iBooks is Apple’s eBook reader. It’s available for free on Mac OS X and all iOS devices. You can purchase eBooks from Apple’s iBook store but you can also load your own ePub and PDF books into the app using iTunes.

Annotating a Book in iBooks

Tap and hold to highlight a section of text you’d like to annotate in the book you’re reading. Using the sliders on the selected text to expand or contract your selection. A menu of options will appear above your highlighted text. Click the right-arrow until you see the Note option.

Enter your note below the text you highlighted and click the Done button at the top.

You now see that your selected text stays highlighted and a highlight mark is shown on the right side of the text. You can click this mark to edit your note.

Exporting Annotations

You can export only a few annotations you select or the entire list of all your annotations for a book by first clicking on the chapters icon at the top of iBooks.

Tap on the Notes tab to see all the annotations you’ve made on this book.

Tap on the options icon and choose Edit Notes so you can select what notes to export.

You can either manually check each note you want to export or you can use the Select All option at the bottom to select all your annotations at once.

After selecting what annotations to export, click the Share button at the bottom.

You can now email or print your annotations.

If you email the notes, they are listed inside the email text along with the selected text.

Google’s free Google Docs online editor is a great option for sharing and annotating documents. Google Docs is also integrated with Google Drive so that your documents are all automatically stored and accessible in the cloud.

Annotating a Google Document

Highlight the text that you want to annotate in your document.

In Google Docs, an annotation is referred to as a “comment.” You can create a comment by either clicking on the Comment button or using the keyboard shortcut CMD + OPT + M (on Mac) or CTRL + ALT + M (on Windows).

Enter your comment into the box that appears at the right side of the text and click the Comment button to save it.

Because Google Docs is a collaborative, cloud-based servie, it also provides a way to reply to a comment and resolve existing comments to mark them as noted similar to Microsoft Word’s change tracking features.

Exporting Annotations

Click the Share button at the top right corner to share your annotations with another person. Follow the sharing options to enter another person’s email address to send your document and annotations to.

Google Docs is a great free option for annotating and collaborating on a document or even a book.

Marvin is a fabulous mobile eReading app. Any ePub or PDF book can be loaded into Marvin and read from your iOS device. Marvin also integrates with cloud-based services such as DropBox that make it easy to sync your eBooks without having to tether your phone to your computer.

Annotating a Book

With an eBook open in Marvin, touch and hold on the text that you want to annotate. The text will be selected. You can drag and drop the sliders under the text to expand or contract your selection area. Several options will show above the selected text.

Click on the paint brush icon with the “+” to highlight the selected text and enter a note.

Enter your note in the box and then tap away from the window to save the note into this book’s annotations.

The selected text is now highlighted. You can click on the highlighted text to edit your note.

Exporting Annotations

You can export an individual annotation or a list of all annotations for a book by first clicking on the book icon at the top of the Marvin app.

Click on the Highlights tab at the bottom to view the list of annotations for this book. Click the export icon at the top right corner to access the export options.

Tapping the Export Annotations option will create a .MRV file that can only be read by others that have the Marvin App (nice for backups but not a great way to send annotations to others). Instead, use the Send Highlights and Notes option to export a list of all annotations for the book.

An email is created for you that has both a .CSV (comma separated values) that can be opened in Microsoft Excel or Apple Numbers and a .HTML file that can be opened in any browser. These formats are totally portable and easily sent to anyone that needs a list of your annotations.

Marvin is a convenient app to create annotations on the go and easily export them in an open format.

Beta readers are readers that receive an early (pre-publication) copy of a book to read and provide feedback to the author. The term “beta” is taken from the software world where early versions of software (still with bugs and not feature-complete) are termed “beta” releases and are put out to receive feedback from a select group of advance users.

What Does a Beta Reader Do?

The author provides a copy of the book (usually in digital form but sometimes printed also) to the beta reader and sets a deadline for when feedback must be received. The beta reader reads the book and may make notes or annotations along the way about their reactions to the story, what they liked, what they disliked, where they got confused, and any parts that might need to be improved.

“The number one goal of a beta reader should be to provide feedback that will help make the book better.”

What Can a Beta Reader Expect?

The book beta readers are given is not a print-ready version. There will most likely be issues like grammar, punctuation, and sentence wording. Authors usually provide their book to beta readers when they feel that the major story issues are worked out and the book is getting close to being ready for publication.

Ways to be an Effective Beta Reader

Don’t focus too much on grammar, punctuation, or sentence structure. The author will most likely have professional editing services provide a final copy-edit on the book before publication. Feel free to give feedback on any obvious grammar / punctuation / sentence structure issues but try to focus most of your efforts on the story itself.

As you read, here are a tips:

1) Confusing or unclear parts – look for any passages that confused you or where you were pulled out of the story. Places that are unclear or you had to read multiple times to understand are important to note.

2) Satisfying ending – did the ending fit with the story? Was it satisfying?

3) Out of character – did a character do or say something that didn’t seem to fit the character that had been established?

4) Overused phrases – are there words that seem overused or a phrase that seemed to be improperly used?

5) Boring parts – were there any places where you were tempted to skip ahead? Any parts of the story that seemed boring?

6) Underdeveloped scenes – were there any scenes that you had trouble visualizing? Was there a part where you had trouble picturing a setting or what the characters looked like?

7) Realism – Do the characters seem real? Do their motivations make sense?

8) Plot holes – was there a part where the character should have done something obvious but didn’t and it frustrated you?

Remember that the most important thing you can do as a beta reader is to provide honest, constructive feedback that can help make the book better.

I took approximately 20 pages of notes at LTUE. I attended 24 sessions on various writing topics over three full days. Along the way, something was bound to jump out to me. After scanning back through my notes, I noticed several scribbles that were starred to remind me to not forget. So here’s a few of the biggest realizations I had at LTUE 2014:

ePubs are just HTML

This was a revelation for me but it makes perfect sense in hindsight. ePubs are just made up of HTML, images, and fonts. It’s super straightforward and since I know HTML, doing the formatting on my eBooks is not only doable but is also going to probably be fun. I learned a ton about using Sigil to format an ebook and the in’s and out’s of using custom fonts, images, and layout.

There are no rules for the process of writing

I’ve been looking for magic bullets for a long time but it occurred to me during a session on writing preparation that there are no hard and fast rules for “the best” process to write a book. The best advice given was to just try LOTS of things (in fact, try as many different techniques as possible) and find the techniques that work for you.

Romance payoffs are when a wall is breached between two characters

I went to a romance session… Let me give you a moment to pick yourself off the floor… Okay, so ya, this romance panel was great. Even if I never write a purely romance book (although I’ve been threatening lately), I want to have some kind of romance or at least romantic connection between characters so I went to learn more. The biggest take away for me was realizing that romance is all about tension and then release. The release is the payoff and comes when the two characters breach another romantic wall between each other.

Never put a scene in your book that you don’t absolutely love

Or another way to put it is leave out the boring stuff. If you don’t love the scene, don’t think it’s fabulous, can’t live without it, then it either needs to be reworked/rewritten or cut. Simple as that. If it’s awesome, keep it. If it’s lame, lose it. It really isn’t more complicated.

Studying the craft of writing while writing ups your word count

Attended a really interesting class about writing and how your brain works. What they showed through a number of studies and tests is that writers who study the craft of writing (reading books on writing, deliberate practice, taking classes) improved both their writing and their word count, no matter what level of a writer they were. So I have been studying writing more specifically while working on my book to take advantage of this.

The future of making money in writing is diversification

It’s not about just the paper book anymore. Besides the obvious eBooks, there are many other avenues to use the same writing in different formats such as audio books, international releases in alternate languages, film adaptations, and mobile apps. These are all additional revenue streams using the same piece of work.

Bonus thought:

Every single sentence needs to pop. Every single paragraph needs to entertain.

I attended The Life, the Universe, and Everything (LTUE) 2014 writer’s conference last weekend and took a boatload of notes through the entire weekend. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing things I’ve learned, notes I took along the way, and the big epiphanies that came from a weekend of endless writing panels and learning sessions.

One of my favorite sessions I attended was a talk given by Chersti Nieveen called: Learning Advanced Writing Techniques from Joss Whedon.

Chersti is a YA author and active on both Twitter and Facebook. You can find her blog including a great writing advice section with many of the tips she shared in her presentation here:

http://cherstinieveen.wordpress.com/

She spent many painstaking hours reviewing every scrap of information she could find about Joss Whedon’s writing process, watching DVD commentaries, behind the scenes details, and of course, watching everything Joss has ever produced. From this process of research, she came up with a list of some of the advanced writing techniques Joss Whedon uses to make consistently interesting and beloved characters, non-cliched plots, and tons of conflict.

Here’s a few highlights I took away from her presentation:

Control the Reader’s Expectations

• Find things about the character that you love. Remind yourself and your audience why they love this character so much.
• Defy and then reaffirm the reader’s expectations
• Use cliches to your advantage. Readers demand to be challenged so turn the perceptions against them.
• You must have at least three plot twists in a story.

Writing Better Characters

• Give every character a secret.
• Make every character believe in something. Give each an ethos or cause by which they live.
• Characters should grow and change so they don’t always react the same way.
• Make characters sacrifice, lose something, give up things.
• Never make the solution/resolution simple or easy.

We watched a bunch of clips from Joss Whedon’s work. Some specific episodes she recommended watching and studying were:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer – Season 2 / Episodes 21 & 22

Firefly – Objects in Space (Joss claims this is the best example of how he tells stories)

Angel – Hero (Season 1 / Episode 9)