Category: Publishing

Book trailers are a new technique for marketing books. Book trailers (or book videos) emerged in 2002 with a company called Circle of Seven Productions.

Book trailers are now becoming mainstream. Bookscreening.com is a website entirely devoted to the viewing of book videos. Another site -- Christianbookvideos.com -- focuses on Christian book videos.

Read more here.

More publishing mysteries revealed by @RachelleGardner: “Sell-in, Sell-through, and Earn-out”: http://bit.ly/49lOYD

If you're a pen aficionado like me, check out these cool pens from Japan: http://bit.ly/3PW1rp

Very nice diagram on proper use of an apostrophe: http://bit.ly/1J0B8O

In order to carve out time for writing, sometimes you have to draw the line and cut off the email spigot. How?

How? As this 43 Folders article says, this include finding automation and economies of scale. Some examples:

• add info on your Contact page explaining what people can expect from you
• use auto-responses and email template sstating when you are away or can't be reached
• where necessary send short responses to clarify when you’ll be available again

It's all about setting expectations.

WritersTechnology.com issues the second in a series on

The simplest way to track submissions is using a spreadsheet program like Excel. You could also use an online spreadsheet like Google Docs. Create a new spreadsheet and put the following as column headers:

Title of Piece | Length | Genre/Type | Query or Submission? |Market Submitted to | Market’s Address | Pay | Date Sent | Response Time | Response (Y/N) | Accepted? (Y/N) | Due date | Publish date | Pay date | Paid? (Y/N)

Source

Tune in to their site their site for future articles on this topic.

Read below to learn about gDarkRoom -- a Google Documents tweak tailored to provide a full-screen writing console with these features:

• Full-screen editing usable from any computer
• Automatic backups of your documents
• Write full-screen on the road and sync your document back up once you reconnect to the Internet

I have long used full-screen text editors for banging out fiction. Having the old-school dark full-screen -- free from distractions -- makes for the ideal writing environment. Some of the full-screen editors I have used in the past:

• Q10 (Windows)
• DarkRoom (Windows)
• WriteRoom (Mac)
• Scrivener (Mac)
• JDarkRoom (Windows, Mac, Linux)

I like to store my writing in Google Documents. The portability can't be beat (you can log in and read and edit your documents from any computer). And best of all, Google Documents provides built in version control so you can always go back and find old text you've (perhaps accidently) deleted. So in the past I've used one of the above software packages to write my fiction, and then pasted it into Google Documents after the fact.

Google has recently added a Full-Screen mode. (Hint: it's under the View menu, or you can click Ctrl-Shift-F). They have also added a feature called 'Edit CSS' (CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet -- a feature to change the look and feel of web pages). This, combined with the Google Gears software allows you to write full-screen from any computer with or without Internet access.

How? By using the 'Edit CSS' feature, you can add CSS code.

Note this part in particular -- this is monitor size specific. You may want to increase or descrease the "260pt" to change the side margins and make corresponding change to the "520pt" width until you get the settings right for you monitor:

.pageview body {
background-color: #000000 !important; /* Make the background color black */
width: 520pt !important; /* Page width */
padding: 0pt 260pt 0pt 260pt; /* Side Margins */
margin: 0;
}

To the right is the resulting look and feel. In full-screen mode you no longer have access to the menus, so it's useful to know Google Documents' keyboard shortcuts and to remember that Esc brings you back to the normal mode.

To style the search bar at the bottom of the screen black, you can download and install the NASA Night Launch Theme for FireFox.

Here is the full CSS code I use to achieve these font effects:

/* Full Screen Editing Style (for 1240x1024 resolution monitor) */
body {
background-color: #000000 !important;
font-family: Garamond !important;
font-size: 18pt !important;
color: #D0A000;
}

.pageview body {
background-color: #000000 !important;
width: 520pt !important;
padding: 0pt 260pt 0pt 260pt;
margin: 0;
}

h1 {
padding-top: 26px;
text-transform: uppercase;
font-family: Garamond;
font-size: 22pt;
color: red;
border-bottom: 3px double red;
}
h2 {
background: url('File?id=ad8wdwbvms_905cwjztrfc_b') no-repeat top left;
padding-top: 12px;
padding-left: 32px;
font-family: Garamond;
font-size: 18pt;
color: #003300;
border-bottom: 2px solid #003300;
}
h3 {
background: url('File?id=ad8wdwbvms_906cb8g4mgj_b') no-repeat top left;
padding-top: 0px;
padding-left: 32px;
font-family: Garamond;
font-size: 14pt;
color: #003300;
border-bottom: 1px solid #003300;
}

OpenOffice.org's excellent software suite has now release version 2.4. This is available from OpenOffice.org, or get a portable version for toting around on a USB drive or to use on locked-down worked computers. OpenOffice now supports extentions (like FireFox) to extent the software's features. Here are some of the best extentions for Novelists and Writers:

1. TestFonts -- Reporting for missing font faces, all used fonts and get statistic available system fonts.
2. OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs -- Export and Import your documents to and from Google Docs.
3. Writer's Tools -- Back up documents, look up and translate words and phrases, manage text snippets, and keep tabs on document statistics.
4. OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs -- Export and Import your documents to and from Google Docs.
5. Linguist -- Provides an easy way for users to create a list of new candidate words to the existing spellcheck dictionary.
6. Alternative dialog Find & Replace for Writer -- Advanced search capabilities including regular expressions, multiple search and replacement in one step, and more.

O3Spaces is another service you should look into. O3Spaces Workplace brings document management and document collaboration features to OpenOffice.org, including real-time version control, check-in/check-out and document security.

The OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs extension imports documents from Google Docs and Spreadsheets to OpenOffice.org and exports from OO.org to GDocs so you can work with your docs both online and offline. Works onWindows/Mac/Linux. Also it is a simple way to backup your local documents to the internet.

The OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs extension is free, works anywhere you've installed OpenOffice.org. Web site DocSyncer is looking to do similar things for your Microsoft Office docs, but right now it's in an invite-only beta. Needs Java 6 to work.