5 WordPress Tools & Plugins for NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month: The WordPress Way

NaNoWriMo

WordPress is a great fit for National Novel Writing Month. In Monday’s post we shared some reasons why.

Today, we want to share some more WordPress-based tools and plugins that are a perfect fit for your NaNoWriMo efforts this year.

PressBooks: WordPress-powered book publishing.

From the PressBooks website:

PressBooks is a simple book publishing tool: put your book content into PressBooks, choose a book design theme, and export into:

  • ebooks format (for Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Kobo and others)
  • typeset PDF (for print-on-demand and other uses)
  • more exotic XML formats
  • PressBooks is used by authors and publishers around the world.

PressBooks is free to use, with reasonably priced plans for removing watermarks and adding additional features. They also offer full-service conversion for manuscripts (Microsoft Word, Open Office, or Adobe InDesign files are supported).

See how it works on their How to Make a Book with PressBooks page.

PressBooks

PressBooks

NaNo Stats plugin

The NaNo Stats plugin enables a variety of shortcodes that let you display your (drumroll please) NaNoWriMo stats on your site or blog:

[nanostats]
[nanowidget_participant]
[nanowidget_calendar]
[nanowidget_progress]
[nanowidget_wordwar]
[nanowidget_regionstatus]
[nanowidget_regionwar]

You can specify different options with these shortcodes to customize what stats are presented and how they appear.

NaNo Stats for WordPress

NaNo Stats Options

Just Writing plugin

The Just Writing plugin adds a bunch of extra features to the Distraction-Free Writing Mode editor.

You can customize what features are available to create an interface that’s perfectly tailored to you.

Just Writing - Plugin Options

Just Writing Plugin UI

Spelling & Grammar Checking in Jetpack

The spelling & grammar tool in Jetpack is powered by After the Deadline, a service that Automattic (parent company of WordPress.com) acquired some years ago.

This handy tool will audit your blog posts and pages before they’re published, offering recommendations for improving your content where problems are spotted. There are options available to customize what the tool/service looks for.

Spelling and Grammar in Jetpack

Jetpack Proofreading Settings

Search & Replace plugin

Did your characters get a name change? No problem. The Search and Replace plugin can scan your entire WordPress database, or just specific parts of it (e.g. post content, titles, comments, and so on), to find and replace text.

One caveat of this system is that there’s no “undo” function. If you change a bunch of stuff, you’ll need to search and replace those words again.

Search & Replace Plugin

National Novel Writing Month kicks off this Friday. You can learn more about the event, and sign up to participate, on the official website. Chances are there’s a local writing group near you!

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