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Listicles

25+ Most Amazing Websites to Download Free eBooks (2021)

February 16, 2021 by Arun 3 Comments

In this article, we will see 25+ websites to download free eBooks.

These could be used to simply READ eBooks for leisure, to learn and to expand our knowledge, OR We can also use some of the websites given here to get your public domain eBooks that are sometimes totally FREE to even publish on Kindle.

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I have obviously not included famous ones like the Project Gutenberg as many already know about that website. So, stay till the end of this video to find out some new websites along with a bonus website at the end.

If you want to “watch” this blog post in a video format, you can see the video below.

1. ebooklobby.com

ebooklobby.com has a humble collection with ebooks categorized into different types such as art, fashion, graphic design, photography, finance, biographies, computers, entertainment, and many others. They also have a section that shows Top 10 ebooks categorized into various sections.

2. bookspics.com

bookspics.com – This website claims to have 275 thousand + books available to download. They have a pretty good collection of books, except that they aren’t categorized for easy identification.

3. planetpublish.com

planetpublish.com – This is a pretty minimalistic website with a neat collection of classic books such as the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Jungle Book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, etc, all available in PDF format ready to download.

4. Librivox.org

Librivox is a website that offers a free collection of Public Domain Audiobooks. This will be loved by people who don’t have time to “read” books but can find time to listen to books through audiobooks. Simply click on their ‘catalog’ and find hundreds of audiobooks, ready to be downloaded, which can also be filtered either by Author, Title, Genre, or Language. A little word of caution here: although these audio books are claimed to be in the Public domain, they are so in the U.S.A. please verify the copyright status of these works in your own country before downloading, otherwise you may be violating copyright laws.

5. free-ebooks.net

Free ebooks dot net is a website that has a HUGE collection of books that are available to download in PDF, Kindle format, text or ePub formats. These downloads are available only after we register with them, which is FREE of course. Go ahead and check it out.

6. freetechbooks.com

This site lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet. All the books listed in this site are freely available, as they are hosted on websites that belong to the authors or the publishers. In other wordS, they don’t host the books but simply provide links to the books in PDF or HTML format available at the authors or the publishers websites.

7. freecomputerbooks.com

Everything on this website is 100% Free. This includes books, lecture notes, magazines, white papers, tutorials and much more.

FreeComputerBooks.com consists of a huge collection of Free online Computer, Programming, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technical Books, which are well categorized by topics, with 13 top-level categories, and over 200 sub-categories. It has both pattern and keywords search engines for you to find the titles quickly.

The key highlights on this website are that most of the books are links to other ‘LIVE’ websites where the books don’t go out-dated as they are all maintained as current and latest by their respective owners.

The other thing is that they even have some books by OReilly publishers, some Mobile computing books where one can find great books on Android Development, iOS programming, etc. Go ahead and start learning coz your “imagination” is the only limit here!

8. gitbook.com

Now this one is my favorite. GitBook was created mid-2014 with the vision of creating a modern and simple solution to documentation, digital writing, and publishing. Since then, they’ve grown to help more than 250,000 people working together into writing 150,000 books served to 20M visitors every month.
To begin, just go to gitbook.com and click on the ‘Explore’ menu then choose a tag that interests you. For e.g. ‘Web development’ brings up these results. Let’s say we go ahead and choose the latest version of “Front-end Developer Handbook 2018” – as you can see these are updated just a few days ago! Let me show you a demo of how and what this book covers.

9. Onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu

An online repository of books maintained by a digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, this is a plain vanilla HTML site but has a great collection of books and is quite organized when we consider the fact that it’s just maintained by 1 or 2 people! Just go ahead and navigate through the hyperlinks given on their homepage to browse through the site by titles, subjects, listings and more.

10. openlibrary.org

Open library is just what it says – an open library, that hosts a huge list of ebooks waiting to be read. It has all the classics and some contemporary books. You can use its search fields to search for books or authors. When ready to read, it has a great book design format that opens right on the screen where we can start reading right away.

11. Google Play books

Next in our list is a little different one. Google Play books. This has the option of either reading on our Android phones or directly on the web browser. I have provided a link to it in the show notes that takes you directly to the Top Free section where you can download hundreds and thousands of ebooks that are mostly short and crisp in their subjects.

12. knowfree.Tradepub.com

As the top destination for the latest research and publications, TradePub.com publishes curated resources on behalf of the world’s largest and most influential companies. The TradePub.com research library is #1 resource for professionals to access free research, white papers, reports, case studies, magazines, and eBooks. Professionals are eligible to sign up for a free TradePub.com Membership to enjoy unlimited access to the TradePub.com resource library including On-the-go access to all materials regardless of device or browser with unlimited access to the complete TradePub library.

13. Amazon Cheap Reads for Kindle

Now, this is not a famous website… wait, I am just kidding here. 🤣 Amazon, as you might not expect, has tons of FREE ebooks to be downloaded. It has a great list of books organized as per categories when you use this special link available in the show notes below. Want to read free romance novels, or mystery, thriller and suspense, or just a classic book or a science fiction, it’s all in here. Just go ahead and get your Kindle apps, if you don’t have a Kindle device or simply read them on your web browser by going to read.amazon.com.

14. feedbooks.com/ publicdomain

Feedbooks – The caption itself promises to provide 1000s of public domain books at the outset. With categories ranging from short stories, fantasy, romance, to the harvard classics shelf of fiction – there are two broad shelves where all these books are kept in – fiction and non-fiction. Ranging from Dante’s Divine comedy, the adventures of Sherlock holmes, Treasure island, Around the world in 80 days, and much more, you can find them all in here.

15. Goodreads

Goodreads – This is not an ebook download site per se but it has a curated list of information about books that are in the public domain. Now people who are into re-publishing public domain books with either an annotation, or illustration, or translation into Amazon’s KDP will find this TREASURE a HUGE help. This has books categorized into various shelves with some even tagged as ‘before 1923’, as you can see here on the screen.

16. ebooks.adelaide.edu.au

This is again a website funded and maintained by a university, The University of Adelaide in Australia. It has a decent collection of books categorized into all these subjects. Although the site design is not that intuitive or great, it does have some neat content and a collection of FREE ebooks worth checking out.

Anthropology
Archaeology
Art
Biography
Books
Economics
Exploration and travel
Fiction
Gastronomy
History
Law
Literature
Medicine
Myth and Fable
Philosophy
Politics
Psychology
Religion
Science

17. LoyalBooks.com

Now, this website is a feast for all readers. And that’s an understatement. It has a GREAT collection of books categorized into various topics, along with providing ebooks for download in various formats from kindle Mobi to pdf to an audiobook. Thus the options are plenty and no excuse for us NOT to read. This website seems to be dedicated to making all free books available to us through this enormous catalog of collections; no wonder it doesn’t surprise when we see that loyalbooks was known as ooksShouldBeFree.com earlier.

18. GRTBooks.com

If you are not just a reader of books but also a collector, this site has many surprises in it. Classics, I mean, age-old scripts are available in this site such as Upanishads, and other sacred texts that goes back to 200 BC and earlier. Works of Plato, Hippocrates, Sun-Tzu, Aristotle, Thiruvalluvar, and The Vedas, Ramayana can all be found in this remarkable HTML-only website. Go Indulge!

19. Wikisource

Wikisource – We all might have heard about Wikipedia, but there is another similar source for getting free books to read and that’s Wikisource. Captioned as ‘a free library that anyone can improve’, it’s another free source for people who are looking to publish public domain books into KDP as almost all the books given here are cited with their publishing year, and many can be found that are published in the 19th century.

20. Baen

http://www.baen.com/catalog/category/view/s/free-library/id/2012

Baen Books is now making available a number of its titles in electronic format, for FREE. They’re calling it the Baen Free Library. Anyone who wishes can read these titles online — no conditions, no strings attached. Or, if you prefer, you can download the books in one of several formats. Again, with no conditions or strings attached. (URLs to sites which offer the readers for these format are also listed. )

Bonus: Now here’s a bonus website: This page from getFreeEbooks has a compilation of many topic-wise ebooks for any kind of reader. https://www.getfreeebooks.com/category/top-compilations/

There are more websites that were worth a mention, but for which I wasn’t sure of the copyrights involved. Go ahead and check all of them in the show notes below.

More websites worth mentioning:

  1. http://www.freebookcentre.net
  2. http://www.freebookspot.com/Catalogue.aspx
  3. http://ebook3000.info/Default
  4. https://www.bookgoldmine.com
  5. https://bygosh.com
  6. https://manybooks.net/
  7. Kobo – free eBooks

As you can see, there is no shortage of websites that let you download and read books for free.

If not already done, make up your mind to start reading to become better in anything you are doing.

Readers are, definitely Leaders.

If not for others, this at least can help you “lead” a better life.

Filed Under: Listicles, Blog Posts Tagged With: guides

Download Free Stock Images for Commercial Use without Watermark

January 12, 2021 by Arun 1 Comment

In this guide, we’ll see 25 websites through which we can download Free Stock Images For Commercial Use Without Watermark.

With this abundance you can have a never ending supply of images and designs for your blog posts, social media posts, within your YouTube videos and video thumbnails – the options are limitless especially if you are a digital content creator.

These websites will help you explore a unique way to create something to make your messages rich with visually appealing treats for your users.

Meanwhile, don’t forget to watch this as a video – subscribe to my channel, and hit on the notification bell icon to be notified of future video uploads, so that you don’t miss them.

TL;DR

  • Little Visuals – https://littlevisuals.co/
  • Photo creator – https://icons8.com/creator/dashboard
  • Jay Mantri – https://jaymantri.com/
  • Blush – https://blush.design/
  • Pixy – https://pixy.org/
  • CC Search – https://search.creativecommons.org/
  • Duotone – https://duotone.shapefactory.co/
  • RawPixel – https://www.rawpixel.com/category/53/public-domain
  • SVG Silh – https://svgsilh.com/
  • IM FREE – http://www.imcreator.com/free
  • Flickr – https://www.flickr.com/
  • Smithsonian Open Access – https://www.si.edu/openaccess
  • FreePhotos.cc – https://freephotos.cc/
  • Free range stock – https://freerangestock.com/
  • Photo Everywhere – http://photoeverywhere.co.uk/
  • AltPhotos – https://altphotos.com/
  • Pik Wizard – https://pikwizard.com/
  • Pexels – https://www.pexels.com/
  • UI Faces – https://uifaces.co/
  • Morgue file – https://morguefile.com/photos
  • Picspree – https://picspree.com/en
  • Burst from Shopify – https://burst.shopify.com/
  • Stock Snap – https://stocksnap.io/
  • New Old Stock – https://nos.twnsnd.co/
  • Visual Hunt – https://visualhunt.com/
  1. Little Visuals https://littlevisuals.co/
    This is one of the websites that is easily close to the heart. And that’s because Little Visuals began as a passion project for Nic Jackson (https://twitter.com/nicjackson?lang=en) but Nic is not among us now – he passed away in November 2013. His family has ensured that all of the images he has taken will remain available and free for commercial use through this website. You can use them anyway you want – and this is a reason enough to credit Nic for his works. The site has a very humble collection but with stunning images. Do give them a try!
  1. Photo creator from icons8. I know you came here to find a list of websites that readily lets you download free stock photos for youtube or for any other commercial use. But here’s something different. Photocreator lets you CREATE your OWN stock photos with swappable properties and faces, instead of providing readymade ones. Here’s how to use it. Simply choose a setting, pick a model – you can also choose to use models with swappable faces, so you can change expressions, hairstyle, and so on.
    Now, this is from icons8 and their ask is pretty straight-forward. Use it for free, but link to icons8. https://icons8.com/license
    https://icons8.com/creator/dashboard
  2. Jay Mantri – https://jaymantri.com/ – as the home page greeting says – Jay Mantri offers us free pics with which we can create magic. Once you are here, simply choose the image and click on the ‘download’ link, to open the image in a new tab where you can right click and save the image to your computer. If you really like the image and want it in a high resolution for printing purposes, you could purchase it for as little as a dollar.
  3. Blush https://blush.design/ – if you are in the designing side of things, you would have already noticed a surge in the use of illustrations on the internet. Blush has gone a step ahead and given this freedom to us to not only provide the illustrations but also customize them to some extent. Just create a free account, search for illustrations, customize them to change background colors, objects, and boom. It’s ready to download and use. They also offer a Figma and Sketch plugin apart from their web app.
  1. Pixy – https://pixy.org/
    Pixy offers high quality free stock images that you can use anywhere. You can choose a specific category from their drop-down menu. What’s unique with Pixy is their ability to provide plac eholder images that we can make use of in our blog posts and websites. Images on Pixy are released under Creative Commons CC0 license. You are free to adapt and use them for commercial purposes without attributing the original author or source. Of course, that’s appreciated but not required.
  1. CC Search – https://search.creativecommons.org/
    CC Search is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone. Their simple to use interface is not to be under estimated because they currently provide more than 300 million images. They also have a search syntax guide if you want to do some advanced queries with search operators. Bonus tip: CC Search also comes in the form of a browser extension. https://opensource.creativecommons.org/ccsearch-browser-extension/
  2. Duotone from ShapeFactory – https://duotone.shapefactory.co/
    If you are a content creator – especially a blogger or a YouTuber, here’s a unique one that goes a step further in your Featured image or Video Thumbnail design. Duotone offers a way for us to search Unsplash and mask it with a transparent dual color tone that can match your brand colors. Simple choose the set of colors you want, and you get not just a free image but a pleasant dual tone colored image that matches your brand.
  1. RawPixel – https://www.rawpixel.com/category/53/public-domain
    RawPixel has a unique artwork collection. Not just the photos but they also provide a wide variety of graphic illustrations. Navigate through their tabbed categories to find your required illustration that comes with the CC0 License. These are free for personal and commercial use with no attribution required.
  2. SVG Silh – https://svgsilh.com/
    SVG Silh – For those who wanted vector graphics, this website is a boon. Not just SVG images, but also PNG formats can be downloaded for free. Their categories span across a huge collection with tagged links provided along with the number of images available within the specific category.

Bonus tip: in this list of websites, there are some that not just offers images, but also free video footages to download and use without any restrictions. See if you can identify any of those, and let us know in the comments below.

  1. IM FREE – http://www.imcreator.com/free
    Im creator’s free section has a decent collection of not just curated images but also a lot of other free web design resources, ALL for commercial use! This website sometimes may require attribution to the creator, and when that’s required you will see it near the download button.
  2. Flickr https://www.flickr.com/
    Flickr in my opinion is the best so far in terms of the number of images and varieties available. After searching for your image, filter the results using their drop-down to navigate across different types of options such as ‘All creative commons’, ‘Commercial use allowed’, ‘Modifications allowed’, and so on…
  3. Smithsonian Open Access – Smithsonian Open Access offers millions of images that can be used right now, without any permission. They provide 2D and 3D digital items through their collections with many more to come. This includes images and data from across their 19 museums, 9 research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
    Smithsonian Open Access assets designated as CC0 for commercial purposes can be used without any attribution or permission. Although they offer copyright-free resources, they do have a detailed FAQ section that’s important to read first before using any of their images which may answer and help you to comply with their requirements.
    https://www.si.edu/openaccess
    https://www.si.edu/openaccess/faq
  1. FreePhotos.cc https://freephotos.cc/
    While stock photos enhance the message you want to convey, free ones ensure you don’t burn down your savings. FreePhotos.cc is one such website in our list that helps you with stunning images. These are again curated from different sources using APIs, but I must admit that their taste in curation and collection is elegant and quite minimalistic in its aesthetics.
  2. Free range stock https://freerangestock.com/
    Now this website provides both photos and illustrations and are available under a different kind of license called Equalicense. This license is slightly different from the CC0 license or public domain where a common sense licensing term is included https://www.equalicense.com/license-faq. You’ll have to create a free account before downloading creatives from the Free Range stock website, and it just takes a minute to do so. Once done, not just downloading, but we also get a choice to further edit it using the free Pixlr online editor.
  3. Photo Everywhere http://photoeverywhere.co.uk/
    Photo Everywhere is a collection of high resolution Travel Stock Images that offers more than 4000 photos. These are all free to use and ready for instant download. Their photos are really cool, and of high quality and context that can be used in a variety of projects. All their photos are neatly organized by locations categorized into the West, the UK, and the East – their complete collection is shown on a World Map with clickable links.
  4. AltPhotos https://altphotos.com/
    All images on ALTPHOTOS are released under Creative Commons CC0 License. It means you may download, modify, distribute and use them free for anything you like, even for commercial purposes. Their license details are clearly shown in the individual image pages, so you can quickly check them before downloading. E.g. https://altphotos.com/photo/brick-wall-with-metal-doors-3471/
  5. Pik Wizard https://pikwizard.com/
    They have a stunning library of over 1 million stock images and videos. All royalty-free and safe for commercial use, with no attribution required. They have a standard license with more details given in their licensing page.
  1. Pexels https://www.pexels.com/
    All photos and videos on Pexels can be downloaded and used for free. My most favorite section in Pexels is their Popular collections area, which can be found from the Discover tab – it has all the latest and trending topics listed.

Attribution is not required. Giving credit to the photographer or Pexels is not necessary but always appreciated. You can modify the photos and videos from Pexels. Be creative and edit them as you like. That’s pretty much it. A quite straight-forward and simple license. https://www.pexels.com/license/

Time for a Bonus tip: If you are a creator from India, Pexels provides a section dedicated where hundreds of images are available in the Indian context. Just visit pexels.com/search/indian/.

  1. UI Faces https://uifaces.co/
    Now, this one is a little different, in a sense that it offers random people’s face images as Avatars for your design mockups. Care should be taken to properly filter your sources of these images before they are used. I would choose Unsplash or Pexels to ensure the Avatars chosen are good to use for commercial purposes too. You could also check an individual photo by clicking on it and verifying its license.
  2. Morgue File https://morguefile.com/photos
    Morguefile is a free photo archive for creatives, by creatives. The photos have been contributed by a wide range of creatives from around the world, ranging from amateur photo hobbyists to professionals and all photos found in the Morguefile archive are free for you to download and re-use in your work, be it commercial or not.
  3. Picspree – https://picspree.com/en
    By now you’d got a hang of what I’m going to say. Yea… you can discover and download beautiful royalty free images, stock photos, illustrations, and vectors – all free here for personal and commercial use. Again, they have a neat User Interface, built-in with organized categories of images. Just be cautious to watch out for premium images listed in-between the search results in here as they are sponsored or paid ones. And you know the drill, remember to check their license information first, before using the content given here.
  4. Burst from Shopify https://burst.shopify.com/
    The next on our list is Burst from Shopify. Now, you might know shopify as an ecommerce platform to create online stores, but they are also highly business-friendly folks. Apart from their other tools, they also provide high quality free images to use for commercial purposes through Burst. When you visit the Burst’s page, remember to check the exclusive Video backgrounds section for some cool backgrounds to use for your Zoom video calls.
  5. Stock Snap https://stocksnap.io/
    At StockSnap you can navigate through awesome collections of high-resolution photos by using the Categories menu or simply go over all their photos in one go. These are CC0 licensed, so you can use them even in commercial projects.
  6. New Old Stock https://nos.twnsnd.co/
    If you are still watching this video, here’s a great one – just for you. This one is a real hidden gem among this list. This website provides vintage photos from the public archives with all the richness of old, noisy, cracky, and grainy looks. Dig deep with this stealthily placed search icon and find your cravings satisfied. These are genuinely vintage collections because when I searched for car, I got these beauties (give some gap) and when I searched for computer – here’s what I get. See, that’s what I am talking about!
  7. Visual Hunt https://visualhunt.com/
    We already have a big list of websites that give us fantastic photos and images so far. Now, how about getting closer to your brand colors and search for free public domain images that matches your specific color requirements! Get to VisualHunt.com and you’ll fall in love with it instantly. Simply click on these colors and find images that matches it. You can also filter by licenses here – where you could specifically choose for Commercial use or Public Domain.

Time for the bonus tip: at least a 25% of the websites mentioned in this video offers API capabilities. In fact, I had mentioned about one of the websites earlier which uses API. If you happened to be a developer and know what I am talking about, you can easily create tools on top of these websites to offer something related to images, to give back to the creative community.

Most free images available on the internet are either in the public domain or are offered through a Creative Commons license:

Public domain is that area in which the creative works are available for the community at large, unprotected by copyright or patent, which means you and I can make use of these works to amplify our messages.

That being said, some common sense rules still apply – because your peace of mind, reputation, and your finances are more important than rushing on your photo requirements hastily now and getting into expensive legal battles later.

Remember while using free images:

a) Images and Videos depicting identifiable persons may not be used for pornographic, unlawful or other immoral purposes, or in a way that can give a bad name to people, or to imply endorsement of products and services by those persons, brands, organisations, etc.

b) Almost all these websites have an ‘About’ page, a ‘Terms of Use’ or ‘Terms of Service’ page along with privacy, iability, and boundaries of usage. Spend a few minutes checking them out before you use their images because your peace of mind, reputation, and your finances are more important than rushing on your photo requirements.

c) If you want more guidance on attributions, check the links given in the description. (add them to the blog post: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution)

d) Visit the official CC0 license page to learn more about the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ and in general about the CC Licenses. https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/

Whenever you see a CC0 License: Here’s what you can do:

  • Download the image file
  • Publish, revise, copy, alter, and share that image
  • Use the image (as-is or as you’ve altered it), in both personal and commercial contexts.
  • You don’t even need to attribute the image to the creator. However, even though it’s not required, it’s a way of Saying Thanks to include an appropriate attribution. It’s a nice thing to do.
    Check the license information specific to the websites listed here.

Here’s what you cannot do:

  • You cannot use these images to imply any kind of endorsement on the part of the image creator or any person or product depicted in the image.
  • You can’t pass the image or the photographer as a direct stamp of approval for you, your company, or your products or services.
  • Finally, you cannot sue or claim any kind of liability against the person who created the image on any kind of theory of warranty or guarantee in the image.

To reiterate, most of these websites won’t allow us to re-sell them for a price. These are just to use in your projects, videos, websites but may not to sell them directly. Just make sure you read each of these websites policies on how to use them without getting into any trouble.

That’s all for this guide, I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Filed Under: Blog Posts, Listicles Tagged With: Resources

25 Awesome Tools For Authors and Self-publishers

February 23, 2020 by Arun Leave a Comment

You could be a magazine editor, copy writer, blogger, author, poet, song-writer, self-publisher or a creative writer of any kind.

All the tools we’ll now see are going to benefit you in many ways!

1. Yarny

The first one we’re going to see is called Yarny which is an ideal software for fiction-authors.

  • First, create a free account so whatever you write gets saved and synced to the cloud.
  • Then name your novel – here you could also give yourself a goal of writing a specific number of words and track it!

We can start writing our chapters on the left side of its screen, and those are called as snippets in Yarny. These snippets could then be reordered if you decide to change the order of your writings by dragging and dropping.

You could also create a group and combine a set of snippets by clicking at the icon given in the bottom left corner of the tool. The ideas for people, places, and things can all be stored on the right panel, and organized by tags.

This tool also saves different versions if you decide to discard and revert to older plots. Once done, download your work by clicking on icon given at the bottom by choosing the format you want. It also offers different themes to suit your mood.

Did I tell you that Yarny is totally free!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NOok2dGjxA

2. iAWriter

iAWriter promises a distraction-free interface to let our thoughts flow on to the screen. It supports Markdown formatting, and we can choose to gray out all the words except the sentence that we are currently writing. They call it the ‘Focus mode’.

This software also highlights different parts of speech in different colors.

While this offers a paid version, there is a trial that you definitely want to try and even buy this which comes only for $19.99 for its Windows version and $29.99 for the Mac version.

3. Wordslingr

This is basically an online community for writers to help fellow writers to become better by providing feedback on their writing. Not just that, it provides feedback at all levels of the writing journey – be it writing, editing, formatting, or publishing – but that’s part of the paid version.

The free version of Wordslingr’s interface is similar to Yarny in terms of setting writing goals. You can change the default goal of 750 words and also change the word count to any number you want.

Create a new file by clicking on this button, and choose a template if you want to. There are multiple templates available to choose from, in case you run out of ideas. It’s editor is quite simple in its interface, with the regular formatting tools.

(Psst… please remember to check some free guides available on my Gumroad page as well)

One key feature is the in-built Thesaurus, and dictionary. The real fun begins while writing the story where you could activate the navigation from the view menu and create your characters, outline, note down your researches.

4. Wavemaker

Wavemaker is a totally free tool!

With Wavemaker, you could easily write a whole novel!

It provides options to structure your draft novel manuscript into chapters, scenes, and notes – which can all be shuffled around in the order you want.

This virtually runs on any device, and the writings can be synced using Google Drive. This also works offline, so you could write from within a train or in your next flight to that city.

It provides planning boards to move around your plot ideas.

5. Sigil

Sigil is a free and open source software available for windows, mac, and Linux OS, that you can use to self-publish your next book.

This is an amazing piece of software to create deeply customized ePub files that can be used for submitting to many online publishing vendors, including Amazon KDP, Nook, iBooks, etc.

It comes loaded with a plenty of features, so much so that, it might take a while for us to get used to its interface. If you know HTML, CSS, then you can create a custom css file to easily decorate any part of your eBook. Although, Sigil could seem intimidating when you use it for the first time, it is a highly flexible tool with an in-built editor to directly edit the parts of your manuscript.

The only downside is that you cannot import Word document files – it supports only HTML and epub files. Not to forget that Sigil’s functionalities can be infinitely expanded with its plugins that are available from this mobileread forum page.

6. Kindle create

This is a software from Amazon. It’s a fantastic tool for those who are into Kindle ebook self-publishing on Amazon KDP – the Kindle Direct Publishing.

With this tool, you can easily format your ebook manuscript, and export to a KPF file to upload to KDP. This is also a free software available for Windows and Mac.

If you would like to know how to get started with Kindle create, I made a walk-through video that you can watch it right here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgImB6OtXHM

7. Kindle Add-in

Speaking of Kindle create, another offering from Amazon’s KDP is Kindle add-in for MS Word.

For those who use Microsoft Word, this is a simple add-in that sits right inside your Word document which can be used to format your eBook while writing it.

This even has an inbuilt previewer that comes along with it. I have a separate video on how to install and use Kindle add-in that you can watch and learn right here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMTzcE1IIsU

8. Calibre

Calibre is a powerful and easy to use e-book manager which is fully free to use. It’ll allow you to do nearly everything around maintaining your ebooks and it takes things a step beyond normal e-book software. It’s basically an ebook storage and management tool but it also allows to edit ebook content and metadata, change eBook’s cover, create ePub files or, convert to many different formats, to publish on Kindle, Nook, iBooks, etc. If you want to learn how to change ebook’s cover, I made a video on that one – which is available on this notification or watch it later by clicking on the link given in the description.

9. Ilys

This is an online tool but a great one to help authors. Especially for writing books with distraction free environment and bringing out all your creative juices without letting the left brain react to all the errors and formatting mistakes you make while writing. This often interrupts your creative flow, as you might have encountered while writing. That’s when this Ilys tool helps to first get the writing done, and save all the editing and formatting work for later when there is no creativity happening in our brains. This tool comes in very handy if you are into participating in NaNoWriMo or any other writing competitions because the main aim of this tool is to let you write first without the luxury to hit on backspace or delete keys or even see what you’ve written so far, and that means we cannot take breaks until we have written a lot in a single streak.

Let’s take a break and recap for a minute. We’ve seen 9 tools so far and here’s a list of what’s free, and what’s paid so you can choose which ones to give a try based on your budget. And just keep watching because we have more tools to come.

10. MasterWriter

This is a Songwriting, Lyric Writing, Poetry and Creative Writing Software. Whether you’re writing a song, a poem, a novel, a script, a blog, or whatever your written or verbal communication happens to be, MasterWriter will unlock all that the English language has to offer. The unique tools and reference dictionaries contained in MasterWriter will help you to express yourself in a unique and more meaningful way. This software comes with more than a hundred thousand rhyming words and 36,000 rhymed phrases. Filters allow you to search on perfect, close and wide rhymes which gives you more choices and helps you to express yourself in a more creative way. You can also search by syllable and on phrases that rhyme.

In case you are not in to song writing but say fiction writing, then you may not want to use the same words over and over while writing dialogues. Instead of saying “she was angry…” you could find the word families for the word ‘Angry’ and instead say ‘fuming’, or ‘seething’… you get the idea. So, why struggle to find the right word when you can have all the possibilities in an instant? Free your mind to create and let MasterWriter do the rest.

11. BookBolt

This is a tool for self-publishing enthusiasts. They offer some really good tools on their website with which you could create ‘No content’ books such as Diaries, Journals, Music sheet books, by using their templates, and upload to KDP and start earning some neat commission on the side.

bookbolt

If you are interested in learning further about this world of ‘no content’ publishing, then let me know in the comments below and I might do a different video for you explaining how this is done.

The links are given in the description below if you want to give BookBolt a try. https://bookbolt.io/interior-wizard/ (give aff link).

12. Portent Title Maker

Now if you are more into writing blogs or articles with fancy titles for sharing on social media with or without the intent to make them viral, then this resource is just for you. This tool creates viral-worthy headlines created from the subject or keywords you input here. Then all you have to do is to simply click to find amusing and surprisingly good title ideas.

13. Reedsy

Reedsy is a British online author services firm based in London which serves as a bridge uniting authors and publishing freelancers in the self publishing industry. They offer a bunch of tools as well, such as book title generator, character name generator, epub to mobi converter, pen name generator, short story ideas, book editor, formatting options, and even publishing your manuscripts into pre-formatted PDF or ePub files that can be used to self-publish on amazon or any book publishing websites.

The editor interface is rich with features, and is easy to follow. One key feature that stood out for me is their pre-formatted sections that we can add as Front matter to our books by properly separating them in order and different pages before our actual chapters begin.

14. Draft

If you are writing something in collaboration with someone else, then Draft is for you. When you share your document using Draft, any changes your collaborator makes are on their own copy of the document, and you get to accept or ignore each individual change they make. When you want to compare your old drafts, you have a powerful view to see how your document changed over time by using version control. You can also import your documents from cloud services like Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive. They provide markdown formatting and also comes with the Hemingway mode where editing is not an option and you could just keep writing using their minimalist interface. There are plenty of other options that you might want to give a shot using draftin.

15. Power Thesaurus

A straight-forward ‘let’s cut to the chase’ tool that offers synonyms for any word you want to use while you are writing. This gets us out in the open by saving us from using the same words repeatedly, thus breaking the patterns and helping your readers get some fresh air from reading what you write. Well, not just synonyms but antonyms, sentence examples, and their definitions too.

16. Noisli

This product offers some soothing background noises like the sound of rain, wind, forest, leaves, and many other ambient sounds. They are free to use if you are using the web version, and have paid options if you are looking for the mobile apps.

Noisli also comes in the form of a handy Google Chrome Extension. They offer a distraction-free text editor once you sign up.

This editor offers markdown and an option to save either to your Google Drive or Dropbox, or even just download it to your local as a text file.

17. Cold Turkey

This has a free version which comes as a portable software. When I used this, I always felt that it was actually productive to write and just keep writing. No bells and whistles, whatsoever – I mean, no formatting, no themes, no sounds, just a full screen writing experience with a couple of options. It keeps automatically saving until we save it manually.

They have both Windows and Mac versions.

This software allows us to block everything until a certain number of words are typed or when a specific minutes are passed. You can also choose to do any of these and just proceed with writing.

I really liked that they offer a free stand-alone, portable version to just use, instead of bloating a setup file and forcing installations to use their software. Pretty neat work. Worth a try if you want a distraction-free writing where all other apps are blocked until you reach a timed goal or word count. Of course, they do have a paid version in case you want to get the sound tracks, themes, and formatting.

18. Grammarly

If writing is an object, grammar mistakes are its shadow – it never leaves us. With a good writing flow, making spelling grammar mistakes are inevitable. That’s when Grammarly can help us because writing is writing, but without editing, there is no good writing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LYLCpkglSg

This comes as a standalone Desktop software, or as Word add-in, or just use it on the Web with its browser extension which is free. It has got some pretty neat features to edit on the go and make the sentences look great.

I have created a detailed review of this software which you can watch by clicking on this notification card. To use this tool, you can create a free account from here (aff link) – which is also provided in the description below.

19. ProWritingAid

If Grammarly doesn’t satisfy you, don’t worry, our next software in the list might make your life even better by becoming your Grammar guru. This is another in-depth online grammar checker and is slightly tailored towards authors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgYZ7QlF8M8

If you want to change your writing in leaps and bounds and make editing better, give this tool a try. Although this is a paid software, it has a free browser extension that you can use. All said and done, it’s only a matter of choice between this and Grammarly on which one you would want to use.

20. Hemingwayapp

This is a web based app that provides a writing AND editing environment. Not just that, they also make helpful suggestions to make our writing better by color-coding and highlighting their suggestions and our possible mistakes while writing, when we are in the editing mode. Just one word of caution that the paid version is better instead of the free one because the free web version of HemingwayApp doesn’t offer saving or exporting, and you might just have to copy and paste it to take it forward. If you want a desktop offline app, then go for the paid version – it comes for both Windows and Mac, and it’s current version, which is version 3 comes with a one-time payment of $19.99 for lifetime access, at the time of making this video. The price is the same for both the Windows and Mac versions of Hemingway. This app actually beats many other tools we saw in this video and will be a great investment if you choose to go for the Desktop offline app.

21. Scrivener

If you are a professional writer who writes for a livelihood, then Scrivener is one of the best investment you may want to make in.

scrivener

This is a boon for authors who are into fiction-writing because this tool helps with plot creation, character name generation, map characters to different scenes, keep research and writing together on a comparable interface, and many such features to help authors of all kind.

They offer a 30-day trial and comes in Windows and Mac versions. They have a bundle purchase option too if you are into using both the Windows and Mac computers.

Their iOS version for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch comes in at $19.99 if you are into writing on-the-go using your mobile phones.

22. Scapple

From Literature and Latte.com, again. This one is again for fiction writers who want to map the characters visually and plot scenes.

scapple

They too have a one time fee and available for both mac and windows. They offer a free 30-day trial for you to check and see if it’s worth your shot.

23. Novlr

This tool comes with a beautiful, simple, sharp, and well-designed interface, something that offers the perfect screen for focusing your mind.

They come in Day, Evening, and Night mode to choose from depending on your mood. Writing style suggestions, Grammar enhancements, Spell check, Syncing to Google Drive or Dropbox, all of these and more are all part of the package.

So, start using Novlr and join over 40,000 writers in 125 countries today.

This works both offline and online with an assurance to constantly save your work and thus secure your writing without the need to create manual backups. Their focus mode is something you must give a try to keep your creative juices flowing. They also offer importing options if you have to import your work from elsewhere in the .txt .rtf .docx .odt formats, along with an option to publish the work as an eBook!

24. Stormboard

This is a great tool for books that are worked on by two or more authors. With an in-built chat feature, this comes for free with upto 5 users’ personal use to create a maximum of 5 storms – which means 5 book ideas. They also provide various templates to choose from – a business model canvas template, agile scrum kanban board template, retrospective basic type template and much more, depending on a framework you like to implement in your planning and execution.

25. Clippings.me

This is a Online Portfolio for Journalists, Bloggers and Writers. By joining them for free, you could add your best work, customize your page and then share your online portfolio with the world – without a single line of code. Thousands of writers trust them with their work, and building your free online portfolio takes just minutes. Join 100,000+ Clippings.me users free today and start showcasing your portfolio for free.

And here’s an extra bonus entry into the list:

26. Cliché Finder:

When writing, it is important to avoid overused single words, phrases, and expressions in order to develop a well-written piece. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to conduct all on your own, hence the importance of a cliché finder tool. With Cliché finder, you can eliminate Clichés & enhance communication skills like a pro.

Filed Under: Amazon KDP Tips, Blog Posts, Listicles, Self- Publishing Tagged With: guides, Resources

5 Sure-Fire URL Shorteners That Work

August 25, 2018 by Arun Leave a Comment

Here’s a quick question for you: which one of these two hyperlinks is easy to remember:

https://www.thekeyponderer.com/tips-on-developing-good-communication-skills-in-the-workplace

or

https://bit.ly/awsm-work

As a matter of fact, both the above hyperlinks take us to the same destination!

If you want to share a long hyperlink URL with your friends and make it easy to remember without having to copy and paste, then the custom URL shorteners shown below will definitely help you.




Note: Google’s very own URL Shortener “goo.gl” is deprecated and will soon be discontinued from service (by March 2019) [source]

A classic example is sharing links to mapped locations like this one:

https://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=louth&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=33.219383,38.803711&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Louth,+United+Kingdom&ll=53.370272,-0.004034&spn=0.064883,0.075788&z=14

or any of the e-commerce product pages like this one:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01J94YIT6/ref=s9_acsd_al_bw_c_x_2_w?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=merchandised-search-1&pf_rd_r=R0AA6PSNY4T30CFVTSM2&pf_rd_r=R0AA6PSNY4T30CFVTSM2&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=f22a5e74-3b2b-496d-a59d-e795d539aae9&pf_rd_p=f22a5e74-3b2b-496d-a59d-e795d539aae9&pf_rd_i=6669703011

which could be converted to this one:

v.gd/suwihu

What this tool does here is that it takes a long hyperlink and transforms it into a manageable hyperlink which almost never even exceed 20 characters and can be easily remembered for life!




You can even customize it to have your own memorable words suffixed to the shortened hyperlink, subject to its availability.

There are plenty of URL shorteners to choose from. I have constantly used almost all of these URL shorteners which not only helped me in sharing them with friends, but some of these services even let me see the statistics on how many times these links are clicked and viewed.

Here are those 5 Best URL shorteners that are tested and proved to be useful.

1. bitly.com
2. tinyurl.com
3. youtu.be (odd one out :))
4. is.gd
5. v.gd

Bonus: bl.ink

If you would like to know more in detail about these services (and about that bonus mentioned above), you can watch it in this video here:

So, now you know how to shorten your long URLs and commit it to memory if you want to share it with your friends.

You can just even stick to any one of these to make your job easier, go ahead and comment below and let me know which one among these is your favorite URL shortener.




Filed Under: Technology Tips, Blog Posts, Listicles Tagged With: guides, Resources

25+ Most Amazing Websites to Download Free eBooks

March 4, 2018 by Arun Leave a Comment

In today’s amazing blog post, we will see 25+ lesser-known websites to download FREE eBooks.

These could be used to simply read ebooks for leisure, to learn and to expand our knowledge, OR we can also use some of the websites given here to get your public domain ebooks that are sometimes totally FREE to even publish on Kindle.

I have obviously not included famous ones like the Project Gutenberg as many already know about that website.

Go ahead and download this list in PDF format from the downloads page, to find out some new websites along with some bonus tips at the end of this FREE report.

Download PDF (350 KB)

As you will see in the above FREE PDF report, there is no shortage of websites that let you download and read books for free. If not already done, make up your mind to start reading to become better in anything you are doing.

Readers are, definitely Leaders. If not for others, this at least can help you “lead” a better life.

If not already done, simply download the free PDF report by clicking on this link NOW.  And you can refer to it anytime in the future.

Filed Under: Self- Publishing, Blog Posts, Listicles, Technology Tips Tagged With: ebooks

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