Current trends in the world market have opened doors for Authors of self-published books, thanks to the use of ereaders used on smart phones, tablets, ipads, ipods and iphones.  During Apple’s WWDC 2011 keynote presentation, Apple announced that they had sold more than 25 million ipads in the past 14 months.  Also, Ebooks have a wide and growing line of distribution.

As an Author, writing your first book can be exciting but time consuming. Having access to the latest technology helps the author stay organized and can save them valuable time. There are a ton of Mac applications out there. There are advantages and disadvantages to all of them, so research carefully before purchasing. Listed below are applications to put on your must have list for Authors who are Mac Users.

iBooks Author

Apple has recently created an application that can create and publish amazing Multi-Touch books for iPad. Apple has included templates that feature a wide variety of page layouts for your book. Best of all, you can preview your book on your iPad. Another big bonus for self-published authors is that once you are done, you can submit your finished work to the iBookstore or save as a pdf file.

OS X Mountain Lion

One of the biggest features for this application is the Auto Save feature and Dictation feature. Press the fn button twice on your Mac keyboard. Speak and your voice message will be typed into your document. The Auto Save feature  automatically saves your changes as you go, so you never have to worry about losing your work. As an Author you can go into your history and bring back previous documents. You can easily switch between various applications. For example, you can have Pages and Keynote open at the same time and view with just one click.  Very handy if you are cutting and pasting content to more than one source.

Read More http://www.apple.com/ca/osx/?cid=wwa-ca-kwg-mac-0001

TextExpander

The TextExpander application is created by the company: SmileOnMyMac.

If you find yourself frequently typing the same text, TextExpander 1.3.1 can save you hours of work—and your fingers hours of typing—each month. It lets you assign abbreviations to snippets of text; the abbreviations are automatically expanded to the full text snippets when you type them. For example, when I type homeadd, TextExpander types my full home address. TextExpander can also insert images or a mix of text and images, and you can create new snippets from selected text. TextExpander works systemwide, so your snippets are available in any OS X
application that lets you type text.

Online Review: http://www.macworld.com/article/51829/2006/07/softwarejackpot5.html

Bean

If you do not have iWorks or Microsoft to edit your document, the Bean Application is a wonderful alternative.

Bean supports .rtf, .rtfd, .txt, .html, and .webarchive formats. It can also open .doc, .xml, .odt, and .docx files, although, as with TextEdit, some documents translate better than others.   When writing, Bean gives you updated word and character counts, and the Get Info button provides such useful statistics as number of lines, carriage returns, paragraphs, and pages. You can also select text to see the number of words and characters in the selection.  Bean has formatting options, zooming, and a page layout mode.  Bean, as well, has an auto-save feature that automatically saves date-stamped backup versions of your documents. The developer also offers a Multilingual Edition that’s localized for Catalan, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Slovak, and Swedish.

Online Review: http://www.macworld.com/article/135436/2008/09/bean.html

iCloud

iCloud updates all the changes, stores your documents from your Mac to all your devices including your iPad and iPhone. You can also use iCloud to locate your iPhone.

Yvonne Wu is an award winning author and certified Professional Virtual Author’s Administrative Professional who helps authors spend more of their time doing what they do best – writing a great book. You have a story to tell.  Let’s get you out there to tell it! 

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