Tag: writing romance

Writers' Tools of the Trade, writing romance

TOOLS OF MY TRADE: #3 TWITTER

I am a self-proclaimed promo ‘ho and proud of it. Day three of my favorite tools brings us one promotional platform I employ, Twitter. Yes, I will admit when I first heard about Twitter I didn’t get it at all. When I try to explain Twitter to my non-tweeting friends, I really can’t (in spite of my vast professional expertise as a wordsmith). So what is Twitter and why does it deserve to be named among my 7 most valuable tools of my trade? It’s a social networking site that limits user updates to 140 characters each Tweet unless you employ one of the lengthening tools (which I do sometimes, though I feel like I’m cheating when I do, LOL). It’s kind of like the user status updates you see on Facebook, but it’s a one way system. I can follow anyone I want and see their tweets. Anyone can follow me and see mine (unless I block them for being a perv or a spammer). It is not the mutual “friending” you find on Facebook profile pages. Since I use it as a professional tool, I do like the Twitter “follow” system better than the Facebook “friend” system. Now why […]

Writers' Tools of the Trade

TOOLS OF MY TRADE: #2 WORDPRESS

Day two of my favorite tools week brings WordPress. Yes, WordPress was originally a blogging format, but it is so much more. With WordPress, there is absolutely NO reason to not have a FREE professional-looking, unlimited, easy to maintain website. Yes, I said free for the basic account which includes tons of free templates in addition to premium templates you can choose to pay for, unlimited pages and your own wordpress URL. So for instance, when I first signed up, I claimed www.catjohnson.net as my own. That was when I was still paying lots of money to GoDaddy to host my website. For a monthly fee, GoDaddy limited me to 5 pages maximum, charged me extra if I exceeded my bandwidth for the month, had a very limited amount of images I could host there, their design templates weren’t very nice and it used to take me all day to update my site with their built-in design program. I still pay a small annual fee to GoDaddy to register my catjohnson.net domain name, but now, for a nominal annual fee (something like $12 a year paid to WordPress) my domain is redirected to my free WordPress account so http://catjohnson.net appears in […]

Writers' Tools of the Trade, writing romance

TOOLS OF MY TRADE: #1 DROPBOX

I’ve been thinking lately about what I use the most, what I love the most, and what makes Cat Johnson, both the brand and the author, who and what I am. I’ve narrowed it down to 7 things (for now) so I’ve decided to do a series of posts, one each day this week, and share my favorite things. I’m only as good as my tools, and I’m sharing them with you here with the disclaimer that just because I love these tools doesn’t mean they’ll be to everyone’s taste. So, that said, here we go. Tool of the trade #1: Dropbox Though they won’t be in order of importance or value to me for the entire week, tool number one truly is THE MOST VALUABLE TOOL I USE, hands down, all caps because I can NOT stress this enough or love it more. Dropbox in an online file storage system that is FREE to use for the basic account which I have yet to even come close to filling up even with keeping all my writing, stockart, coverart, music files and other assorted important documents in it. What’s so cool? From my MAC I can open, edit and save […]