Starting next week I am going to start weekly State of the Industry updates. I will be posting every week on the state of the publishing, and writing industry. I will bring you the latest in trends, innovations and changes in all things writing.
Now though, as promised in my last post, I am going to give you two more free writing tools to assist you in all your writing endeavors. I will of course bring you more tools and resources in future posts.
Google Docs: One of the problem in today's culture is that once you type up documents you may need to have access to them at any time. Google Docs can deal with this “problem”. Another benefit of such a service is most people who have documents that have to travel with, keep them secure on either a laptop or some sort of flash memory either with a jump drive or a external hard drive. Google Docs makes these documents even more secure by storing all your important documents on a external server that is password protected and tied into all your other Google services; Gmail, Adsense, Analytics, and even your blog.
Blog: The most important thing for some writers is to have an outlet that allows them to share their work. Luckily the Internet provides more of these types of outlets that most writers can handle. One of the most popular and in my opinion the best one is the blogging platform. Blogs can reach hundreds or thousands of people who would just a few years ago, not have had any access to the writer's work. That is now changing in very interesting and mind-blowing ways. The blogosphere is changing every day in ways that can not even be predicted from week to week. The main benefits of such an outlet is that it is totally customizable and there are many good free blogging host available such as the popular Blogger, which I use for this blog.
I am very interested in your experiences with these tools or if you have any alternatives to offer please comment. If you have a greats story to tell about using any of these or if you have a
great resource or tool to offer your fellow writers.
I am looking forward to “seeing” your comments and getting to know some of my readers in my new weekly column on The State of the Industry.
Four Free Tools for Writers: Part One, Part Two
2 comments:
Personally on a professional level I've found that blogs tied into social networking sites are a very formidable tool when trying to promote anything or gather resources for a project.
I've used these tools to my advantage a LOT in the music scene. It's ironic to me that I never had any formal training in how to promote myself and yet I've levied a massive amount of promotional power (relative to the kind of work I do djing) to build a decent career in the music industry. It's a tool everyone has access to and yet hardly anyone really appreciates the magnitude of what it can really do.
Thank you for the kind words and you make a good point about tying blogs into social media. With both of them used together it is quite a force to be reckoned with.
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