Resources for Writers on the Web

Posted on Jun 17, 2021 (last modified Jan 26, 2022)

In my travels through the Web, I'm often stumbling across valuable tools and resources for writers, so I thought I would start collecting, organizing, and sharing them. I've only just begun, so the list is not yet exhaustive, but please do check back often and let me know in the comments or contact me if you know of something I should add.

ACX: ACX is a marketplace where authors, literary agents, publishers, and other Rights Holders can connect with narrators, engineers, recording studios, and other Producers capable of producing a finished audiobook. If you’re a Rights Holder, you choose how you produce your audiobook—whether on your own or by engaging a Producer on ACX—and you choose among two royalty models. If you’re a Producer, ACX allows you to post a profile and be seen. Plus, you can be proactive and audition on ACX for posted titles. If you already created an audiobook and just want to sell it, ACX can help you.
AI-Writer: AI-Writer is an article generator that uses state-of-the-art AI writing models to generate content from just a headline.
Alliance of Independent Authors: A professional business membership organization for self-publishing authors. A non-profit that provides trusted advice, supportive guidance, and a range of resources, within a welcoming community of authors and advisors.
Alliance of Independent Authors Self-Publishing Advice Centre: A Self-publishing Advice Center, run as an author outreach service by the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi).
Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing: Self-publish eBooks and paperbacks for free with Kindle Direct Publishing, and reach millions of readers on Amazon.
BookBaby: Provides a variety of online services to help authors self-publish: book printing, eBook services, editing, book design, marketing services, educational resources for writers, templates, and more.
BookSweeps - Join a Promotion: "The Smart & Easy Way to Grow an Audience for Your Books." BookSweeps runs genre-oriented contests featuring multiple authors, helping them grow their BookBub followers, newsletter subscribers, or followers on specific social media sites. Readers then choose which authors they are interested in.
Campfire: At the moment, there is not a very succinct description published about this tool other than, "Develop characters, build worlds, weave plotlines, and write your stories." I haven't tried it yet, so I can't say anything about it, good or bad.
Capitalize My Title: A tool that makes title capitalization easy. Automatically capitalize and case convert to Title Case (in AP, APA, Chicago, MLA, BB, AMA), sentence case, UPPERCASE, lowercase, and more.
Chicago Manual of Style Online, The: The venerable, time-tested guide to style, usage, and grammar in an accessible online format. An indispensable reference for writers, editors, proofreaders, indexers, copywriters, designers, and publishers, informing the editorial canon with sound, definitive advice. Trial subscription available. Paid subscription required for regular use.
CitationGenerator: This online editor allows you to write or paste text, select portions of the text, and then generate a citation in the APA, MLA, and Chicago citation formats. The tool supports creating citations for a book, webpage, magazine, newspaper, video, journal, blog post, image, audio, encyclopedia/dictionary, television, government publication, lecture notes, film/dvd, conference, or report.
Duotrope: Duotrope is a subscription-based service for writers and artists that offers an extensive, searchable database of current fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art markets, a calendar of upcoming deadlines, a personal submission tracker, and useful statistics compiled from the millions of data points they've gathered on the publishers and agents they list. Subscriptions cost USD $5 per month or $50 per year, and all new subscribers get a free trial.
Findaway Voices: Audiobook distributor offering "40+ options to make your title available for sale across retail and libraries". Soon to be releasing Findaway Voices Marketplace, an audiobook creation platform to help you create for distribution.
Grammarly: AI-powered writing assistant provided as a free web browser extension. From grammar and spelling to style and tone, Grammarly helps you eliminate writing errors and find the perfect words to express yourself.
Headline Studio: "Write better headlines that will boost your traffic."
Hemingway Editor: In order to make your writing a lot more expressive and interesting you should try to vary the words you use as often as you can. It's just like Google Search for synonyms. Simply input a word to find unique variations (synonyms) of the word.
IngramSpark: "If you're looking to publish quality print books and ebooks, you've come to the right place! We also offer global book distribution and free resources to help you self-publish successfully. Once you write and format your book, we make it possible to share it with the world."
International Association of Professional Writers & Editors (IAPWE): An organization dedicated to providing helpful resources to writers and editors and disseminating helpful ideas and resources across the greater professional community in the form of outreach, blogging, networking and thought leadership. In addition to providing free resources for members, IAPWE is always seeking talented writers and editors to help create engaging, locally relevant, educational and inspirational content to help support its outreach efforts. IAPWE believes in paying its writers and editors a competitive wage, unlike many of the "content mills" and comparable low-paying clients and/or companies. The IAPWE is also dedicated to bringing the most updated, legitimate and vetted writing and editing job opportunities to its members.
just the punctuation: Paste in some text, then hit 'submit' to strip out everything but the punctuation! Why? See: What I Learned About My Writing By Seeing Only The Punctuation.
LitReactor: A community for writers & book lovers featuring online writing classes, writers' workshops, and columns, articles, reviews and more. LitReactor is a destination for writers to improve their craft; a haven for readers to geek out about books; and a platform to kickstart your writing goals.
Master Writer: A powerful suite of writing tools and reference libraries: Word Families (Adjectives, Adverbs, Nouns, Verbs), Synonyms, Phrases, Definitions, Rhymes, Speech Types, and more.
Medium: A social journalism/blogging platform that pays writers to write about whatever they choose. To read most content on Medium, readers pay for a subscription fee.
OneLook Thesaurus and Reverse Dictionary: This tool lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be anything at all: a single word, a few words, or even a whole sentence. Type in your description and hit Enter (or select a word that shows up in the autocomplete preview) to see the related words. Personally, I think this is the best thesaurus on the Web; I use it all the time.
Plottr: Visual book planning software for writers featuring visual timelines. Use Plottr to track your characters and places. Brainstorm with notes and stay organized with tags. Comes with starter templates based on proven storytelling structures to help you kickstart your writing project. Export to Word & Scrivener.
ProWritingAid: A grammar checker, style editor, and writing mentor in one package. Integrates with MS Word/Outlook, Google Docs, Scrivener, Open Office, and Final Draft. Available with subscription or one-time "lifetime" payment.
Quillbot: "QuillBot's paraphrasing tool helps millions of people rewrite and enhance any sentence, paragraph, or article using state-of-the-art AI."
Reedsy: Reedsy is hard to describe because it has so much stuff: searchable and sortable lists of Book Promotion Sites, Book Review Blogs, Booktube Channels, Independent Publishers, Literary Agents, Literary Magazines. It features a Character Name Generator, a Pen Name Generator, a Plot Generator, Short Story Ideas, Writing contests, Writing Exercises, and Writing Scholarships. There is the ReedsyBookeditor, Free EPUB & PDF typesetting tool, ReedsyDiscoivery, to "Launch your book in style, " and ReedsyPrompts, a weekly short story contest. There is a marketplace for finding professionals to help with your book and more.
Scrivener: A powerful writing application for desktop and devices. "Scrivener is the go-to app for writers of all kinds, used every day by best-selling novelists, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, students, academics, lawyers, journalists, translators and more. Scrivener won't tell you how to write—it simply provides everything you need to start writing and keep writing."
Simily: "At Simily, our goal is to help writers reach new readers and get paid in the process."
Speechnotes: Speech to text online notepad (dictation through your web browser). Also features a Chrome Extension that allows you to voice type on any web page. Automatic transcription of recordings, YouTubes, & more.
Substack: "Substack is the simplest way to start a subscription publication, and the best place to grow it." If you want to build a newsletter and get paid by your subscribers, this is an increasingly popular option.
Synonym Finder: Like a spellchecker, but for style. It makes sure that your reader will focus on your message, not your prose. Features include: Readability Grade Levels, Dangerously Weak Adverb Hilighting, Highlighting of Words That Can Be Simpler, Highlighting of Passive Voice, Toggle Between Write and Edit Modes, Use Text Formatting and Keyboard Shortcuts. Available to test for free on the Web and, for a one-time purchase (not a subscription), is available as a desktop app for Mac OSX or Windows.
Unbound: A crowdfunding publisher that works for readers and authors. Readers back projects, choose rewards, and help spread the word. Authors pitch ideas and rally an audience. Unbound takes the best ideas and makes them real. Stated on the website, June 2021:
"Our community of 289,914 people from 206 countries have pledged £10,413,896 to fund 597 projects — and counting — from bestsellers to award-winners."
Vocal: A social journalism/blogging platform that pays writers to write about whatever they choose. Sort of like Medium, but newer to the scene.
Wet Ink: Create and teach classes around writing. Build deeply engaging workshops and classrooms centered on written assignments. Wet Ink supports various types of learning environments such as Classes, Workshops, Self-Paced Courses and Mentorship. Whether you run in-person, online or hybrid classes, they'll find a happy home at Wet Ink!
Writesonic: AI writing assistant that helps you generate high-quality, human-level blog posts, landing pages, emails, product descriptions, digital ads and more in seconds.