Category: Tutorials

How-to articles for writers.

Amazon.com Book Descriptions

Judge and Author K.S. BrooksMy oh my. I’ve been banging my head against the wall quite a lot lately. I’ve found so many book descriptions on Amazon.com that are not doing justice to the authors’ books. Twenty words or less? More about the motivation to write it than about the story? Nothing more than a few reviews? An entire paragraph telling me how awesome the author is at flossing his/her teeth? Listen, there’s a right place for everything. And the right place for the book description…is the book description. Potential customers want to know what the book is ABOUT, otherwise, how will they be able to tell if they want to read it? (If you need help writing your book’s description, try this tutorial here.)

For authors who self-published their book, they can go into Createspace or Kindle and easily change the book’s description. But, once the print and Kindle versions are merged, this may not reflect the description they’d prefer. Also, if you aren’t the publisher of your book, and your requested changes have not been made, there is an alternative for you: your Amazon Author Central Page. Continue reading “Amazon.com Book Descriptions”

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”

Tutorial: Tweeting to Facebook

It was brought to my attention by the Evil Mastermind that I’d missed a tutorial. We’ve covered how to generate tweets from Facebook here. But I’d yet to cover how to generate status updates from Twitter to Facebook. Shame on me, especially because I was already doing it.

Currently I have my stuff set up so that Mr. Pish’s page and my personal author Facebook page send updates to their respective Twitter accounts. But, since my personal Facebook account is marked private, I don’t want those updates going out to the world on Twitter. So, I have it set up so that any time I go to Twitter and tweet, it sends an update to my Facebook profile. Continue reading “Tutorial: Tweeting to Facebook”

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”