Keeping Track of Yourself

xposted from here.

Like many writers, I obsessively track my submissions. For the past few years I have used an Excel spreadsheet and only recently discovered the submissions tracker on Duotrope Digest. Now I use both (Gee, obsess much?). While Duotrope is free and subsists on donations and therefore always on the brink of extinction, it offers some things that I haven’t been able to get my little Excel spreadsheet to do. For one, it can give you the percentage of acceptances and rejections (according to what’s been input into their system) for each publication you are considering submitting your piece to. Also, from the data it’s got on hand, it can tell you not only the outside amount of time that a publication tells you it will take to get back to you, but also the average (according to the data) of what the amount of time actually is.

In fact, by using the submissions tracker and including your data in their search engine, you are actually helping yourself and others keep better track of your submissions process. One of the cooler things it does is provide you with your acceptance percentage, which could be depressing, but can also be ultimately motivating. Or at least give you an idea of where you fall on the writers’ Bell Curve. :-P

Now, I know some people are of the “why would you want to keep track of that” school, but practically speaking, if you’re trying to do this writing thing as more than just as a hobby then you pretty much have to keep track. You don’t want to submit the same piece to the same place twice (most places don’t like that unless they specifically request changes and a resubmission). You don’t want to submit your piece simultaneously to several places when many of them don’t accept simultaneous submissions. Most places also don’t like multiple submissions (more than one submission at a time) unless it’s poetry. And then, you need to keep track of when it was submitted so if you get impatient (that would be me) you can mark on the calendar the appropriate time to send a query letter to ask about the status of your submission (querying before say 60 or 90 days can be seen as a bit of faux pas).

And then, on the off chance that your piece does get accepted some place (and after you’ve told all your friends, jumped up and down and shouted WhooHoo! to your cat or dog or kid), you need to notify any other publication where it might be out for submission to let them know it’s no longer available. Then you need to write down when it’s coming out because most of the time it will be several months after it’s accepted for publication before it sees the light of day. And THEN if this is a place that offers payment (with either free copies or money), chances are you will be paid a certain amount of time after publication. So you need know when to expect all that to pass.

And finally, even if all you received was $5 for that nifty poem, you need to record it and all of the above for the good people at the IRS, especially if you’re also recording expenses having to do with your writing.

So, yeah, keeping track of yourself can get pretty obsessive, but in the long run it’s what you need to do. And then next time you’re at a cocktail party or trying to explain to your parents how you spend your time (and possibly their money) all you need to do is bring out the spread sheet, log in to a site like Duotrope to show them your progress, or show them your list of publications that you might keep tucked in your wallet, like baby pictures, for just such occasions.

BTW – you can find my “baby pictures” on my website. For my fiction and poetry click here. Or for any other articles I’ve written, click here. ;-)