That second job is the one nothing else here is built for: deciding how the book prints, pricing it so the royalty covers what the edit and cover cost, and putting a sound copyright page in the front matter. This page assembles both jobs in the order you hit them: draft, revise, publish.
Not here: client invoicing, rate cards and scope negotiation. You are not billing by the hour. If you also freelance, that lives on the freelancers page.
Getting to a finished manuscript on a schedule you set yourself, with nobody assigning it.
Daily quota, finish date and a streak, from a target.
Open tool→Save the Cat beats mapped to your word count.
Open tool→Where a word count sits, and what it sells as.
Open tool→Era-accurate names from real birth records.
Open tool→The stages, with worked examples, for a sagging middle.
Open tool→A telling line, then how to show it instead.
Open tool→Typical word counts by genre, so the manuscript sells as what it is.
Open tool→Every problem you find yourself is one you are not paying an editor to find. These run in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
Every check below in one paste, plus a pacing report and draft-over-draft deltas.
Open tool→Cliches, echoes, passive voice and rhythm, per chapter.
Open tool→Stiff words, filler and passive voice, before an editor charges you.
Open tool→Flesch scores and reading time for any passage.
Open tool→Paste a draft; the filler lights up.
Open tool→The mix-ups an editor bills you to fix, each with the rule.
Open tool→The publisher's half of the job. This is the maths that decides whether the book makes money or quietly loses it.
KDP, KDP Select, IngramSpark or Draft2Digital, for your book.
Open tool→Royalty per sale and breakeven for KDP, ACX, IngramSpark.
Open tool→What editing, formatting and a cover really cost.
Open tool→A ready-to-paste page, plus a public domain checker.
Open tool→Whether KDP's AI rules apply to your book, per content type.
Open tool→What AI drafting really costs at your word count, prices dated.
Open tool→Filter free software by what you write and price.
Open tool→The epigraph, the song lyric in chapter two, the contract an anthology just sent you. As the publisher, clearing these is your job now.
Lyrics, poetry, prose and epigraphs in your book: the rules, with the source under every verdict.
Open tool→Whether that older work is free to quote, from its publication year.
Open tool→Reversion, option clause, indemnity: what each clause means before you sign anything.
Open tool→The copyright page is not the only page a reader hits before chapter one. The front matter can also carry a preface: a short introduction in your own voice that tells the reader why you wrote the book and how to read it. Not every book needs one, but memoirs, academic and technical books usually do, and it is where you set out your authority to have written the thing.
Keep a preface to a page. Say why the book exists, what it took to write, and anything the reader needs in order to follow it, then get out of the way. Write it last, once the book is finished, so it introduces the book you actually wrote rather than the one you set out to write. Edit it as hard as chapter one, because for many readers it is the first prose of yours they will judge.
Refreshed on a schedule. Conferences are where agent pitch sessions happen. Grants and residencies are how an unpublished manuscript gets funded before it earns anything.
Dates, costs and which run agent pitch sessions.
Open the database→Grants and fellowships with deadlines, for the edit.
Open the database→Deadlines, stipends and costs, for the time to finish.
Open the database→All of them, in one chronology, soonest first: what closes next.
One weekly email with what is closing in the genre you pick. Nothing closing, nothing sent.
One genre per address on the free alert. Prefer no email at all? Every genre is also acalendar feed you can subscribe to.
What you sent where, privately in your browser.
Open the tracker→Your deadlines, streak and saved work, on one page.
Open your desk→It depends on one thing. Writer's Toolkit Pro syncs the tracker and saved items across devices and keeps report history, so you can see whether chapter nine got cleaner between drafts. If you query agents from more than one machine, it is worth it. If you work on one laptop and query nothing, it is not, and the free tools already do the job. Everything here stays free either way.
One practical tool, one thing worth knowing about publishing your own book, and a deadline worth hitting. Once a week. Unsubscribe anytime.