Links to resources for creative writing, self-publishing, entrepreneurship, worldbuilding, and language.

Entrepreneurship

• Goinswriter.com
  Jeff Goins blogs about entrepreneurship and building a platform.
• Video course in building a platform
  Jeff Goins offers a free video course in three parts about entrepreneurship and how to build a platform.

• The Nonverbal Dictionary
  A dictionary with nonverbal behaviors, their psychological background and lots of sources.

• Internet Speculative Fiction Database
  ISFDB seems to be for books what IMDB is for movies and TV shows.
• readinglength.com
  How many words in a book? Find out by searching among this database’s more than 20 million titles.

• About.com Fiction Writing
  A site about creative writing, lots of articles, practical tips, competitions, and links.
• Advanced Fiction Writing
  Randy Ingermanson’s blog on creative writing.
• BetterNovelProject.com
  Analysis of novels and discussions about how bestselling authors like J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins among others have structured their novels.
• DIY MFA – Do It Yourself Master of Fine Arts
  diymfa.com is a site showing how to create your own Master of Fine Arts.
• FARP – Writing Tutorials
  ”FARP – Fantasy Art and Resource Project” has a section with articles on creative writing.
• Helping Writers Become Authors
  A site that contains lots of articles on writing, focusing on novel structure, scene structure, and character arcs.
• Writers Helping Writers—creative writing guides from emotional wounds to character traits to settings to conflicts.
• Inside Creative Writing
  A podcast about creative writing.
• Margie Lawson
  A psychologist and writing teacher with a focus on writing emotions.
• TV Tropes
  TVTropes.org is a catalog of ”tricks of the trade” for literature and movies.
• Wikihow’s Writing Category Page
  Wikihow has information on a lot of topics, such as writing.

Editing

• Writing And Editing: Five Problems to Avoid in Your First Novel

Structure

• Story Structure Database
  Lists the structure of hundreds of films and books, founded by the author K. M. Weiland.

Tools

• Reedsy Plot Generator
  Get help to come up with plots in genres like drama, fantasy, mystery, romance, and sci-fi.

• The Punctuation Guide
  How to use punctuation in English.
• Unified Verb Index (University of Colorado)

• Creating Fantasy and Science Fiction Worlds
  A series of articles on the subject of creating a fictional world. Covers theology, physics, weather, geology, botany, astronomy, calendars, biology, and anthropology.
• Creating Realistic Fantasy Animals
  ”10 Steps to Creating Realistic Fantasy Animals” describes, as the name suggests, how to create fantasy animals to inhabit a fantasy world.
• Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions
  A list of hundreds of questions to use as inspiration for building a fantasy world.
• Medieval Demographics Made Easy
  ”Medieval Demographics Made Easy – Numbers for Fantasy Worlds” describes the middle ages in numbers. How many butchers in a medieval village with 500 inhabitants?
• Outline of Culture – Wikipedias very thorough outline of culture can be used to get ideas or areas to cover when creating your own culture.
• Project Rho – 3D star maps
  Project Rho – 3D star maps for role-playing or SF.
• 7 deadly sins of worldbuilding – things to avoid when building a fictional world.

Earth – references

• moonconnection.com – moon phases from 1930 to 2024. fullmoon.info – calendar for full moons from 1900 to 2050. Lunar Calculator – manages most years, perhaps though not all kinds of calendars…

Names

• Behind the Name — the etymology and history of first names
• Kate Monk’s Onomastikon (Dictionary of Names)
  “This is a collection of names from around the world which was initially intended to help provide character names for live role-players.”

Sci-Fi

• Project Rho – Atomic Rockets – How to build your own hard-SF atomic rocket ship.
• Architect of Worlds – John. F. Zeiglers (GURPS Space) further work on star and planet generation.

Conlangs

• SCA2 – The Sound Change Applier 2 is a program that applies a set of sound changes to a lexicon.
• eSpeak text to speech – a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux, Mac OS and Windows.
• IPA Reader – translates IPA using several different voices for different languages.

General

• writingforums.org
  A discussion forum for creative writing covering most of the above topics.
• Hundreds of creative writing worksheets at eadeverell.com

Beta Readers

• betabooks.co
  Software for organizing beta readers with such features as access control, online reading on many devices, tracking reader progress and feedback handling. Here’s a very comprehensive comparison between BetaBooks and its largest competitor.
• betareader.io
  Like above. A bit less intuitive UI but has support for Swedish! 😀

Podcasts

• https://writingexcuses.com/

Authors

• https://jerryjenkins.com/