Rebecca Recommends for Writers
Hey there writers! So I get asked a fair bit for advice and tips about tools I use in my writing career and I wanted to create a quick and easy place to share. Just a heads up, some of these are affiliate links because it means you’ll get cool extra features or special offers. Everything I recommend are things I use myself that I feel significantly help me manage my author life and author business.
Getting the writing done:
Okay, obviously the first thing is absolutely Scrivener.
I’ve written all of my books in Scrivener. In fact, in 2010 I bought my first MacBook so that I could get Scrivener which at the time was only available for Mac OS. Spent $4,000 on the laptop and only $40 for the software and like to joke that Scrivener is the best $4040 software I’ve ever invested in. Worth every penny of that! But then admittedly the investment in a MacBook was also amazing. Anyway, all this to say that I write my books in Scrivener. I love that I can keep everything related to a series in a single project.
Simplifying Social Media
I’m not a huge social media fan, but I do keep an active social media presence. Thanks to the fabulous Laurie Wright I learned about SmarterQueue and the power of recycling evergreen content! Basically, you create content once, and then schedule it to recycle itself. The more content you produce the less repetition you get in your content. And essentially you constantly can continue to grow or cultivate your content. This means I can batch content creation on days when I’m in a content creation mood and then have it in my Smarter Queue instantly posting out on the schedule I set up. Then I can engage on social media just to have fun, respond to readers and fans, and enjoy it stress free because I’m not constantly having to figure out what to post next. It’s awesome and has been a game changer for the way I look at social media and social media marketing.
Mailing List Magic
For my list I LOVE Mailerlite and adore the new design they now use. It’s a great way to keep track of subscribers, set up mailing list automations, and send out sporadic or regular emails to your fans. I could definitely work on consistently sending out content but that’s not on MailerLite, it’s on me making more time. Meanwhile MailerLite makes it so easy to design, schedule, track, and measure the results of my mailing list.
Speaking of mailing list, another great tool is BookFunnel which you can use both to grow your mailing list and to deliver any free books you want to give away to subscribers.
Managing Market Research
Okay, two more tools that I absolutely love, use, and highly recommend. The first is the fabulous Publisher Rocket! The brainchild of Dave Chesson who is absolutely brilliant. Publisher Rocket is amazing for real world data for keyword and category research. It even lets you get a sneak peak behind the dashboard of other authors and their books to get a sense of what their sales are like and how they’re categorising their titles. It’s super powerful, fast, and easy to use.
The other is by massive data nerd (trust me, he’d agree with that title!) Alex Newton who brings us K-Lytics. These are in-depth data reports on real world industry results crunching data from Amazon and many of the major publishing houses when it comes to what sells, what’s hot, what’s hard, and what works. Along with the general data, Alex and his team put together some fabulous deep dives into particularly interesting niches so if you’re writing Urban Fantasy or Thriller or Romance you can dig deeper into that data to see which tropes are working and which sub-genres are the up and comers.
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