• Podcasts
• RSS aggregators
• Twitter

Now admittedly, these will take some setting up initially – there is some searching involved. However, once set up, the information comes to you. I subscribe to several science and skeptical podcasts using iTunes, and update my iPod every weekend. I now have a bank of information to absorb over the week during my walks to and from train stations to get to work. If something catches your ear, many podcasts have an associated website where they keep show notes. These normally take the form of a series of links to further research on the topic in questions.

Blogs (as you know ), are another great source of information. But wouldn’t it be great if you could access all the blogs you are interested in in one place? No problem! Every blog has an RSS feed. I forget what that stands for (tsk), but it’s basically a stripped down, information only feed of all the entries in the blog. This lets you subscribe to the feed using an RSS aggregator of some kind. This is  where you gather all your feeds into one place. A lot of the time you can order them into categories or give them tags so that you can find them more easily. Now you have access to all of them at once, and it’s easy to see what new posts have been submitted to each of these blogs while you’ve been away from your computer. It all comes to you. There are loads of RSS aggregators (or RSS readers as they are also called) out there, and chances are you’ve got one already. You can subscribe straight through the Firefox web browser for example, and the new posts will be put into a handy dropdown in your toolbar. Apple Mail also has a way of showing the blogs you’ve subscribed to in the left-hand column, beneath all of your email folders. There are loads of free ones too. Personally I use Google Reader, as it’s a web app, so is available on every computer with an internet connection (plus my iPod Touch, and even my Nintendo Wii), and it is easy to arrange feeds into categories.

To subscribe to a feed, just look for this symbol, either on the site itself, or in your browsers address bar. Depending on the reader you are using, this alone will subscribe you, or you may need to copy and paste the URL into your reader.

Twitter is perhaps not the most obvious choice, but I am loving Twitter for exactly this purpose at the moment. Twitter is a kind of microblogging service. You sign up, and get to write 140 characters about something and post it. This goes out to anyone who happens to be looking at everything coming out of Twitter, or are looking at Twitterers (‘Tweeters’? Actually, I think ‘Tweeps’ is the popular term at the moment. That may change tomorrow),  in their local area, plus it goes out to anyone following you. Following is the thing that makes Twitter powerful. There’s a whole load of people out there who are interested in the same things as you, and they’re providing links, talking about events, and responding to questions all the time. All you have to do is ‘listen’.

All this does sound like a bit of work, but it’s not nearly as much as it looks. For Twitter, start by searching for celebrities that you’re interested in, or friends that you know are on there. Don’t know who to follow, then take a look at my Twitter profile for ideas. Other than that, the whole thing kind of snowballs and feeds off itself. You only need to find two good blogs or podcasts that you like and it’s not long before you are referred to a couple more from within those posts or episodes. Believe me, you will soon have what feels like a little community of like-minded people feeding you information. And don’t forget, podcasters often have blogs and visa versa, and many of them are on Twitter too. And many of them know each other. It’s this fact that means your collection grows, but it’s brought into sharp focus when you see the conversations between the people you are following on Twitter. It’s interesting to watch in itself.

Practice

One other reason why inspiration doesn’t come easily any more might simply be that I am out of practice. It sounds odd to say you can ‘practice’ at being inspired, but as long as there are activities you can do towards something (see above), you should be able to become better at it. In theory, this means that the more you look for inspiration, the more used to this activity your brain becomes and the more automatic it becomes. The big upside of this is that even if we don’t feel inspired very often now, the more we graze on our interests, the more we will be inspired and the easier it will come.

Right?

You’d be lying if you say you hadn’t thought this way. Everyone has. But writing, as with everything, is a struggle and the biggest struggle we have to deal with is that fact there are simply too many writers. Publishers themselves receive thousands of manuscripts a week and if they haven’t asked for them they will either bin without looking at them or take a glance and then send the heartbreaking ‘does not meet our criteria’ letter. How do you break through? It’s simple, you get yourself an agent.

However, here lies the Catch-22:

‘To get an agent you must be published, to be published you must have an agent.’

Ok, I’ll let your brain stop swelling for a moment at that conundrum before I continue.

Yes, Agents also receive hundreds and thousands manuscripts a week and can only take on maybe one or two new clients a year. So you’re sitting there with potentially the next Harry Potter and after bumping into obstacle after obstacle it looks destined to become just another few MB on your computer or a few hundred printed pages under the bed.

Not anymore!

Disclaimer from Matt: Other self-publishing services are available. Comment if you recommend any

You can now self publish without the worries that a lot of self publishing has come with before thanks to the website www.lulu.com. Whereas before, if you wanted to self publish, you would have to pay for printing and manufacturing costs and purchase a number of books with the hope that you will recoup the money by selling the books, this is no longer the case. Lulu allows you to place your book on their site and depending on how much profit revenue you would like to receive for each book sold you can price them as you want and not spend a penny. When someone purchases a book it is simply printed on demand and sent to them direct.

How does this work? First up you must have a completed book. For those with just an idea, or halfway through, click Back and return in another few months when you’re done. Your book will not be proofread or edited by Lulu and so all spelling mistakes, grammatical errors need to be looked at by yourself before you put it on the site. If you have thought this far ahead in terms of what you want the book to look like you can upload pictures for the cover, however they do stress that these are original works and not copyrighted images. If you don’t, you can simply design the colour and font of the type of the book and then go.

Just Like Starting Over, by David Simpson on Lulu.

A few clicks and then there! Done!

This is where you really need to think about the ‘Why’ of all this, as in:

‘Why did you write this book?’

If you wrote it to make you a multi-millionaire then self publishing could be a great first step, or a bad one. Unless you have a cult fan base already, the amount of books you sell will be minimal, less than one hundred if you are lucky and though this is still a great amount, if all you are receiving is £2 profit from each book, the potential £200 isn’t exactly enough to give up your day job. (Remember most writers in the real world exist on their advance, the profit they get from the book can sometimes be less than 15%) Setting a price is a complicated issue, but personally depending on whether you actually want to make a profit I’d suggest the lower the better as obviously the more copies that exist in the world, the more exposure your book gets. Even if you were just to buy a number of your books to send to local newspapers, editorial columns or even agents, the price will be lower for you too.

Getting your book available on Amazon is certainly an attractive proposition.

Personally I think the whole idea of self-publishing could also be used as the greatest confidence boost to writers ever. How many of us have dreamt of having a book published and done? Some people will never see this and yet with this site, this seemingly impossible task is possible. You can send a copy to your Mum and Gran and have them place it on their bookshelves between Mary Shelly and Bram Stoker. Once you have that book in your hands, bound, the flow of confidence is amazing and then all those rejection letters, all those letters that said they ‘couldn’t see a market for it’ soon melt away. Granted, you still won’t find the book in Waterstones or your local library; however with this simple act you can be on Amazon and be accessed by millions of people who are just browsing through that site.

With sites like Facebook, Myspace and others also helping to promote what you place on Lulu you could find that this is the ticket to a million pound book deal.

Is it cheating? Not really. This is more like showing the writers what can be done if they were given the chance and rather than just letting all that hard work go to waste, doing something about it. It’s a blow to all those people who said it would never be a book and potentially the first step to real publication.

It works by installing a bit of software that allows a specific folder to be designated as your ‘DropBox’. The contents of this folder is then automagically uploaded to DropBox servers whenever your computer is on, including any changes you make. Anything on the server that has changed is also automatically downloaded.

Where it gets clever is that you can install it on several computers, and register those computers on the same DropBox account. So, if I’m editing a file in my lunch break at work, that sits in my DropBox folder, it will automatically get uploaded. Then, when I’m at home and I turn on my computer, the document will be automatically downloaded to my home computer. And it works on Mac (my work PC is a Mac), Windows (my home PC) and even Linux, and files can be sent between these different operating systems.

There is also a web interface, that tracks changes to documents, allows you to compare them and roll back changes! Plus, a way of sharing photos between family members and friends.

Another use for writers might be as a collaboration tool – the same document can be updated among different writers.

Of course, some of you will be concerned over issues of copyright. I recommend you read the license agreement if you are worried. But, the quick and dirty version is that you own everything you upload, you agree that you own it, and you agree that it is your responsibility. And here comes another warning – it is not intended as a backup system, even though files are being stored on DropBox servers.

So there you have it. If you give it a go (or have done already), or have thought of another use for it for writers, let us know what you think below.