Favorite Things
Below, you’ll find my Amazon shopping lists and my affiliate links for products and courses that you might enjoy. As an Amazon Influencer and an affiliate for other programs, I earn from qualifying purchases. However, I have only included products I’ve used or that come highly recommended. I hope you find these resources helpful!
Stacy's Amazon Store - Organization, Tech, Writing, & More
Main Storefront
Try Audible Plus, an all-you-can-listen membership that offers access to thousands of titles, including a vast array of audiobooks, podcasts and originals that span genres, lengths, and formats.
Try an Amazon Prime 30-day Free Trial. This membership program offers special benefits including: * Instantly watch thousands of movies and TV episodes * Borrow Kindle books * Get unlimited free two-day shipping (no minimum order size)
Try a Prime Student 6-Month Trial. This membership program offers special benefits to college students including: * Unlimited free two-day shipping (with no minimum order size) * Exclusive deals and promotions for college students
Shortcuts For Writers Programs & Blog Guidelines
Grammar, Writing, & Editing Tools
Worldbuilding template (Free) – Richie Billing offers an amazing free worldbuilding template and guide on his website. This template allows you to be more organized by breaking up your process into two key considerations: the physical world and the cultural world. It serves as a mini questionnaire, bringing order to a chaotic process. It’s especially useful for fantasy and sci-fi writers, though any novelist can benefit from this helpful guide.
ProWritingAid – ProWritingAid is my favorite editing software, and is a grammar checker, style editor, and writing mentor in one package. If you’re a new ProWritingAid user and purchase through my affiliate link, you’ll get a 10% discount on an annual license.
Plottr – Plottr is a visual outlining tool built for published and aspiring writers of all kinds including novelists, screenwriters, playwrights, academics, journalists, writing students, and beyond. Whether you’re an outlining pro or your journey is just beginning, Plottr can help you visually (and creatively) build a plan to write your book.
Plot Factory – Plot Factory is an online story planner that provides you with the tools you need to plan, organize and create stories, fictional worlds, characters, and more. It runs as a freemium app. You get all the necessities for writing for free, and the nice-to-have features with a paid subscription.
Scrivener – Scrivener is the go-to app for writers of all kinds. It unites everything you need to write, research, and arrange long documents in a single, powerful app. At its heart is a simple ring-binder metaphor that allows you to gather your material and flick between different parts of your manuscript, notes, and references with ease. Break your text into manageable sections of any size and leave Scrivener to stitch them together. Integrated outlining tools let you plan everything first or restructure later. And as your project grows, you’ll find that Scrivener grows with it.
Graphics Resources
MockupShots – With MockupShots, you can get lifetime access to a complete library of book mockup images, putting your book into over 600 different settings in only 10 seconds. Create product page images with transparent backgrounds, themed images for holidays and seasons, and action images of your book moving across the screen. The price is regular $207, but with this link you can get it for $97.
You can watch my 12-minute video demo on YouTube.
Productivity & Planners
Planner Pads – This is what I personally use as a daily planner. Check out the undated versions with start dates that sync with your unique timeline. Choose from spiral bound or loose leaf versions which are available in different sizes and ink colors.
Marketing Tools
Publisher Rocket – This handy tool, which I own, will help you get your book in front of more Amazon shoppers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. Rocket gives you real data that shows you exactly what Amazon customers type into Amazon, as well as how many people search for those keywords every month. With the category feature, you can quickly find relevant niche categories for your books, as well as find out how many books you’d need to sell that day in order to be the new #1 bestseller. Rocket will help you find hundreds of profitable keywords for your Amazon ad book advertising campaign in under 10 seconds. Once you have your list of keywords just click export and paste your keywords right into your AMS campaign, and you’re done!
The site has lots of free resources also, including:
How to Choose Keywords Tutorial
How To Choose Categories Tutorial
ConvertKit – This is the email service provider that I use for my mailing list. It offers automations, customizable sign-up forms, and landing pages to help bring in more email subscribers.
The Free plan includes:
- Management of up to 1000 subscribers
- Unlimited landing pages
- Unlimited, customizable CTAs & signup forms
- 30+ premium landing page templates
- Unlimited traffic
- Customizable domain setup
- Mobile responsive designs
- Unlimited email broadcasts
- Subscriber tagging
- Seamless Unsplash integration
- Creator community
Below are a couple of mailing list providers recommended by my writer friends:
AWeber – One interesting integration is with the design software, Canva. You can read about that here.
Podcast Power from Irene Gabelnick – Podcast Power is a 10-page ebook that shows you a quick and easy system to land live radio and podcast interviews. It includes 5 email templates to get you booked in the media, build your brand, and get seen.
From Elizabeth Goddard:
The Tripwire Training – Elizabeth’s tripwire training (which I have gone through) is an in-depth course covering everything you need to know to start making surprise money with a tripwire offer. You’ll learn how to plan, set up, launch and refine your tripwire funnel in no more than a couple of hours.
The Painless Guide to Hiring and Working With a VA – This class walks you through the entire process of getting your business ‘VA ready’, hiring the most magical unicorn VA out there, how to work together day-to-day so you get the very best support out of your fledgling team, and how to become the much loved ‘favorite client’.
Website & Domain Resources
Namecheap – This is where I purchase my domains. It’s easy and inexpensive.
SiteGround – This is what I use for my hosting. SiteGround has three plans to choose from: The StartUp plan is perfect for people with one website. It’s what I started on. The GrowBig plan (which is what I’m now on for my three sites) is a great value for the money offer, including the option for multiple websites and the Ultrafast PHP that greatly improves website speed. By using my link, you’ll get a significant discount.
