13 more free tools and resources for writers

Make this your best writing year, for free!

You’re reading Soft Hobbies, a weekly newsletter for creatives in all mediums, with a special focus on writers. I’m Auzin, a Seattle-based writer in the fiction, poetry, and tech spheres. To see more of my work, visit my author website or check out my socials.

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Hi softies,

Happy new year! I hope your 2025 is off to a good start. And if it isn’t (mine’s a little rocky), at least there’s nowhere to go but up. The days are getting longer, minute by minute, and every day is a new chance to work on your current project or start a new one. I love planning, and I take my resolutions seriously by using goal trackers, putting my goals/resolutions where I can see them, and updating them throughout the year to make sure I work towards things that are realistic, helpful, and what I truly want.

Here are my current writing goals for 2025:

• Finish first draft of the short story I’ve been picking away at for two years

• Publish on Substack once a week

• At least 2hrs of focused (non-Substack) writing time per week

• 2-week writing retreat/residency

• Make progress on all WIPs in Google Docs

• Outline my novel

• Get accepted for publication 5 times

The more specific and quantifiable you can get with your goals, the better. Specificity makes it easier for you to plan things out and structure your creative time, so you can actually meet your goals instead of just dreaming of them. I’d love to know what your creative goals are for this year, by the way! Leave a comment and I’ll send you some encouragement.

My original free resources for writers post is one of the most successful newsletters I’ve ever written on Soft Hobbies, which makes me really happy. All I want to do with this space is make your creative life a bit simpler, more connected, and softer…I offer my advice and resources for free because I know we’re always being asked for our money, on the internet and otherwise.¹

Finding free tools, databases, and communities on the internet is infinitely harder than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Subscription models are ubiquitous and costly, articles get paywalled, writing communities have annual or monthly fees, etc. Add in the cost of residency/grants/submission applications, and it becomes even more frustrating for writers to make this lifestyle work, especially when most of us have other jobs to pay our rent.

So, here are 13 resources and tools for writers that are entirely free (or have free versions). I hope some of these can be helpful to you! Good luck.

Free resources for writers:

1. Want to learn how to bookbind? Check out the Renegade Bookbinding Guild and start turning your favorite fanfics into physical books. From their website: “Renegade Bookbinding Guild is a not-for-profit guild of artists engaged in binding fannish works, aka Fanbinding, under the idea of fandom gift economy! We have dozens of resources for folks interested in starting or continuing their fanbinding journey!” So freaking cool.

2. Looking for an alternative to Goodreads? You can import your current Goodreads list into Storygraph and the app will help you track your reading, get matched with reading buddies or read along with your friends, and a lot more. Books will be suggested to you based on your mood and your favorite topics and themes. My friend

   Adrianna Nine
   from Creativity Under Capitalism is a big fan of StoryGraph.

3. If you need a second brain: Chuck everything into Milanote or Miro. The free plans have more than enough features for an individual writer, and you can even collaborate on Miro by inviting folks to a board. Milanote and Miro are simpler, more elegant alternatives to Notion and are great for visionboarding, flowcharts, and/or digital notetaking.

4. Want to make a map for your fantasy book? Inkarnate is so damn cool; I could spend hours playing around with it. You know those fictional maps you see in fantasy novels? You can make up to 10 of those for free with this tool. Would be amazing for dungeon masters and TTRPG players too.

5. Need a metric ton of synonyms? Power Thesaurus has your back.

6. Story arc planners, beat sheets, plot roadmaps: Free PDFs made by professional authors from Save the Cat, Writers Helping Writers, and Jami Gold.

7. Looking for tropes to avoid or explore in your story? I haven’t browsed TvTropes in-depth since I was a teen, but it’s still a goldmine for storytellers in all genres and mediums. As their website says, “Tropes are not the same thing as cliches…tropes are tools that the creator of a work of art uses to express their ideas to the audience. It's pretty much impossible to create a story without tropes.”

8. Want a free, subscriptionless alternative to Microsoft Office? LibreOffice is a private, free and open source office suite that is compatible with Microsoft Office/365 files. It’s consistently updated and includes tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.

9. Have a word that’s on the tip of your pen, but you just can’t think of it right now? This reverse dictionary can find it from a description or related phrase. So helpful!

10. Writing for keywords or SEO? WordCounter shows you the top 10 keywords and keyword density of the article you're writing. This allows you to know which keywords you use and how often they come up, helping you stop over-using certain words or word combinations and check for best distribution of keywords in your writing. You can also see can see the average speaking and reading time of your text.

11. Need to get some focused writing time in? FocusWriter creates a clean, distraction-free writing environment on your computer, and you can customize the font, colors, and background image.

12. Looking for an agent for your book? Good for you! Get on AgentQuery ASAP.

13. How much money is your book going to make? A legitimate and confusing question. Try out the book royalty calculator to get a better idea.

Again, I truly hope this list is useful. Let me know what you’ll be trying, and anything I missed. See you soon!

Softly yours,

Auzin

1. Of course, there is the option to get a paid subscription to this newsletter, but at the moment there are no extra benefits for paid subscribers. Other than all the love in my heart :)