Writing Resources
We post the items below without endorsement. Directory of Resources Submission Trackers and Agents Royalty Free Images and Public Domain Reedsy is a marketplace and toolkit for authors, connecting them with vetted publishing professionals—editors, cover designers, marketers, ghostwriters—to help with every stage of creating and launching a book. It also offers free and paid resources like Reedsy Studio (for writing and formatting), Reedsy Learning courses, and community and knowledge content to guide writers through the publishing process. The Insecure Writers Support Group The Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) is an online community where writers of all levels share their doubts and triumphs, offering mutual encouragement, advice, and inspiration. Through monthly blog posts, extensive resources, and a global network of members, IWSG provides a safe and supportive space for writers to grow in confidence and craft. WritetoDone, which focuses on self-publishing, is a blog and resource site offering writers practical tips, inspiration, and guidance on craft, freelancing, blogging, and building a platform. With posts aimed at helping writers improve their skills and reach audiences, WritetoDone blends creative encouragement with actionable advice. With a strong focus on book promotional sites, this is a volunteer-run blog and resource hub celebrating independent authors. The site offers practical guidance in writing, publishing, marketing, and tech topics, along with regular promotional features like “Thrifty Thursdays,” print-book deals, and a weekly flash fiction challenge. Jane Friedman is a veteran publishing industry expert, author, and educator with over two decades of experience helping writers understand the business of writing. She publishes in-depth, practical guidance on publishing trends, book contracts, author platform building, and navigating both traditional and indie routes. Her work includes The Business of Being a Writer, a well-regarded reference book for writers; she also edits The Hot Sheet, an industry newsletter, and produces extensive free content, courses, and industry reports. The link above is to her resource listing. Check out her topic listing as well. Writers.com - 90+ Writing Websites and Resources for Writers of All Stripes This article directs you to some of the best writing resources on the internet for creative, technical, and academic writers. Whether you’re looking to improve your grammar, find creativity, get published, or improve your research, this growing list of writing websites will help you advance in your writing journey. SheWrites Magazine - The Ultimate List of Writing Websites (70+) There are so many incredible resources out there for writers hoping to begin, hone, and elevate their careers. We’ve gathered up different sites for different kinds of writers, including fiction and nonfiction authors, poets, screenwriters, bloggers, and beyond. From writing prompts to expert interviews, tips and tricks, as well as publishing insight, these are the writing websites we hope you’ll add to your education arsenal in addition to SheWrites.com. Authors Publish Email Magazine They send you emails about publishers seeking short stories, poetry, essays, and book submissions, plus many informative articles. A free service. Every Writers Resource - 110 websites every writer should know. Are you ready to explore a treasure trove of online resources designed to help you hone your craft, find inspiration, and connect with fellow writers? Look no further! We’ve compiled an extensive list of 110 websites every writer should know, covering everything from writing tools and blogs to news and community forums. This is a free, self-paced online course by author and marketer David Gaughran, designed to teach aspiring indie writers how to self-publish and gain their first readers. The course covers essentials like choosing a niche, using promo sites, optimizing Amazon categories, building an author platform, and designing marketing campaigns. It is a leading resource site and toolkit for self-publishing authors, founded by Dave Chesson. It provides in-depth, actionable content on book marketing, Amazon optimization, and publishing strategy, as well as free and paid tools (e.g. keyword & sales rank calculators, book description generators, etc.). Its mission: to give authors the knowledge and tools needed to sell more books and grow a sustainable author career. 14-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge 14-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge is a guided (handholding), short-term program by Bryan Cohen designed to help indie authors experiment with Amazon ads at low cost. Over two weeks, participants set up ads, collect data, and refine targeting strategies to “train” the Amazon algorithm and test ad efficacy. It’s often positioned as a hands-on, low-risk entry point into book advertising—ideal for authors who want to get practical experience without a huge ad spend right away. Reedsy Book Promotion Sites List This is an intensive list of book promotion sites. They say, “Discover the ideal book promotion sites for your price range. Our database is vetted with care so that you can eliminate the scammers, while our tier system is designed to give you a better picture of the sites that tend to deliver the best value for money.” Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is a free, self‑publishing platform that allows authors to publish and distribute eBooks, paperbacks, and hardcovers globally through Amazon. With KDP, authors maintain full rights to their work and have control over pricing, royalties, and distribution. eBooks priced between $2.99 and $9.99 earn up to 70% royalties, while print books are produced via Amazon’s print‑on‑demand service. KDP also offers promotional tools like Kindle Countdown Deals and Free Book Promotions, as well as the KDP Select program, which provides additional marketing opportunities and inclusion in Kindle Unlimited. Draft2Digital is a user-friendly, commission-based self-publishing platform that assists authors in formatting, distributing, and tracking their eBooks and print books across multiple retailers and libraries. There is free formatting and conversion, and wide distribution. D2D takes a 10% commission from the retail price of each sale. Authors benefit from Books2Read’s Universal Book Links, customizable author pages, and promotional tools to enhance discoverability. IngramSpark is a comprehensive self-publishing platform that enables authors to publish and distribute both print and eBooks globally. Through its extensive distribution network, authors can reach over 45,000 retailers, libraries, and online stores, including major platforms like Amazon, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble. The platform offers a user-friendly Book-Building Tool, allowing authors to create professional-quality print and digital books without the need for specialized formatting skills. IngramSpark also provides resources and educational materials to support authors throughout the publishing process. How to Publish a Book For Free: The 7 Best Sites If you’ve written the last word of your book or are just about to be done, you might be wondering how to get your book out into the world… without breaking the bank. Also, how to get your book formatted for free. AWP Directory of Writing Organizations The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) offers a comprehensive directory of writing organizations, including conferences, retreats, and centers. This resource is ideal for discovering events that align with your writing interests and goals. Wikipedia – List of Writers' Conferences Wikipedia maintains a categorized list of writers' conferences worldwide, including those in the United States. This resource is useful for exploring a wide range of events, from regional gatherings to large-scale national conferences. Established in 1988 as a publisher of comprehensive worldwide guides to writing, educational travel, and creative career programs, Shaw Guides has offered free online access to the unabridged, continually updated content of each guide since 1995. You can search for writing programs by location or keyword or view a calendar of upcoming writing events. Writers & Editors – Conferences, Workshops, and Learning Places Writers & Editors offers a curated list of writers' conferences, workshops, and learning opportunities. This resource is beneficial for writers seeking specialized events and educational programs to enhance their craft. Submission Trackers and Agents QueryTracker helps authors find agents for their books and keeps track of their queries. A free service. The Writer’s Database will keep track of all the markets for your writing and the status of all the manuscripts you’ve sent out to each market. Appears to be a free service. Duotrope is a subscription-based service for writers and artists that offers an extensive, searchable database of current fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art publishers and agents, a calendar of upcoming deadlines, a personal submission tracker, and useful statistics compiled from the millions of data points we've gathered on the publishers and agents we list. AgentQuery.com offers one of the largest searchable database of literary agents on the web—a treasure trove of reputable, established literary agents seeking writers just like you. And it's free (not because there's a catch, but simply because not enough things in this world are free). Post your query letter and receive in-depth feedback and critiques. The Directory of Literary Agents They say, "Literary Agent Directory 2025-2026 – The official Directory of Literary Agents™ is the most accurate (and comprehensive) literary agent database in the world." It’s also the easiest to use–and it’s free. Created and maintained by a former AAR book agent and literary agency president, this literary agents directory contains everything you need for finding a literary agent using your own personalized list of literary agents. A guide to grammar terms. Search by name, browse by category, or explore detailed explanations with examples and usage tips. Explanations are brief. Another guide to grammar terms. Also searchable (Look for the magnifying glass icon). Explanations are lengthy. Mignon Fogarty is the founder of the Quick and Dirty Tips network and creator of Grammar Girl, which has been named one of Writer's Digest's 101 best websites for writers multiple times. She is also an inductee in the Podcasting Hall of Fame. Edit and correct your grammar, spelling, punctuation, and more with your personal writing assistant, grammar checker, and editor. There is a free version. It is a little hard to find. Grammarly Free. Tighten Up Your Prose. The Hemingway Editor cuts the dead weight from your writing. It highlights wordy sentences in yellow and more egregious ones in red.
Keep It Simple. Hemingway helps you write with power and clarity by highlighting adverbs, passive voice, and dull, complicated words.
Get a writing assistant wherever you go. QuillBot works across all of your favorite apps and websites, so you can always write your best.
AutoCrit is a cloud-based writing tool that helps authors improve their manuscripts by providing feedback on elements like pacing, dialogue, and structure. It offers features such as story analysis, genre-based comparison scoring, and progress tracking to enhance the writing process.
If you’re a writer seeking tools to help you with tasks such as research, organization, and formatting, you’ve probably heard of Scrivener. Scrivener has been one of the leading and most comprehensive software suites made exclusively for writers.
ProWritingAid helps you craft, polish, and elevate your writing. Tailored analytical tools assess every aspect of your writing in seconds and teach you how to improve. Jordyn Redwood has served patients and their families for nearly 25 years. As a self-professed medical nerd and trauma junkie, she was drawn to the controlled chaotic environments of critical care and emergency nursing. This blog is devoted to helping contemporary and historical authors write medically accurate fiction. Search America's Historic Newspaper Pages through 1963 A searchable archive of small, local, and obscure newspapers and journals, some as far back as 1800.
This collection from the Chronicling America Historic American Newspapers provides access to select digitized newspaper pages produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress. This archive can be useful for stories set in historical milieux as they give what were then current events and attitudes. Looking for a catchy phrase using a particular word you MUST have in that sentence? Stumped for a title? Try this site and get inspired. Be warned, they have all been used before! Just Publishing Advice - 10 Free Search Tools Every writer needs to check facts, and these free research tools can help you get the job done quickly. Whether you’re writing fiction, nonfiction, online articles, or essays, the accuracy of your information, or even small story elements, always matters. If you’re looking for a worldbuilding guide, you probably harbor an ambitious, dazzlingly beautiful goal deep within your writerly soul. You want to create a world that stays with your readers—a world that draws them in completely and remains with them forever? This may be the guide for you. A nice and extensive overview of blade weapons, bludgeons, polearms, ranged weapons, etc. Plus menu links off to other aspects of medieval interest (see top of page). by Charles Kiernan. A quick overview and some personal experience in fantasy map-making.
...or any large language model you wish to use. This is a good starting point for all sorts of off-the-wall research. Royalty Free Images and Public Domain Images you find on the internet are not necessarily legal to use in illustrations or book covers. Most images are someone's property: photographer, illustrator, painter, etc. To legally use any image, it must be in the Public Domain, or you must obtain a license to use the image. In most cases, you will be required to acknowledge the source of the image somewhere in your book. Royalty-free images are those you do not have to pay for every time you print another copy. Some sites, like Getty Images, have very restrictive licenses for use of their images. There are also Editorial-only images, which cannot be used for commercial purposes. Read each site's license carefully. In general, any royalty-free image can be used for print and ebook covers or interiors, but bear in mind this is not always the case. Images for license can be purchased from the following sites. This is not an exhaustive list. To find more image sites, search for "royalty-free images" in your browser. Image (and Video) Resourses
Resources from Getty Images, Shutterstock, and iStockphoto are almost exclusively pay-to-play. Some services pay their artists by a subscription model, though many have a free trial period. Some are free, though still requiring (free) registration, with only voluntary contributions to the artists. In many cases, you will find the same image across several sites.
Pay-per-Image
Subscription- or Token-Based
Free Public domain images from old books. 19th century and earlier. Some fascinating stuff here. The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, it provides free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge. Museum Archives A big breakthrough came in 2017 when a NY court ruled that museums that own flat art (paintings, tapestries, embroidery, etc.) cannot hold copyright to the images because there was no 'creativity' involved on the part of the owner, i.e., the museum. All of the following entities now have searchable archives of their flat art, which can be downloaded for free and used under the Creative Commons CC0 license in commercial works, e.g. covers, interiors, or whatever you want. More than 180,000 of the items in their Digital Collections are in the public domain. The Library now makes it possible to download such items in the highest resolution available directly from the Digital Collections website. When you click on an open-access image, the CC0 public domain designation appears beneath the image on the left side of your screen. A download button appears on the right side of the screen. Those images that are not open access will not have the CC0 designation or a download button. The Institute does not give you a convenient way to capture the metadata of the image you want to work with. The Institute requests attribution when you use their Open Access images. Biodiversity Heritage Library is not a museum; it is an open-access digital library for biodiversity literature. It has uploaded over 150,000 illustrations in the public domain to Flickr, each with a link to the high-resolution download. The download process is a little cumbersome, but well worth it. Clicking the link on Flickr will take you to the BHL catalog page. Then locate the PageID for the image and copy it into your browser navigation bar using this syntax: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/pageimage/pageid. Metadata can be downloaded in various formats, but not .txt. The Cleveland Museum of Art (enter your search term, select open access). After selecting open access, the thumbnails of all open-access images appear with the CC0 designation beneath them. Select an image to download by clicking on the thumbnail, and a download button will appear to the right of the image. The image is delivered in a zip file along with a text file with the metadata that can be used to cite the work. The Museum asks that you consider citing the source as explained in its Open Access policy. Indianapolis Museum of Art (the site is called Newfields) (search collection). There's no way to filter the search to extract public domain images only. The metadata for each image appears under its thumbnail after you enter a search term. The metadata includes the date of death of the artist, if known. Remember that in order for the work to be in the public domain, the artist must have died more than 70 years ago. Once you select an image you are interested in, if the work is in the public domain and available for unrestricted use, a download button appears to the right of the image. Before you can download the JPEG, you have to advise the Museum of your intended use. If you select commercial use, you are then required to describe the project for which you would like to use the image in detail. The Museum asks you to credit the source of the image. J. Paul Getty Museum (Enter your search term and add filters.) This link is for searching all the public domain images they have available. Click on the title of the work for its complete metadata and provenance. The download button is located beneath the full image. The download is offered in various sizes, including JPEG files large enough for print publication. The metadata is provided in a nice text block ready for copying. You will be asked two brief questions about how you intend to use the image. The museum asks that you credit Getty's Open Content Program. Los Angeles County Museum of Art Los Angeles County Museum of Art (select public domain images only). Enter your search term(s) of choice. I've been using watercolor. The search results are returned in thumbnails. Click on the thumbnail to get to the metadata and the download option. LACMA offers a TIFF download in addition to a JPEG, which is useful for print publications. Other museums require a special request for a TIFF image. The metadata does not come with the download and has to be copied separately. LACMA includes its open access policy in its website terms of use, complete with impenetrable legalese. LACMA does not ask to be cited. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's open access portion has over 10,000 entries. It does not ask for attribution when you use an Open Access image. National Gallery of Art (click on advanced search below the search bar, then select open access and run your search). The search results return a page of thumbnail images. The thumbnail opens up to a single image page with complete metadata. You can download images suitable for print publication using the download icon that has two bars beneath it. Or you can choose low-resolution images (the download icon with one bar beneath it); they are referred to as "lecture images." The metadata comes bundled with the image download which is nice. The caption automatically populates when the image is uploaded in WordPress. The Gallery's Open Access policy asks users to give credit, but doesn't add the credit automatically to the caption, which is interesting. The Walters Art Gallery (you can browse or search in the upper right-hand corner). The search results page is a listing of thumbnails with snippets of the work's provenance. By clicking on either the title of the work or the thumbnail, you will open a page that offers the download. Each page has a sub-menu for further information about the work, including conservation and provenance. The metadata is not embedded in the downloaded image. There are no options for high or low resolution images. In its Image Rights, Reproduction, and Terms of Use, the Gallery asks that you provide them with information about your project if you are making scholarly or commercial use of a CC0-designated work. Yale University Art Gallery (enter your primary search term, then select the filters). There is no filter that allows you to limit the search results to open-access images only. You need to click through the thumbnails to see whether a download of the image is available. If the work has been designated CC0, two download options are available—presentation size and full size. In its Terms of Use, the Gallery asks that you credit it so that others can find and benefit from the collection. Yale Center for British Art. There’s no easy way to browse the collection, but the search capabilities are powerful. I particularly like being able to limit search results by gender of the artist. The search results page is a grid of thumbnail images with snippets of each work’s provenance. By clicking on either the title of the work or the thumbnail, you will open the detail page for the work. Another click on the work will open a light box, which will let you know whether the image is in the public domain and available for download or if it is still subject to copyright protection. If it is available for download, you can select a file suitable for print or a smaller file for digital use. There is no way to filter the search query for open-access images only. A text file with caption information is also downloadable. Paris Musée is a public entity that oversees the 14 municipal museums of Paris. From the home page, click on the "filtered search" button. Unfortunately, the subsequent pages have recently changed, and their instructions are in French. If you succeed in navigating your browser's translations, you'll get a zip file with the high-resolution image, a text file with metadata for the image, and a PDF that explains the CC0 program both in French and English. Trademarks for Creative Professionals There’s a lot of confusion about what trademark law protects and what copyright law protects. They both protect creative work and both use letters in a circle, but they are different. Copyright law protects the creative expression of an idea. Trademark law protects words, phrases, logos, or symbols that act as source identifiers for goods and services. At the most elemental level, copyright protects creativity and trademark protects commerce. Using Song Lyrics/Titles in a Novel DON'T - until you read this. This is one of the most contentious areas of copyright. All song lyrics are copyrighted, and you MUST get permission to use them in a novel. There is the "fair use" doctrine for using song lyrics, but the burden of proof is on you if you are sued. See the link above for a bit of clarity. There is some light at the end of this tunnel, however. Here is a searchable list of song lyrics in PDinfo. Essentially, any song published before 1930 (as of 2026) is in the public domain in the USA. HOWEVER, each performance is also copyrighted. So you may use the words, but you may not be able to reuse any particular performance in a trailer, for instance. Note that song titles are NOT COPYRIGHTED, just as movie and novel titles are not copyrighted. Blogs about legal matters and writing. Everything from copyright expiration to "take down" notices. U.S. Copyright Basics for Authors A highly experienced copyright lawyer on what authors should know about copyright law. (Especially when signing a contract.) How To Read A Publishing Contract This is a fourteen part blog by “Stroppy Author.” The link above is to the first installment. You will need to look under the blog’s archives to read all of them. The creation dates are April and May of 2010. The above title is what mystery writer Susan Spann calls one section of her blog. It’s a little inaccurate. The blog entries are not so much about legalisms, but rather she touches on many issues dealing with publishers and contracts that we need to consider. How to secure copyright protection for a series of books depends on what kind of writer you are. An annotated sample publishing contract from Katherine Goldman of Charm City Legal. There is also a report you can download for free and sign up for notifications. |