Tracking Submissions

For a while I used index cards. Two colors, one for stories, one for markets. When a story came back, I tucked it towards the front, and did the same with markets I wanted to try. Advantages include the fact that a hard drive crash wouldn't wipe it out. Disadvantages included reading my own crappy handwriting.

Since then I've moved to an Excel spreadsheet. Each submission is a line, organized alphabetically by story title. The problem is that at 300+ lines, it's starting to get too darn long.

For a while I was fooling around in Visual Basic trying to write my own tool. I wanted to be able to do things like make a list of potential markets for the story, query to find submissions past the usual reporting time, or see what was available for reprints. But I asked myself - was I recreating the wheel? Had someone else already done (probably better too_ what I wanted to do?

Well, of course they had. Here's a couple of the ones I've looked at.

Writer's Planner at http://writersplanner.com/ is an excellent web service. And the fact that it's stored someplace other than your computer is a nice thing, although you don't know what will happen to the site's server. But it's a nicely organized and very useful service.

A piece of software I found that runs on my computer is Writer's Database, which is freeware that can be downloaded at http://www.download.com/Writer-s-Database/3000-2131_4-7073848.html

No matter what you do - remember to perform regular backups! I just bought a flash drive that I keep a lot of backup copies on, and just the piece of mind is well worth the $25 bucks it cost.