Author: Lynne Cantwell

Lynne Cantwell grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan. She worked as a broadcast journalist for many years; she has written for CNN, the late lamented Mutual/NBC Radio News, and a bunch of radio and TV news outlets you have probably never heard of, including a defunct wire service called Zapnews. But she began as a fantasy writer (in the second grade), and is back at it today. She currently lives near Washington, DC. Learn more about Lynne at her blog and at her Amazon author page.

Direct Marketing for Indies (NOT)

We’d all like to sell more books, right? And we’re marketing directly to our readers (or trying to), right? So maybe we should be looking to direct marketers for advice.

With that thought, I picked up the number-one bestselling Kindle book in the direct marketing category: Crush It With Kindle: How to self publish your books on Kindle and promote them to #1 bestseller status, by John Tighe. Leaving aside the typos in the title (“with” should be lower case, and “self-publish” ought to be hyphenated), I was hoping for some big insights. Alas, the only thing I learned was how to make my book resemble an infomercial. Continue reading “Direct Marketing for Indies (NOT)”

Juggling Books in a Series

When I first got Microsoft Office 2010, I looked over the list of programs included, mentally gauging how useful they might be to me. I stopped at OneNote, which I’d never seen before. I learned that OneNote was a project planning program – a place to put all sorts of disparate things that sort of go together, including pictures and links from the web. I shook my head and moved on. What sort of use would that be?

Then I started writing the Pipe Woman Chronicles – a five-book series.

By the time I started working on book two, Fissured, I couldn’t remember the last name of the bad guy in book one, Seized. I also couldn’t remember what color eyes I had given my main character, whether she owned a condo or rented an apartment, and numerous other details. It had only been a few months between books, but I’m old, okay?

I realized that I needed somewhere to keep track of all the characters in each of the books. I also needed a place to keep track of the credit information for the stock photos I was using for the covers, and a rough timeline, and so on. Ideally, all of that would be in one place, like a notebook. Except electronic, so I wouldn’t have to try to read my own handwriting. And then I remembered I had OneNote. Continue reading “Juggling Books in a Series”

How to Make a Word Template

Last week, I showed you how to make Styles work for you in Microsoft Word. But wouldn’t it be fabulous if you could just open a new document and have your styles already set up for you?

Sure, you can open an old document with the formatting you want to use, delete the original content, and add your new stuff – but then you need to remember to hit “save as” instead of “save” or you’ll lose your original work. (Not that I’ve ever done that.) It would be safer to start with a properly-formatted blank document, wouldn’t it?Of course, it would. Continue reading “How to Make a Word Template”

Stylin’ in Microsoft Word

I know, I know, it’s frightening – the “Styles” drop-down menu in Word 97/2003, and/or the string of needlessly colorful Styles on the ribbon in Word 2007/2010. But there’s no need to avert your eyes. Believe it or not, not only can you tame the scary Styles beast, but you can make a Style of your very own. And it will help you!

Let’s say you’d like for your first drafts to incorporate most of Mr. Coker’s whiz-bang paragraph formatting right off the bat, because you’re sick and tired of using the Nuclear Option to get your books through the Meatgrinder. You can create a Style that does that! Here’s how: Continue reading “Stylin’ in Microsoft Word”