amazon's version of lulu.com - published
print books.
3. www.kdp.amazon.com - publish an e-book for kindle only. Beware
kdp select!
There are others that I've heard of but don't use, like "Smashwords" for
example.
1. www.audacity.sourceforge.net - download a free, open source
program for recording your own audiobooks on your home computer. Read them
yourself or pay a pro to do it.
2. Sites you can upload audio files to for selling your audiobooks: www.CDBaby.com and
www.tunecor.com
(can get your audiobook on amazon, itunes and spotify)
3. Libriovox is another site you can publish an audiobook for distribution,
though you can't sell it here.
Programs I've found to be invaluable for marketing/book creation:
1. Paint program (I use Corel Painter 12 but many people have
Photoshop)
2. Windows Movie Maker - make your own book trailers! :)
3. Windows Sound recorder (before I downloaded Audacity anyway)
4. MS Word (of course!!!!)
I hope this was useful for everyone and if anyone wants to, I'd be happy to give them a "tour "of the internet sites /programs I use and show them some of these things sometime. If we can somehow get internet access at the church (ie: if Jayne has a wireless modem at home that we can use), I could even do it at a meeting if you like. Cheers!
Email received from S. J. Faerlind.
Thank you so much for the information.
Thank you so much for the information.
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