The Book Blogger Toolkit

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a long time: a comprehensive look into the tools that are super useful for any book blogger. All of these have been invaluable in running my blog and creating new posts, and I want to share them with others. I would also love to hear if you have any recommendations too! 🙂

Websites

• Tweetdeck – I wish the desktop version still existed but I find this a lot more awkward to use in my browser, but it is still 100 times better than doing everything via the Twitter website. Much much easier for scheduling Tweets, following hashtags and controlling several accounts at once.
• Goodreads – Well, duh. I’m pretty sure every book blogger uses this website for all their book information, as well as hunting down new releases and meeting fellow-minded people.
• Pixabay – A really great stock image site that’s completely free to use. Perhaps not the biggest variety of images out there, but again, it’s free and the images can be edited.
• Creative Market – I love this website so much. It’s a marketplace for designers to sell images, vectors, fonts etc – but if you sign up to their newsletter, you get six free goodies every Monday. Totally worth it.
• Trello – A ‘to do list’ type website that lets you create ‘boards’. I have different boards for each of my features, and ideas pinned underneath, plus one for general blog admin. A great place to list ideas for future posts.
• DaFont – I have been using this website for years and years, goodness knows how many different fonts I’ve downloaded from here.

Software & Applications

• Ultimate Book Blogger Plug-in – AN ABSOLUTE GODSEND. This was created by my wonderful host, Ashley, and makes the organisation of book blogs so much easier. Once you set up your system, so much is automatic. I don’t know how I managed without it before, and it is absolutely worth your money.
• Google Keep – Handy for noting down blog ideas on my phone whilst I’m on the go. I’ve tried a couple of ‘to do list’ apps, and this has been my favourite so far.
• Google Drive – I love Google Drive a lot for being so easy to share documents with others. I’ve used it to write several collaborative posts in the past, and it makes organisation for Sci-Fi Month so much easier.
• Evernote – I am actually using Evernote to write this post right now… I don’t particularly like writing in the HTML editor in WordPress, it’s rather uninspiring. But the Text Editor is worse. So I like to write things in Evernote, then copy them over and add in the HTML where needed. It’s also handy for when I want to write posts in bed – I’m a bit odd in that I don’t particularly like using my laptop for things like writing posts, because I really need a bigger screen. So I’ll write them in Evernote on my laptop, which then syncs to my desktop, and I can format them from there later.
• Image editing software – I use an old version of Paint Shop Pro (8), which I’ve had for years, but you could use anything. Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop, Picmonkey… got to make those pretty graphics and headers somehow! 🙂

Offline

• Several notebooks – One for review notes, one for general planning purposes. I like to keep them separate so it’s easier to find certain things.
• A paper planner – I blogged about my paper planner before, but I really prefer to use a paper planner over a digital one for planning out my posts. It’s always there when I need it and somehow much easier to read, at least for me.

What tools would you recommend to help other bloggers? Do you use many of these yourself? Let me know in the comments! 🙂