Bye Bye 2020, Hello 2021

As Tracey Hirt of Bored Panda points out, 2020 reads like a kindergartner’s first attempt at fiction: Um, so first an entire continent was on fire. But then there was this disease, and everyone forgot about that. So then the whole world had to stay home. And school...

Is Santa a Superhero?

Superhero culture seems to play a similar part to ancient mythology, with superheroes being the modern equivalent of gods and demigods. So, you may be excused for wondering if Santa may, in fact, be yet another superhero. Confessions of the Professions has the answer...

More Funny Similes and Metaphors

Seeing how much you enjoyed my recent post, Funny Similes and Metaphors, here’s another one for you. This one’s courtesy of Writer’s Relief, which hosted a metaphor competition. Here are the results. I hope you like them! More Funny Similes and...

A Wizard’s Hat

Have you ever wondered where the pointy wizard hat stereotype stems from? Someone on Quora did and Wendy Carolan had the answer. Where Does the Idea of the Wizard’s Hat Come from? As you can well imagine, the question here refers to the stereotypical pointy blue...

Funny Similes and Metaphors

Mike Kerr, author of the Humour at Work series of books, has some hilarious similes and metaphors I think you’ll enjoy. Use them as inspiration or steal them for your books. After all, Mike himself copied them from high school essays! Her face was a perfect...

Responding to Negative Reviews

Mark Lindsey of Enplug has written an interesting article with tips on how to respond to negative reviews on social media. There seem to be two schools of thought when it comes to reviews. The first is that reviewers need to feel that Amazon is a safe space where they...

Are There Any Primitive Languages?

Once again, Quora has a great answer on linguistics — and the emergence of language in particular. As Thomas Wier points out, the faculty of language is far, far older than our own species. And that, surprisingly, explains why there is no primitive language. Early...

Old Anglo-Saxon Character Names

As someone who knows how hard it can be to choose a character name for your fantasy novel, I came across some interesting discussions on Quora (here and here). They concerned the letter Æ and the evolution of old Anglo-Saxon names. I hope you find it as interesting as...

5 Crucial Tips For Writing Plot Twists

This is a guest post by Desiree Villena. Desiree is a writer with Reedsy, a marketplace that connects self-publishing with the world’s best editors, designers, and marketers. In her spare time, she enjoys reading contemporary fiction and writing short stories....

Where Are All the Missing Socks?

I had a good laugh when I read on Quora this brilliant answer by Jay Cashen, and just had to share! The question, of course, being what happens to all our missing socks… What happens to all our missing socks? Washers spin clothes at high revs. That generates...

Typography: What Is That Called?

Have you ever wondered why some parts of letters are called tails and stems, and what are other parts besides them called? As David Maier explains, a lot of the terminology seems to come from human and animal counterparts with roughly the same shape or position (eye,...

RecordCast: a Free Tool to Create Your Book Trailer

One of the free author tools I’ve discovered lately is RecordCast. RecordCast is an all-in-one tool for screen recording and video editing that helps everyone turn screenshots into professional-looking videos in just a matter of a few minutes. This can be great for...

Reading Is the Key to Learning

This is a guest post by Garima Aggarwal. Garima is an aspiring content writer working for TABSCAP. Coming from a journalism background, she has been into content writing for 2 years and is passionate about topics related to lifestyle, health, and digital marketing. ...

Black Friday Writer Deals

Publisher Rocket Deal You may remember my review of Kindlepreneur’s Free AMS Tutorial & KDP Rocket (now Publisher Rocket). I have been using Publisher Rocket for two years now to optimize my Amazon campaigns and book categories. Dave Chesson, aka...

Happy Thanksgiving 2020

I know that this year has been hard on everyone (to put it mildly) but I also have a LOT to be thankful for. From my awesome family to my wonderful InSync Media coworkers, I am grateful to a lot of people for making this year much better than it would be otherwise....

Making a Good Impression via Zoom

I don’t know about you but nowadays I find myself increasingly often in front of my computer camera talking to friends and clients. It looks like video calls are now a real thing and not just a prediction whose time had never come. But that only creates new...

The Spread of English

Ivy Panda has created a World Map Timelapse of the spread of the English language from the 5th century to date. You can watch it in its entirety below or click on the links to jump to a specific time period: 0:00 Intro 0:09 5th-15th century 0:26 16th century 0:49 17th...

Your Digital Assets

Since the sudden passing of my father, I’ve been thinking a lot about digital assets and what becomes of them. UK firm I Will Solicitors has produced an interesting infographic about this very topic. I’m sharing here in case others are wondering about the...

Stay Safer while Gaming

Fans of fantasy and sci-fi consume these genres in several mediums, from books to movies and also video games. The latter, however, comes with higher stakes than the rest — hackers and cybercriminals have become increasingly inventive with ways to compromise your...

Picture Colorizer: Free Photo Editing Tool

I recently came across Picture Colorizer; a free online tool that lets you produce stunning color pictures out of your old black-and-white photos. I used it with some old photos from my personal album and was amazed by the result. For example, this is a 1970 photo of...