Sarah Juckes – MediaShift

9 Online Tools to Help Writers Find a Literary Agent

Sarah Juckes — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 11:03:47 +0000

The following piece is a guest post from Sarah Juckes, now at Agent Hunter. Guest posts do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this publication. Read more about MediaShift guest posts here.

Most writers find they need to query a number of agents before they find the right one for them. At Agent Hunter, the comprehensive online database of UK literary agents, we’ve found a number of nifty tools to help keep you organized and prepared for your search.

1. Agent Query

Similar to our site at Agent Hunter, this website holds details of literary agents based in the U.S. The site also has some useful tips for writers starting out, and a forum to connect with others.

2. Streak

This was designed as a CRM tool for sales teams, but is a godsend to writers who use gmail. A free add-on, this tool enables you to track your submissions within gmail itself, adding chase dates to each email, and even letting you know when your email is being read.

3. Trello

S3 you’ve found twenty agents you think might like your book – which ones do you email first? Trello is a useful to-do list app that works like a virtual corkboard. Add your agent notes to one column and move them to the next as you research them, write your cover letter, pitch and review your contract!

4. Dropbox

Let’s face it – submitting to all these agencies is going to take a lot of time. By saving your submissions to a cloud-based app such as Dropbox however, you can work on them using any device on the move, so you can capitalise on your commute time. Even better, your file will update across all your devices too, so you can avoid duplicates.

5. Scrivener

Scrivener is widely regarded as the king of writing apps, helping you work on your submission in style. Add notes, divide into folders and make use of the hundreds of fancy functions available in the program.

Photo by Negative Space via Unsplash’s Creative Commons license

6. CamCard

Let’s say you get chatting to a literary agent. After presenting your perfected elevator pitch, the agent gives you their card and asks you to send your manuscript to them. Now imagine how you’d feel if you lost that card… Fortunately, CamCard is a great app for storing card details digitally on the move, using your smart phone camera to capture data. Phew!

7. Hemingway

An editing tool, Hemingway will helpfully point out any problems with clunky sentences or poor grammar in your cover letter. Just paste in your text and watch Hemingway highlight the sentences that need work. A useful start, although it doesn’t offer the level of detail that a real editor can offer.

8. Pocket

Spotted an interview with an agent that could come in use later? Pocket saves the sites you find most interesting, enabling you to visit them later without clogging up your bookmark bar.

9. Online writing courses

Photo by Andrew_Writer and used here with Creative Commons license.

Agents are attracted to writers who have invested in their craft, especially those who’ve taken time to learn what makes a good book. There are thousands of online courses for writers happening right now, such as this one from The Writers’ Workshop.

Sarah Juckes works with Agent Hunter, the comprehensive online database of UK literary agents. For more information on submitting to literary agents read this useful guide from The Writers’ Workshop.

Correction: This article’s headline has been corrected.

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10 Great Business Tools For Authorpreneurs

Sarah Juckes — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 10:05:34 +0000

The following piece is a guest post and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of this publication. Read more about MediaShift guest posts here.

A lot of authors write books to earn a living, and there are a few nifty services out there to help you do just that. I work with CompletelyNovel, a publishing platform that was built with professional authors in mind, and we’ve put together a list of our top business tools that will help you “authorpreneurs” get your book on the road to success.

1. Trello

Have a to-do list the length of your arm all on different bits of paper? We use a nifty tool called Trello, and it works like a clever corkboard. You can add tasks to different columns to keep track of what needs doing and when, and you can assign tasks to other people (particularly useful if you have someone helping you with PR, for example).

2. Pocket

Found an amazing article, or a competition that you definitely need to enter, but don’t have time to look at it there and then? Pocket is a useful app that works with your browser and other devices to save things in an orderly way, so you can go back to them later. Much better than having a bunch of bookmarks scattered across your devices.

Pocket

3. MailChimp

Email is an amazing marketing tool. If you haven’t used MailChimp before, we’d recommend taking a look. It reduces the amount of time you spend faffing with newsletter creation by enabling you to drag and drop components. It’s easy to put something together that looks really professional. There are also lots of neat tools for attracting new subscribers that are all easy to use.

4. LastPass

Pretty much all these great tools require you to create a password. Add that to your existing passwords for your email, social media, and CompletelyNovel account, and remembering them all becomes a bit of a drain. LastPass is a secure system that’ll remember all your passwords for you and also generate new ones for you. Useful.

5. Thunderclap

Want to get your book trending? Ask people to sign up to your Thunderclap campaign, and it will automatically tweet and post your tweet to their profiles – all at once. It’s a good way to flood social media with your book, but it can also be a little tricky to get the hundred sign-ups it needs to run the campaign.

Thunderclap

6. Streak

This gmail app was created for sales teams, but works really well for anyone pitching to different people. It works in your inbox and enables you to keep track of your pitches and chases, as well as letting you see which emails have been seen. Great for the times you are pitching to press and book bloggers.

7. SquareSpace

All businesses need a website, and this website-building tool based on customizable templates is definitely worth checking out. SquareSpace is intuitive to use, and we love the professional, image-led websites it helps you create.

8. Hootsuite

Don’t have time to tweet all day every day? Hootsuit has a great tool for scheduling tweets in bulk, meaning that you can reach those 6am commuters whilst still catching up on your Zs. You can also shorten URLs at Ow.ly, which lets you track the number of clicks on those links.

Hootsuite

9. MotionMail

A great free tool for adding a countdown timer to an email. Alert your readers to that limited offer, competition, or book giveaway you are running, and customize the timer to match your brand.

10. Dropbox

The tool we can’t work without. Saving book drafts to your Dropbox means that you can write anywhere you are – and you don’t have to worry about losing your work when your laptop explodes in a puff of smoke. It’s also a great way of sharing large files with early readers and doing away with those pesky USB sticks at events.

Sarah Juckes is Communications Manager for CompletelyNovel, where this post first appeared. CompletelyNovel is an online publishing platform and author community that aims to make book publishing simple through use of online tools.

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8 Free Things For Writers

Sarah Juckes — Mon, 23 Feb 2015 11:05:47 +0000

Everyone loves free stuff. Food samples, household products through the post –- even winning the odd competition –- things taste better when they are free. In this blog post, CompletelyNovel lists its top eight resources, services and events for writers that are totally, 100 percent free and available right now.

1) Free manuscript assessment from TLC

If you’re a writer living in England with a low income, you can apply to The Literary Consultancy’s Free Reads scheme funded by Arts Council England. This is a great chance to have professional feedback on your manuscript if you aren’t able to afford a critique. Find out how to apply here.

2) Free 9-week screenwriting class from Steven Barnes

After teaching this class at UCLA, screenwriter and author Steven Barnes has popped all nine weeks of it on the Internet for writers to learn from –- for free. There are some great exercises included to get your creative juices flowing. Take the course here.

Photo by Sean MacEntee and reused here with Creative Commons license.

3) Free publishing workshops with The Library Press

We’re very pleased to be involved in this one. The Library Press is offering free workshops across seven London libraries this Spring, on subjects from writing to book-making! The CompletleyNovel team will also be running workshops on self-publishing, e-book publishing and family history publishing as part of this scheme. Full workshop schedule is here.

4) Free book marketing resources from Joanna Penn

Joanna Penn has a whole host of free e-books and information on book marketing over on her website. As an independent author herself, her tips are tried and tested. Download them here.

5) Create your book for free, with CompletelyNovel

We can’t do a blog on free stuff without mentioning our free publishing plan. Sign up to CompletelyNovel and use our online tools to create your book, free of charge. You can then print copies of your book at cost-price. Easy! Sign up here.

Photo by Matt Katzenberger on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

6) Free Twitter images, from Spruce

We came across this wep app recently, and we love it! This is a really easy way to make shareable photos for your social media pages. You can even upload an image of your book cover to use in your marketing -– all for free. Try it here.

7) Free writing software, from yWriter

yWriter works a little like Scrivener in that it’s software that helps you organize all the thoughts and documents you need to write a book. It comes recommended by our friend K. M. Weiland and is, of course, free to download here.

8) Free crime knowledge base, at Thrill Writing

A fantastic resource for crime and thriller writers. This website hosts regular interviews with experts to let writers know everything from how your character can escape from handcuffs, to what it feels like to fire a gun. Check it out here.

This post first appeared on CompletelyNovel, a friendly publishing platform and author community specializing in print-on-demand. More advice here on publishing.

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6 Great Apps to Help You Write

Sarah Juckes — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 10:00:11 +0000

How do you write? Are you a pen and paper person? Or are you a jot-down-ideas-on-your-phone writer? For those of you on the lookout for nifty bits of tech to help you with everything from planning to writing the novel, here are some useful apps the team at CompletelyNovel have tried and tested with authors in mind.

1. For jotting down ideas: Evernote

Evernote is perfect for making notes. You can sync your devices, so you can make notes on your phone on the bus and pick them up on your tablet when you get in. Evernote can be used by one person or collaboratively, which is also useful if you’re writing with someone else.

2. For plotting and character development: Bubbl.us and Gliffy

Bubbl and Gliffy are free-to-use websites that enable you to easily create customized diagrams and charts to construct a clear storyline. Basically, it’s a techy version of the old post-it note on your floor technique, and is much less susceptible to be lost if someone opens a door, or accidentally lets the dog in.

Using Gliffy to plot a novel

3. For long-form writing: Scrivener

Scrivener is a well-known writing software that works for both Windows and Mac. It has a plenty of effective tools to organize your research, notes, storylines and much more. Perhaps the best feature is the keyword search — no more wasted time trying to find that well-hidden folder with initial ideas in the depths of your computer. It costs $45 so it’s slightly more expensive than the other apps on this list, but then again, it’s much more involved.

4. For distraction-free writing: FocusWriter

FocusWriter is a document creator like Microsoft Word with a stripped-down aesthetic that is distraction-free, whilst still providing all of the functions you need. You can set timers, alarms, writing goals, spell-checking or statistics. It’s free and works across Windows, Mac and Linux. Great for those of you who spend more time than is necessary worrying about what font to use for your characters’ handwriting instead of getting words down on paper.

5. For collaborating: Poetica

Need feedback from others on plot devices, characters or editing? Poetica was created to make collaborative editing much more effective. You upload or paste the file you need to edit, and share with whoever you want. You can then edit together at the same time, as you might do with a Google Doc.

6. For editing: Hemingway

If you find editing tiresome, Hemingway can make it easier and quicker. All you need to do is to paste in the text and Hemingway will automatically highlight problems in your writing, such as hard-to-read sentences, complex phrases and passive voice. It’s a good place to start, but don’t rely on it to give you the same level of detail that a human editor can, if that’s what you’re after.

The Hows and Whys of Metadata for Authors

Sarah Juckes — Wed, 28 May 2014 10:00:43 +0000

The word metadata sounds potentially confusing but is really very simple. Its direct translation is “data about data.” When we’re talking about books, it simply means all the information about your book that isn’t the story itself. This can be anything from the title, to the traditional blurb, to the tags that make it easier for search engines to find your book.

For authors hoping to sell your book online, the smart use of metadata is crucial. Without it, a book is much harder to come across. At the self-publishing company I work for, CompletelyNovel, metadata is integral to how we display books on our online store. The booksellers you’ll be selling through, the search engines where people might find your book – they all use and depend on correct and complete metadata. Ignore it, and your book won’t show up where it otherwise would have.

Title and Author Name

The most important metadata there is! Make absolutely sure they’re spelled and capitalized correctly in any forms you have to fill in.

Photo by mobilyazilar on Flickr and used here with Creative Commons license.

Blurb / Book Description

The next most important metadata is your book description, or blurb, so read our tips to writing a blurb here. Once you understand that a blurb is an example of metadata, then it makes all the online stuff much easier to understand! Blurbs and other metadata exist to help people understand and, hopefully, buy your book: whether in a bookshop or on the internet.

Your online book description can however, afford to be a little different than the one on your physical book. You could take the chance to include as many keywords as you can. This will be a lot easier for non-fiction writers as you can smoothly integrate technical terms. Fiction writers can try to include information like similar authors and books, and the genre. Make sure you don’t go overboard with this; you still want a well written piece that will entice readers.

Category / Genre

When you publish a book with CompletelyNovel you’ll be given the choice of which category or genre your book fits in to. There are two categories to make a decision on.

The first is the BIC category (or BISAC in the US). This is the standardized format used in the ISBN database.
CompletelyNovel also have our own list of genres for when your book is sold on our site.

You should think very carefully about these. Definitely do some research into similar books that are successful. You could choose a very popular genre, or could instead pick a more niche genre where you are more likely to ‘rank’ on sites like Amazon. Click here for an in-depth guide on picking a genre from Cathy Yardley.

7 Social Media Tips for Authors to Connect Over the Holidays

Sarah Juckes — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 11:00:03 +0000

Click the image for the full series.
Photo illustration by wildfox76 via Flickr Creative Commons.

It’s Christmas! Time for all you hard-working authors to gorge on mince pies and generally relax, right? Wrong! Christmas is one of the busiest times of the year for bookselling, and a really good time to be engaging with people, and letting them know about your book.

Here are our top eight things authors can do on social media over Christmas, so you can sit with a mince pie, and still capitalize on those festive book sales.

1. Get personal

Make social media even more social by sharing your personal Christmas with your followers. Tweet a picture of your turkey, or share the books you were given as gifts this Christmas. People are more likely to support a human being, so remind your followers that you are one.

2. Wish your followers Season’s Greetings

Photo by Maximilian Schönherr

You’ve built up some friendships on social media over the year, and Christmas is an important time to thank them for the help they’ve given you, and remind them of your friendship. You could even ask them nicely if they would mind sharing a link to the book on your behalf.

3. Promote your e-book on Christmas day

It’s Christmas, and you have been given an e-reader. The first thing you’re probably going to do is look for books to fill it. This is such a good opportunity for self-published authors — offering your e-book at a discounted price will encourage users to take a chance on an unknown author. Promote it over Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ — as much and in as many places as possible to capitalize on this.

4. Run a Goodreads Giveaway

These are great for new releases, as they allow you to use the largest book-focused social media site to list a giveaway of your book. Christmas is a time for giving, and giveaways can be great promotion tools. Find out more about Goodreads giveaways, here.

5. Release a festive tale

Writing doesn’t have to be contained on a page. Use Twitter to release a festive short story over the Christmas period and widen your readership. Just tweet a section of your story each day. You never know who might like your writing and decide to buy your book! More about Twitter fiction, here.

6. Write a Christmas-themed blog post

Thousands of readers will be heading online to read off their Christmas dinners this year. Give them something new and interesting to read with a festive twist. It could be a piece of new creative writing, or even a section of your book that relates to Christmas.

7. Pin your favorite Christmas Books

Pinterest allows you to create themed boards of images that millions of users can see and share. Create your own board of your favorite festive books — and make sure you include a linked image to your own!

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10 Essential Non-Writing Tools to Help Writers Write

Sarah Juckes — Tue, 03 Dec 2013 11:00:18 +0000

The last decade has seen an increase in programs to help writers plot, write and read their books — but there are also plenty of non-writing tools that writers can use to help them create their masterpieces. At the company where I work, CompletelyNovel, we use digital tools every day to streamline their tasks. Here are our top 10 tools to help writers write.

1. Dropbox

If you’re working on a Microsoft Word file or similar, regularly save your file to Dropbox. That will keep an archive of all previous saves (just in case the worst happens and you accidentally delete the whole thing! It sounds silly, but it’s guaranteed to happen to every writer at some point in their careers). It’s free to download and easy to use.

2. Google Docs

Working via a Google Document is particularly great if you’re collaborating on a project with another writer, or are enlisting the services of an editor. It allows two people to log in to the same document and work on it at the same time. It also automatically saves your work for you, so you’re less likely to lose it, should your computer suddenly fail, or you accidentally close the window. To make use of it, create a Gmail account and click on “Drive.” You can create all kinds of things!

3. LastPass

LastPass is a neat app that securely saves all your passwords – meaning that you can spend less time searching back through emails to find your Twitter password, and more time writing!

4. Sticky notes

Most computers come with sticky notes in some form or another. They look and work a lot like Post-it notes that you can stick to your desktop to remind you to do something. They’re also great if you need to quickly jot something down in a rush, like a new scene or story idea.

5. Ctrl-Z

Most people will recognize this as the “undo” key. It works on most programs and browsers — just hold down Ctrl and press “Z”, and watch that paragraph you just accidentally lost, reappear! (If you use a Mac it’s Cmd + Z.)

6. F11

Pressing F11 in any window will allow you to go into “Full Screen” mode. This eradicates any distractions, such as your email blinking in your start bar, or your Twitter tab — and allows you to concentrate on writing. (On a Mac it’s Ctrl + Cmd + F)

7. Pinterest

If you’re trying to create something — whether that’s a story, a book cover or even book-themed gifts — Pinterest is a great tool that allows you to take useful advice articles and images from across the Internet and pin them on your own board. It works in the same way as a corkboard, and is great for creating moodboards to help you describe a character or location, or to keep track of your favorite websites.

8. Gliffy

This nifty program is free to use and works in your Internet browser — allowing you to easily create flowcharts and diagrams. If you’re stuck in your plot or are planning your novel, this is a great tool to help you visualize your thoughts and help you analyze how you might get from “a” to “b.”

9. Gmail Streak

This app uses your Gmail account and was originally designed for those working in sales. The app works with your emails and lets you create a “box” for each contact and track their responses. This app is perfect for any authors who are sending out to agents, competitions or press, as it’ll allow you to schedule chase-up emails and ensure you aren’t accidentally submitting to the same person twice.

10. HungryHouse

After a day writing indoors, it’s always a good idea to make sure you get outside and stretch your legs/eyes. But for those days that you just can’t bear to change out of your pajamas to go to the shops and get some food — there is HungryHouse. Enter your postcode and search a range of takeaway restaurants that will deliver to your door.

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