Five More Tools no Writer should be Without

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Following my post last week about the five tools no writer 
should be without, here are five more you might like to consider. 

This nifty little site/app blocks Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pintrest or whatever your primary distraction is for a set period of time, so that you can get on with your work. It's not free, but you choose what you pay and up to 90% of it goes to charity.

With more and more self-published books flooding the market, good editing is more important that ever. The manifold errors and myriad typos in them give them away as a cheap and shoddy product, and that's very damaging to the industry. I read a book with a spelling mistake in the title, for goodness' sake! If you want your book to look professional, it needs to be well edited. Of course, editing is expensive, but check out this blog post to find out how you can get bargain basement editing.

Grammarly's Plagiarism Checker
Apparently The Hunger Games is very like Battle Royale by Koushun Takami, which was published in 1999. JK Rowling was accursed of plagiarism by Nancy Kathleen Stouffer, author of 1984 works The Legend of Rah and the Muggles and Larry Potter and His Best Friend Lilly. Ecclesiates 1:9 says "There is nothing new under the sun" and Christopher Booker said that there are only seven basic plots and everything written is a variation on them. Given this, it's not surprising that what we think is a bright and original idea is sometimes actually something we saw on TV twenty years ago. I use Grammarly's plagiarism checker because I can't always figure out where my imagination and memory overlap.

NaNoWriMo
We're in the middle of National Novel Writing Month and at the moment writers across the globe are struggling to write 50,000 words in a month. I've tried - and failed - NaNo once, but I still think it's a wonderful thing. It really serves to get your eye on the ball, to establish a goal and to really get the creative juices flowing. Every author should try NaNo at least once because it teaches you so much about the real slog of being a writer, and it can help you connect to other writers and feel part of something wonderful.

Rafflecopter
Rafflecopter enables you to run contests and giveaways to promote your book. It creates code for your blog and website, works across the social media platforms, and it is available free, although you get more with a paid membership. If you want to create a buzz about your latest release, Rafflecopter is the easiest way to do it.

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