Beta readers can be an aspiring author’s best friends—or worst enemies. But which they turn out to be can depend as much on the author as it does on the reader. Forming good working relationships with a trusted circle of readers can ensure the manuscripts you submit to agents, publishers, literary magazines, or elsewhere are as good as they can be, without the expense of a professional editor.

I am a WordPress junkie. There, I’ve said it. I love anything to do with WordPress: using it, designing themes for it, customizing it, reading about it. But themes, especially, are my favorite part. I’ve just started designing some themes for public release (stay tuned for more details on those) but I love using themes others have designed, too. And I especially love making little tweaks here or there to make them reflect my personality.

I recently wrote a post over on Mashable covering more than 100 authors making the most of Twitter. In doing so, I had to do a TON of research and found plenty of authors who weren’t using Twitter in the best way possible. I also found a lot of authors who weren’t using the web in the most effective way either.