How to Put Your Book in a Sidebar

I was listening to Lindsay Buroker’s podcast on blogging the other day, and she suggested having your book displayed in a sidebar on your blog. I thought this was a great idea, and wanted to share how to set that up. The video below shows you how to do it. It’s really easy and only takes about a minute or two.

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Here’s the code for the sidebar. Just copy, paste & tweak it.

<a href=”YOUR BOOK PAGE URL HERE”>YOUR BOOK NAME</a><a href=”LINK TO BOOK PAGE HERE”><img src=”PATH TO YOUR BOOK COVER HERE” alt=”YOUR BOOK NAME eBook” width=”180″ /></a>

<center><a href=”LINK TO YOUR EXCERPT”>Read an Excerpt</a> Available from <a href=”AMAZON LINK”>Amazon</a> | <a href=”B&amp;N LINK”>B&amp;N</a> | <a href=”SMASHWORDS LINK”>Smashwords</a> | <a href=”CREATESPACE LINK”>Paperback</a></center>

And if you’re interested in using Notepad++, you can download that from here.

Using Snapshots in Scrivener

Sometimes, you’ll write a scene, make changes to it, and then later decide that the original scene was better. When I was writing in Word and this happened, I used to copy the scene and paste it into a separate document. Then I could make changes in the original doc and if I later decided my first scene was better, I could re-copy the scene back in. This got to be a pain, especially when a scene went through multiple incarnations; I’d end up with four or five different files that all corresponded to slightly different flavors of the same scene. I wound up with a folder with files named things like Chapter2Version1CharactersGoForIceCream,Chapter2Version2CharactersGoForDonuts, Chapter2Version3CharactersGoForThaiFood, you get the idea.

Luckily, Scrivener has a built-in feature called Snapshots that manages this process for you. Let’s say you’ve got a scene that you want to tweak, but you want to be able to go back to the original version. Just press Ctrl+D, and you’ll hear a camera shutter sound effect. Then, click on the Snapshots button on the lower right toolbar to see a list of Snapshots associated with the current scene. You can create as many Snapshots as you want for a particular scene, and then restore a scene to a previous version by clicking the Roll Back button.

This short video shows Snapshots in action. Enjoy!
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Distraction Free Scrivener

I’ve been working with Scrivener since Literature& Latte announced the Windows Beta late last year. It’s an awesome program and has made it very easy for me to organize my current WIP. However, like most tools, there’s a lot going on in its UI, and sometimes that can be distracting when you’re trying to bang out a scene. To help me focus, I customized Scrivener’s Full Screen view so it’s more like an old school word processor – black background and green text. This short video shows the steps I performed.
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One thing to note – the video shows some lines at the top and edges of the screen after these changes have been made. Those lines aren’t actually visible in Scrivener while you’re using it.

If you’d like to try out Scrivener for Windows, head on over here.

 

 

 

 
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