Once you’ve narrowed down your list of tasks associated with the business of writing, you might find yourself wondering what tools to use and how to keep track of it all.

Here’s my tech stack:

Writing: MS Word

I almost feel like a luddite admitting that I use MS Word, rather than Scrivener or a similar writing app. I’ve tried Scrivener. I don’t have anything negative to say about it, but it didn’t work with my writing process, which looks something like this:

I like the One Stop for Writers site, from the people who create the Writers Helping Writers blog. One Stop is built to help you organize long-form work into chapters, scenes, and beats, and lets you create separate folders for characters, settings, etc. The site is also directly attached to the publishers’ writing resources, including multiple thesauruses and craft advice. If you’re looking for an organization tool, I recommend checking it out. Wait for a sale. You can usually get a six month membership at a decently discounted rate.

Graphics: Pixabay, various public domain sites, Affinity Photo

I can usually find a decent royalty-free photo on Pixabay. There are other good sites, but I happen to like that one. I also liberally steal borrow images from film and television if they fit my topic. That’s like free advertising, right?

If you want to disappear down a research hole, here are some non-Wikipedia sites with literally millions of public domain images:

Don’t say I never gave you anything.

To edit graphics, I use Affinity Photo, part of the Affinity suite of creative apps. Apparently, it compares favorably to Photoshop, but I wouldn’t know anything about that, because my skills are limited to cropping and resizing. It is also significantly less expensive than Adobe products, so if you are considering purchasing any creative apps and don’t need the highest high-end software, the Affinity package is a very good buy.

Just about everyone I know migrated to Affinity when Adobe issued a license agreement that, under the right microscope, gave them certain rights to anything created with one of their apps. Probably an AI training thing. They retracted it almost immediately, but the damage was done.

Website: WordPress

Easy to set up, short learning curve for basic theme design and posting, flexible enough to accommodate users who put in the effort or are willing to pay someone for bells and whistles.

Alternative: Substack.

I recently added Substack, based on some professional advice about “discoverability.” Built more like a social media app, Substack allows you post into the news stream, where people who don’t know you might stumble across one of your posts. For now, the account simply mirrors my WordPress blog. I’ll keep both for now.

Substack offers less flexibility on design and color, but provides a built-in newsletter function and auto-optimizes post images for various social media. It probably does other things, but I haven’t investigated fully.

Newsletter: Beehiiv

There are a lot of options out there for free or very low cost email newsletter platforms. Costs are generally tiered to your number of subscribers, and most include various add-on features. I chose Beehiiv because Warren Ellis uses it. Ellis is a comics writer and a slut for new tech and apps, so if he adopts one, that’s usually a good sign that it’s worth the trouble. The free tier runs to 2,500 subscribers, which is more generous than many platforms. The interface is drag and drop and fairly intuitive.

Had I known I would start a Substack, I might not have launched the newsletter on Beehiiv, but now that I’m using it, I like it.

Social Media: Yes

Whether to have social media accounts, how many, and how to use them are questions of individual preference. The best advice I’ve read on social media is to pick one or two that you enjoy using and ignore the rest. Don’t get bogged down figuring out which is the best for writers or book sales. Even if you guess right, it will change.

Today, I’m on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, and Bluesky. I don’t use any of them to great extent, but I post on FB and Bluesky more often, which isn’t saying much, because I post on X and Insta exactly zero. I didn’t want Bluesky at all, but most of the writing community hightailed it over there due to current events, so I signed up. Bluesky is basically X, but with ridiculous left-wing assholes instead of ridiculous right-wing assholes.

Productivity: Motion, Fedica, Publer

My brain runs fine, thank you very much, but it doesn’t always take the most direct route to my destination. I have some bad habits, like overcommitting, forgetting appointments or errands, and being indecisive about what to tackle next. I’ve tried calendar alerts, habit apps, spreadsheets, reward systems – none of them worked well or for very long. But this AI-lite app has been very beneficial.

Technically an office productivity app, Motion allows you to schedule tasks and events, set durations and deadlines, flag priorities, and create multiple schedules. You can create one-time tasks or recurring tasks that will automatically schedule daily, weekly, or monthly based on your settings. The app uses AI to schedule your tasks around your events, prioritizing what you marked as high priority. As you mark tasks as complete, it reshuffles, moving items with approaching deadlines to earlier dates and times. It red-flags anything about to miss a deadline.

I benefit from having a visual representation of my upcoming calendar that I can review every Sunday evening. Occasionally, I will have weeks were almost every minute is scheduled (such as when I try to do everything a writer should be doing…) Even if I could technically fit in everything I’d like to accomplish, I realize that’s not feasible. I like that I can make choices and adjustments well before it’s necessary. I also like that Motion resorts my tasks without my needing to do anything.

It’s not cheap – the annual subscription works out to about $20 a month – but for me, it’s money well spent.

And, because I “should be” more visible on various social media, I’ve also opened accounts with service apps that cross post to various platforms. Fedica and Publer offer free accounts, but limit the number of social accounts and posts you can make. I don’t have that many or post that often, so that works for me. Caveat: Setting up FB, X, and Bluesky wasn’t too difficult, but I had to jump through a bunch of hoops to get Instagram working properly. Publer only works on “professional” accounts, so you need an FB business page, plus an Instagram creator or business page, and they have to be linked <insert eye roll emoji here>. This was another tedious chore I handed off to ChatGPT. It couldn’t do the work for me, but it broke down the multiple steps across platforms.

There’s the short version of the tech stack. I probably left something out. And yes, I felt youthful and cutting edge calling it a “tech stack”.

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