C. M. Skiera's Blog

This week I'll present some free online utilities that can help you analyze, count, data crunch, and convert your text.  Although the tools I'll discuss don't address grammar, spelling, etc., these handy utilities are still useful to a self-publisher. Character and Word Counter  with Frequency Statistics Calculator This webpage offers a clever tool for calculating the number individual words in your writing (not just total words--a total for each word). It allowed me to paste my entire first draft of Mirrors & Mist into it (73,000 words), and found I used the word "was" 589 times! Ouch! It also has sort functions and some other data-crunching tools that let you analyze your writing based on the words you've written. EPUB Validator If you're self-publishing through a service like Smashwords, et al, you may not need EPUB Validator; however, it's a good quality control tool to have at your disposal, especially if you create your own EPUB ...

Last week I posted about FastPencil , a self-publishing platform. Thanks to  +Shah Wharton , I learned about Draft 2 Digital , yet another platform for self-publishing authors. Whereas FastPencil appeared somewhat overwhelming with all its options, Draft 2 Digital is nearly the opposite. A clean, uncluttered interface with just five tabs, the  Draft 2 Digital website is simple and easy to navigate. Draft 2 Digital doesn't have its own ebook storefront (like Smashwords) and it currently doesn't distribute to quite as many retailers, however, it current sales channels include: Amazon iBookstore Barnes & Noble Kobo and CreateSpace Speaking of CreateSpace , which is a rather unique option for an ebook publishing platform,  Draft 2 Digital  states:  "We can create paperbacks for any books generated through our conversion service (that is, everything except pre-formatted epub uploads). Simply choose CreateSpace as one of your sales channels at t...

I was going to write a post comparing Smashwords (which is how I self-published ) to BookBaby (which I have not used).  However, in my research, I came across this excellent post from last year that gives a much more in-depth comparison than I planned on doing.  Since it's silly to re-invent the wheel, I thought I'd link to this post and move on to another topic.  If you're interested in comparing the two self-publishing services, check out Giacomo Giammatteo' s fantastic guest post (and resulting comment thread) on How to Successfully Self Publish . A third self-publishing/distribution service, with certain similarities to Smashwords and BookBaby is  FastPencil  (which I have also not personally used).  So I wondered if FastPencil was different than Smashwords and BookBaby, and if so, how? For starters, FastPencil is a self-publishing platform that targets not only authors, but publishers and enterprises as well.  From my perspective as an indie...

Did you ever wonder what an online editing program would say about the work of a best-selling author?  Well, I have, and to satisfy my curiosity, I ran portions of three famous books through the Pro Writing Aid  free online writing editor. The results of my experiment are described herein. If you're asking "What's the point?" I wanted to see if there were any mechanical deficiencies in my writing that best-selling authors had mastered (i.e., too much passive text, too many pronouns, excessively long or short sentences, etc.). These are the types of analytic data an online editor can provide (among other information). A secondary question was to see if the information provided by an online editor offered any insight on the marketable quality of the writing. I'm already convinced that there are enough features in a good online editor to make it worth my while to use in self-editing my text, so this wasn't an exercise to determine if there was value in using...