Count 'em Ten

Ten Word Count Widgets for NaNoWriMo

AllIndieWriters.com's Wordcount Tracker

Another Little Progress Meter

Critique Circle's Word Meter Builder

Language is a Virus's simple NaNoWriMo Word Meter

NaNoWriMo's page of official participant wordcount meters

ProgPress is a word meter plug-in for the WordPress (hasn't been updated in a while, so caveat emptor)

StoryToolz's word count meters page (must register to gain access but it's free)

Writeometer, which I think is an Android App

Writertopia's two wordcount meters

Writing Journal, which is a free iTunes time tracker & word meter

NaNoWidgets

A quick heads up before I hit the road: I noticed this morning that the NaNoWriMo site folks had finally posted this year's batch of wordcount widgets. Looks like they're for officially registered users only, but all the same a nice variety.

Also, my thanks to everyone who invested in Nightshine since release day. While it probably won't make an appearance on the Times list, the novel performed well on B&N's lists, coming in at #12 on their romance mm and #38 on their overall mm bestseller lists. The e-book sales for this book are particularly strong, too, and altogether made my editor quite happy.

Widget Quest

Now that I've tried reinventing the bookmark, my second creative challenge is to come up with three widgets to use with promo for my upcoming Lords of the Darkyn trilogy. The immediate problems: I'm not a widget lover; I think 99% of all widgets are a waste of time and materials. I want something unique and different that is my idea, which rules out all the mass-produced advertising-type junk (thank heavens.) And I want to make it myself, which limits the range of possibilities to what I can reasonably produce without making a complete hash of it.

I've been keeping my eye out for inspiration and hoping the universe would conk me on the head with something fabulous. Which it did last night when I made a stop at World Market for some international treats. I always check their bargain bins for interesting sale items, where this time I found a set of three notes made into scrolls:

     

It was a real eureka moment. Scrolls are what books were before there were books, and as it happens Nightborn, the first novel in the new Darkyn trilogy, features a scroll as an important part of the story. Perfect idea for a widget! I even knew what I could do with different materials to make it low-cost, give it my own personal spin, and end up with something that has a good chance of not landing in the trash bin.

Next problem: I've never actually made a scroll, so I needed to do some research. I promptly went over to BAM to hunt for some how-to guidance, and in the process found Alisa Golden's Making Handmade Books. This is practically an encyclopedia of book making, and features a wide variety of beautiful and unusual bindings and forms. Ms. Golden offers fully illustrated, step-by-step instructions paired with beautiful finished examples of the different styles, so you can see what the end result should look like. Btw, if you're an art journalist, book maker or someone who for whatever reason fashions and binds your own books, this should absolutely be in your library.

Lucky for me it also included how to make a scroll book, the instructions for which I can adapt to use for my widget project. Reading through it also gave me a great idea on how I can secure the scroll in an interesting way and still assure that every component of the widget can actually be used for practical purposes. I love art, but I love not wasting or throwing away things even more. Now I just have to experiment with the design and put together some prototypes to test out the vision and see if I can make it work in reality.

Watch the Blog Pets

I'm still off writing, but while you're here, would you mind feeding my new fish? (click anywhere inside the tank):



Or feed my new hamster (click inside his cage to give him a snack; click on the center of his wheel to make him take a turn):



Or maybe you'd like to play follow-the-cursor with my new spider:




To get your own fish (or a hamster or a spider or other way cool gadgets) for your blog, check out Adam Bowman's page of widgets here.

(I so swiped this from Gerard over at The Presurfer.)

Biz Card Buyer Beware

Back during my rookie year as a pro everyone told me I needed business cards. So I had some printed up and handed out maybe 2 or 3 in a year. Then I moved, which changed all my contact info, so I had to throw the rest away. I have not bothered with business cards since.

Fast forward to last month, when I placed an online order with B&N.com. After going through the checkout, an ad came up that offered me free complimentary business cards as a thank-you:



Now sure, I like free stuff, but I've learned that very few things offered as a purchase perk are actually 100% free. On the other hand, I still don't have any business cards. Thus I decided to click through and see how much I was going to get fleeced.

Navigating through the business card site was like running a sales barrage gauntlet. At the type-in-what-you-want-on-the-card page, they showed me a couple of stock designs, then offered to show me the premium designs ($3.99) Did I want 500 cards instead 250? $9.99. The flat/matte finish on my cards was included, but I could upgrade to a glossy finish ($8.99) 100 lb. paper ($8.99) or show everyone how much I cared about the environment by using the recycled paper option ($14.99)

I skipped all that stuff, designed my biz card and thought, okay, time to checkout.

Alas, the site decided, not so fast. It threw a back side printing options page at me (the free option noted that it contained vistaprint advertising, which btw looks like this) with blank/no advertising ($2.74) color ($6.99) black and white ($3.99) and designer (starting at $3.99) I went with the free option, and clicked through, expecting to checkout.

Nope. More pages of products and widgets printed with my biz card info were then lobbed at me: A pad of sticky notes ($3.74) self-inking address stamp ($13.49) printed pens ($3.74 each) notepads ($6.74). There were a lot more; custom-printed hats, car door magnets, lawn signs and equally ridiculous dreck that I clicked through to get to the checkout.

Which I didn't. I went to a page offering to sell me a web domain with my name (try 1 month for free then pay $9.98 per month.) It seemed to include a web site based on my biz card info, which was a little creepy. Then there were more "free" offers from Google ad words, Pitney Bowes, etc. etc.

After plowing through several more screens of this crap, I finally got to the place-your-order screen. The 250 cards I'd ordered were free, but shipping was not. Standard shipping (defined as 14 business days) was $9.52; Priority (7 days) $13.68; Rush (3+ business days) $26.20. I opted for Slow (21 Days) for $5.67 and that seemed to be it except for my credit card info or buying via Paypal (I went with the latter choice.)

So in reality my free/complimentary business cards cost me $5.67. That was the absolute cheapest I could get them, too.

I was curious to see what the quality of the printing was, and about three weeks later the cards arrived, not especially well-packed or packaged. Out of curiosity I checked with the post office to see what the actual shipping charges would be, and according to them it actually cost $2.38 to ship it to me. So the company tacked on $3.29 to the shipping (which probably covered the cost of their printing and packaging, so I won't begrudge them that; they simply shouldn't call it free.)

As for the cards, the quality is about what I could do myself on my ink jet printer if I set the printing quality at medium. There is no finish to the cards; the flat/matte finish is just the surface of the cardstock they used, which feels to be on the light side, maybe 50-60 lb. It's not horrible, and with the cost of toner cartridges it is probably cheaper than what it would cost me to design and print it out myself. The end result didn't impress me, though, and the ordering experience was so utterly obnoxious that I doubt I'll order anything from them again.

NaNoFun

Every Wednesday from now until November 1st I'll be posting some ideas, resources and other info that may be of help to those of you planning to join in NaNoWriMo 2010.

As I did last year, I've uploaded all of the participant badges for NaNoWriMo on my Photobucket account; anyone is welcome to use the image links:

   

   

   

Made my own badges, too, which if you're a NaNoNag or Camp Follower you're also welcome to use:

 

For those interested in word count widgets for NaNoWriMo but don't want to wait until they post the official links on November 1st:

Last year I used this one to post my counts on PBW: Another Little Progress Meter

LanguageIsAVirus's still has their NaNoWriMo Word Meter available

Need a word count widget plugin for Wordpress? Here you go.

You have to register first (free) to get StoryToolz's Progress Meter, but it looks like you can customize it, too

Svenja has a nice little word count meter with several color options for the progress bar

If you don't trust your word processor's count, cut and paste your text into this online Word Count Tool

Writertopia offers two writing meters; one is simple and the other features a cute cartoon

Some free stuff for NaNoWriMo'ers, and the first one is from me: in honor of my favorite writing month of the entire year, until December 1, 2010 my OOP how-to writing guide, Way of the Cheetah, will be available here in .pdf format for anyone to read online or download for free.

The NaNoWriMo site has some special offers here, including a NaNoWriMo version of Storyist for Mac (scroll down to where it says special offer) that you can use for free for the entire month of November. It's not available yet, but Scrivener is also promising a NaNoWriMo 2010 Special Trial version for Mac and Windows.

FreelyEducate.com has a post here that details some of the special offers and freebies being offered to you writers out there who are 17 years old or younger and plan on participating in NaNoWriMo's Young Writers Program.

If you have any fun/interesting/helpful links to share, please post them in comments. And get ready, guys, because National Novel Writing Month starts in exactly ten days.

Count 'Em Ten

Ten Things About Word Counters

Freeware caution: always scan free downloads of anything for bugs and other threats before dumping the programs into your hard drive.

If you're looking for a wordcounter widget that uses straight HTML versus images, check out Another Little Progress Meter (and here's what it looks like on a blog.)

The Dreaded Daily Word Count by Chris Stewart takes a practical look at wordcounting and suggests how you can custom design a daily quota you can live with.

Allena Tapia has some good tips on how to trim your numbers in her About.com article Five Ways to Cut Down Your Word Count.

LanguageIsAVirus has an online wordcount code generator (which looks like this on a blog.)

StoryToolz requires you to register first (free), but then you can get their progress meter.

If you just wanted to count your words and don't trust your word processor, cut and paste your text into the box at Word Count Tool, click submit, and get your count.

Word Counter is a "Macintosh OS X application that performs a word count and a character count, but it can do much more. It can be used independently or in conjunction with other applications such as TextEdit, Microsoft Word, Pages, TextWrangler, and others" (OS:Macintosh OS X 10.5 or higher)

The Word Counter Widget is a "Dashboard Widget for Macintosh OS X. It provides word counts and character counts and can also count the number of instances of a specified word or phrase" (OS: Mac OS X 10.4 or later)

WordFlood 1.2, which offers customizable word and phrase lists, one-click word usage frequency stats and a displayed worcounter, is now being offered as freeware (OS: Windows 2000/NT/XP/Vista)

Writertopia offers two free wordcount widgets; one that is a simple, no-frills meter, and the other to display your mood as well as your progress.

Widget Yourself

While hunting for widget-making freeware, I came across an eHow.com article, How to Create a Widget Featuring your Blog, Content, Or Website by Ariana Cherry-Shearer. Sounded pretty simple, and as we all know I am completely hopeless when it comes to this sort of thing, I thought I'd test it out personally and see just how easy it was.

Took me about a minute to make this:



Note: you do have to join Widgetbox.com before you can use their widget-maker/designer, but all they ask for is a sign-in ID, password, and e-mail addy. Otherwise it's free.

I used my blog post headlines for my example widget, but there are all sorts of options and templates, sizes and colors, bells and whistles etc. This could be useful for writers who want to create a promo-type widget for their blog, web site, latest news, posts, upcoming releases, freebies, contests and so forth.

Widgets from Hell

Ten Promotional Products Authors Should Probably Avoid

Caution: Some of these links are not work-safe.

1. Beanie Babies -- yes, they're precious, and soft, and cuddly, and so sweet, and you have ten thousand of them on shelves in your bedroom and decorating your bookshelves and piled up the rear window of your car, and please, I ask, no, I beg you, don't infect anyone else with the beanie baby craziness. Besides, you know the ones you give away will be worth a fortune in a few years, right? Best keep them in your personal collection.

2. Book Matches -- Why do we even have these anymore? I thought everyone quit smoking by now. Anyway, the first rule of advertising is: never give the buyer a promotional item that can actually destroy your product.

3. Condoms -- Not what you want to be handing out at the Christian Booksellers Association's annual con, but I'd pay money to watch someone do it at RWA National. My suggestion: sneak them into the big luncheon and put them on top of the freebies they stack on the seats.

4. Hard Hat -- useless, unless your reader is attending a SFWA-run conference, in which case it would be more practical to offer promotional hip waders.

5. Fake Tattoo -- Think about the many places on the body to which this item can and will be applied. Or, guess where I'd put it. Yep. Next.

6. Fly Swatter -- I want you to close your eyes, and imagine your cover art. Now festoon it with the smushed bodies of flies and fly parts. Yum. (Might work for the New Weird authors, though.)

7. Herb Grinder, Pocket-Size -- For God's sake, do I even have to explain this one?

8. Nipple Rings -- Look, just keep your advertising away from my womanly curves altogether, got it?

9. Playboy Playmate Calendar -- The average book buyer in the US is female, middle-aged and straight. For us, you need to invest in the PlayGIRL Promotional Calendar.

10. Rolling Papers -- Yeah, sure. Nothing says "Search my body cavities" at the airport like getting caught with a thousand of these in your carry-on.

Eleven Widgets

On the eleventh day before Christmas, PBW found for me:

Eleven Widgets for Widgeting

1. Astrology.com offers four widgets for your blog or web page: LoveScope, Dashtrology (Mac only), Horoscope, and On This Day in History.

2. AddThis.com offers a free bookmarking widget to help promote your blog.

3. Forgot to mail out cards? Try the online Christmas card generator.

4. Put your blog visitors to work with 123Greetings.com's holiday widget, Decorate the Christmas Tree.

5. A free online lineage chart generator to keep track of your series/story characters and their relationships.

6. FreePhotoCalendar will help you put together and print out your own customized 2008 calendar (note: you do need a .pdf reader to view the finished product.)

7. MagMyPic will put your photo on the cover of one of twelve different magazines (finally, I can be on the cover of Vogue!)

8. Lunapic's photo-spread tool can make your uploaded image into a neat pile o' Polaroids.

9. Show off your prezzies with a photo slide show for your blog from Flickr.

10. Get 29,000+ more widgets for your weblog over at WidgetBox.com.

11. Mac users, add a daily horoscope to your blog or web page with The Zodiac Widget.

Most of the above links were found over at the ultimate source for web widgets, The Generator Blog