Five and A Half Great Free Tools for Authors by Frankie Bow

Whether you’re traditionally-published or indie, here are five (and a half?) sites to help you write, promote, and track sales. Take a look:

1.  Hemingway.

Cut and paste a chapter at a time into this interactive website. The site flags hard to read sentences, extra adverbs, and passive voice so you can slim down your prose. I use this site to clean up my final drafts.

2. IBM’s Personality Demo.

Do words reveal personality? Of course they do—we authors depend on it.  We write each of our characters with a distinctive voice in order to show something about their inner lives.

And now, thanks to IBM’s data scientists, we can measure exactly how well we’re doing.

IBM’s Watson Services use “linguistic analytics to extract a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics from the text data that a person generates through text messages, tweets, posts, and more.” In other words, your words reveal your personality. The services are intended for marketers, but the free demo is pretty useful for authors.

Go to the page and paste in your character’s dialogue, and watch a personality analysis pop out.

2.5 IBM’s Tone Analyzer.

Because this is also part of IBM’s Watson Services, I’m not counting it as a separate site.  Does your writing display joy or anger? Cut and paste a chunk of text into the Tone evaluator and see for yourself.

3. Booklinker.  

Wouldn’t you like a handy Amazon link that works for every country, and lets you use your affiliate code? Booklinker.net is easy and free.  For example, getbook.at/DefunctAdjunct takes you to my Professor Molly mystery, The Case of the Defunct Adjunct, will take you to the book on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com.au, or wherever your local Amazon store is.

4. Tweetjukebox.

Easy, randomized Twitter automation. With a free account you get two “jukeboxes” and up to 300 tweets that you set up in advance. You decide when and how often you want tweets sent out, and tweetjukebox will “shuffle the deck” and post a tweet at the appropriate time.

5. Kindle sales rank calculator.

You know what your Amazon rank is; how many unit sales does that translate to? Just enter your rank and get an estimated daily sales figure.

BONUS:  Here’s one that costs money, but I’m going to put it here anyway. Instafreebie is free for one month and $20/month thereafter. It’s the best mailing-list builder I’ve found.  Pre-Instafreebie I had about 400 subscribers; after two giveaways I have 3,500. Want to see how it works? Head over here to claim your free copy of my Professor Molly mystery, Trust Fall. Enter your name and email, choose your preferred format, and click the button to claim your book and sign up for my mailing list. (You can always unsubscribe, and I never share emails with anyone.)

What are your indispensable online author tools?

Like Professor Molly, Frankie Bow teaches at a public university. Unlike her protagonist, she is blessed with delightful students, sane colleagues, and a perfectly nice office chair. She believes if life isn’t fair, at least it can be entertaining. In addition to writing murder mysteries, she publishes in scholarly journals under her real name. Her experience with academic publishing has taught her to take nothing personally.