A Year In Review

 

Happy New Year!

We completed another fifty-two weeks with the blog. I want to thank everyone who supported my endeavor. Most weeks, I managed to get you some information. I will continue next year with more apps and helpful tips. Hopefully, everyone found something helpful.

My initial idea for the blog included teaching classes about these apps to author groups. Covid stopped that plan cold. With fingers crossed, I’m hoping that in 2022, I can begin teaching and, of course, blog all the apps you can stand.

Today, I’m reviewing the 2021 blog. The apps break down into these categories: Productivity, Organization, Marketing, and Self-Care. Each item links back to the How-To post on my blog.

Productivity

• Vellum—A book formatting app for Mac only. It’s a powerful program that will get your books ready for publishing quickly.
• Scrivener—These posts discussed the huge update for the writing app, including a fantastic new template for National Novel Writing Month.

Organization

• Evernote—This note-card app is more than somewhere to jot quick thoughts. It includes complex ways to make schedules, deadlines, and clip webpages. It’s like Google Keep, with more bells and whistles.
• AirTable—This database app is a fantastic way to organize all your projects. You can outline a book, create a marketing plan, or fill in a complete story bible.
• OneNote—The app is part of the Microsoft Office Suite and works as a filing system. It’s great for keeping notes on all your projects, including story bibles.
• Notion—This app is a colorful, graphic project manager to help keep all your ducks in a row. It has a wide variety of templates to help you organize all sorts of information.

Marketing

• Title Generators—This series of posts includes several sites that generate book titles and more. It’s great for authors who get stuck (like me).  
• Portent 
• Adazing and Fantasy Name Generator 
• Reedsy, Cool Generator, and Imagine Forest

• Link Apps—This series of posts includes ways to shorten those pesky buy or social media links into chewable bits.  
• Linktree 
• Books2Read  
• Bitly
• Mail Chimp—One of several services to help authors create a distribute newsletters.
• Social Media—We covered many social media sites last summer, including  
• Facebook  
• Twitter
  
• TweetDeck
  
• Instagram 
  
• Pinterest 
  
• TikTok 
  
• Discord  
• Going Live on social media.
• Book Brush—This app is a graphic generator for authors. You can create ads, social media posts, and even book covers.

Self-Care

• HeadSpace—This app uses guided meditation, tracks good habits, and advice on healthy lifestyle choices.

I can see I need to step up the self-care and productivity apps for next year. Let me know if there’s an app you’d like me to review. Or better yet, contact me about guest posting about your favorite app. Email me at ginnyfrost@ginnyfrost.com

Here’s to a productive 2022!

 

 

Notion for Authors

 

Hopefully, you’ve had a chance to play with Notion and all its lovely options. Let’s talk about how the app can make life easier for authors.

The focus of the program is project management. Here is a place to manage your writing career. The Goals template is a great place to start. You can convert it to an extended to-do list for current and future projects. The template has spaces for upcoming, ongoing, and future tasks. Create goals for the year or map out the due dates for projects. The Roadmap template works similarly, giving a great visual of the progress of a project.

I find writing things down helps so much. It might seem redundant or lame to spell out goals or steps. But life is busy, and people forget things. (Like I opened my Goals page and was happily surprised I’d already spelled out my intentions for 2022. I totally didn’t forget I made that list.)

Another useful template is Calendar Content. With this page, you could map out social media posts, planned discount sales, and in-person events (if we ever get there again). A great author class I attended suggested using a calendar such as this one to plan social media content. At the beginning of the month, take a few minutes to jot down your intended marketing items. It will save time in the long run. You can save the images and ad copy for the posts right in Notion. Cut, paste, and you’re done!

One interesting template in the Marketing section is called Brand Assessment. In this template, you can save your logo, banners, ad copy, fonts, avatars, and more. Currently, I’ve been using Google Keep for my collection of hashtags, links for my books, and plot bunnies. By employing Notion for the task instead, I can also add my book covers and ad images. All my social media links, pictures, and marketing material will be in the same place. Then Keep will be just for my plot bunnies and checklists. Perfect!

Another great template in the Marketing folder is the Mood Board. I create a similar board on Pinterest and keep it public. But perhaps as you are plotting (or pantsing), you want to keep your cards close to your chest. The mood board allows you to add pictures, website clips, and videos to visualize your book. Once you’re ready, you can add the content to other social media (or not, as you prefer).

Templates are not the only option for making Notion work for you. Once you become familiar with the app, you can create timelines, databases, name lists, story/series bibles. The sky is the limit.

Notion is diverse enough to handle many author tasks. (It even has an add-on $50 template for making newsletters!) As the program is available on Android and iOS, you can update Notion on the go.

I want to thank all my readers for another great year. Next week, we’ll have a wrap-up and then forward to new apps for 2022.