The Writer’s DB Blog

When you’re about to send out a manuscript, chances are you want to send it to a market that isn’t already holding on to one of your submissions. (Or at least, that’s probably how the editor prefers it.)

So here’s a small new feature under the “Search Markets” link in the Writer’s Database. It’s a checkbox labeled “No submissions pending @ market.” Check that box, and your search will be narrowed down to markets where you don’t currently have a submission pending. You can find the next market for your manuscript that much faster.

Received a feature request this morning for a feature that already exists on the site. That’s usually a good indicator that I should create a quick tutorial, in case there’s anyone else who hasn’t discovered that the feature exists, but would use it if they knew about it.

In this case, the inquiry was:

I think your service is popular among some people doing genre submissions who send material to a list of magazines, sending it to the next one immediately upon rejection.

The ideal thing would be

Where hasn’t this MS been?

To find out which of your markets haven’t seen a particular manuscript yet, it takes three quick steps:

1. Click “Search Markets” in the left sidebar.
2. Select your manuscript from the “Untested for manuscript:” menu.
3. Click the “Search My Markets” button at the bottom of the search form.

Optionally, you can specify additional parameters in your search. For example, find only markets tagged “horror” and “tier1″ that haven’t seen the manuscript yet. Or only markets that accept electronic submissions greater than 10,000 words long. Or only contests whose deadlines are less than a month away.

For a couple of years now, ever since version 2.0 of this site launched, it has been possible to discover new markets for your writing by browsing the shared market listings of other users. However, you’ve had to do it manually—by clicking on the “Browse Shared Markets” command in the left sidebar every so often to see what’s new.

Now, there’s an easier way. When new market listings are added to the site by your fellow users, you can get them in your RSS feed reader, your customized homepage (such as iGoogle, Netvibes, My Yahoo!, Pageflakes, etc.), or even your e-mail inbox. Here’s how:

In the title bar of the “Browse New Markets” page, you’ll find a little orange icon representing the newsfeed. Click on it, and you’ll be presented with the opportunity to subscribe to the feed.

As you can see, the newsfeed gives you a wide array of subscription options. Regardless of which one you choose, my hope is that this will help you to find a few publishers who love your writing.

Writing is a solitary activity; it’s useful to have the support of friends. People who will read your latest work and offer commentary. People who, if they hear you haven’t been writing, won’t let you get away with it. People who write themselves, and whose presence in your life helps to foster an environment of creativity.

Some of you reading this probably have accounts on Facebook. They have over 140 million active users, so I feel safe making that guess. The purpose of Facebook is to bring your friends closer, to help make them more a part of your life. That purpose should apply in the context of writing, as well as any other context.

So, I’ve taken advantage of their newly released “Facebook Connect” technology, which allows other web sites to integrate with Facebook. It is now possible, when you take certain actions on the Writer’s Database, to publish the news of those actions to your Facebook news feed, where your friends can see it.

I’ve started with four specific actions:

• When you send out a submission.
• When you receive a reply from a market. (Let your friends celebrate or commiserate, as appropriate.)
• When you update the word count for a manuscript in progress.
• When you add a new market to the Writer’s Database. (Your friends might want to submit there, too.)

When you perform one of these actions, you’ll be given the opportunity to publish the news to your Facebook newsfeed, and you’ll be given the choice of a one-line format or various longer versions, which include different levels of detail. For example, when you submit a manuscript for publication, you can choose to include just the title, the title plus the name of the market, or neither.

Please note: This is beta functionality. I’ve tested it with my own account, but that’s all. And Facebook’s own release of FB Connect happened in a bit of a hurry. If it doesn’t work as expected, please let me know, and please be patient.

The Clarion Writer’s Workshop was the best thing I ever did. One of the many reasons is that it was the most intimately I’ve ever been connected to a community of talented writer-friends. These new WritersDB features are not as good as Clarion—I guarantee it. But I hope they’ll help.

By default, the Writer’s Database offers some pretty simple choices for the status of your submissions:

• Pending
• Sold
• Rejected
• Withdrawn by author

For some writers, those may be inadequate. I’ve often (too often) used “Withdrawn by author” when the truth was more along the lines of “Market went out of business.”

Those of you submitting novels to agents may need submission status choices such as “Initial Query” and “Agent Requested More.”

Some writers like to keep track of “Rejected with Kind Handwritten Note” separately from form rejections. They count this as slightly more of a win.

Now, WritersDB supports all of the above, and more. You can define your own custom choices for Submission Status. Give them whatever names you please, and tell the system how to treat them: whether as Pending, Closed/Success, or Closed/Failure.

You can access this feature by clicking the “Record a Reply” link for any of your pending submissions, then choosing the last menu item under Submission Status: “”Customize submission status choices.” Also note that the Advanced Search feature on your list of submissions allows you to search any of the custom status choices you create.

Sometimes, even the best of us get distracted. And sometimes, so do I.

This wasn’t the highest-priority item on the WritersDB to-do list, but they made the Twitter API so gosh-darned easy to use, this just sort of slipped to the front of the line. It didn’t take very long at all.

Now whenever you’re sending out a new submission, you can click a checkbox to post an announcement of that fact to your Twitter account.* Then click on the pencil if you want to edit the default message.

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* What’s that? You don’t have a Twitter account? Well, you probably didn’t have e-mail in 1992, or a cell phone in 1986. When this change comes, we’ll be ready.

A minor new feature announcement which, sad to say, will come in handy sooner or later for nearly every submiting writer:

When you’ve sent out a manuscript, you may be expecting to hear from the market within 8–12 weeks because that’s what their guidelines say. Around the 35th week, anxiety sets in. This is the time for what some writers of my acquaintance call the “polite WTF note.”

The end result of such queries is typically the discovery that your manuscript was lost in the mail. It is beyond the scope of this discussion to explain why editors refer to their desks as “the mail.”

The “Submission Details” page for each piece you’ve sent out now offers a mechanism for keeping track of these queries, separate from the more general “Notes” field.

Please note: The queries that you send for a longer work, or a piece of journalism, prior to sending the entire manuscript, are a separate topic. The site will be enhanced to allow tracking of those as well—but this is not that announcement, yet.

I’m pretty excited about the latest new feature here at the Writer’s Database, just introduced tonight. As vital as it is to keep track of which manuscripts you’ve sent out, to whom, and when . . . that isn’t the whole story for a writer.

How much you’ve been writing, and when, is nice to know, too.

For any title you’ve added to the Writer’s Database, you can now enter the total word count in that manuscript on any given date. The site will calculate how many of those words are new since the last time you wrote, and will serve up a wide variety of graphs for you upon request. (Note that this is a beta feature. It should be stable, but if you encounter any bugs, please do report them, so we can squash them.)

You can see how the total length of a manuscript has grown (or, if you’re in editing mode, shrunk) over time. You can see how many words you’ve written each day, week, or month—on any one title, or on all titles combined. You’ll know, in one easy-to-digest picture, when you’ve been productive and when you’ve been slacking.

The easy way to use this feature is to visit the site at the end of each writing session and type in the total word count for your manuscript right away. But if you need to wait until the end of the week (or longer period) and enter your best guesses at historical data, you can do that too. If you write a few more words—or edit a few—after submitting your word count, you can just enter a new word count for that same date; it will overwrite the previous entry for that date.

They say that what you measure tends to improve, and what you don’t measure tends to stagnate. Well, it just became easier to measure how consistently you write, and how much.

So write well, my friends, and write often.

Thanks to the fine folks at Netvibes, I’ve been spared some programming effort. One of the items on the to-do list has been to create a Konfabulator widget (a.k.a. Yahoo! Widget) for those of you who aren’t using Dashboard, iGoogle, or Netvibes, but still want your WritersDB data “to go.”

What Netvibes has done, which is pretty spectacular, is to make good on their promise of a “Universal” widget architecture. It used to be that if you wanted to create widgets for Dashboard, iGoogle, Konfabulator/Yahoo, Windows Vista, Windows Live, etc., you would have to manually port the relevant code to each of those platforms, coding to match the idiosyncracies of each.

Widgets written for the Netvibes platform, though, can now be run in several of those other environments. The conversion to all those different formats is handled with no additional effort from the developer.

So, if you were waiting on those proverbial tenterhooks for the Yahoo/Konfabulator widget, you can now get it here:
http://eco.netvibes.com/widgets/202565/writersdb-pending-subs
(Just click the “Yahoo” link on that page.)

It would be nice if we could always believe what people told us.

For example, if a market says, “We usually respond to submissions within 2–4 weeks,” it would be lovely to assume that yes, you’ll see an envelope in your mailbox within that amount of time. But just look at a site like “Submitting to the Black Hole,” which tracks actual response times for a ton of markets, as reported by actual writers who sent actual manuscripts. You’ll see where the promises match up to reality, and where they don’t.

Note: “Black Hole” applies specifically to the markets for science fiction, fantasy, and horror writing.

Tonight, we’re adding a similar feature to the Writer’s Database site. In the right-hand column of any market detail page, you’ll see the average response time for all the submissions you’ve sent to a given market (and received back). For example: If you’ve sent 3 submissions to a magazine, and the replies have arrived within 3 weeks, 4 weeks, and 5 weeks respectively, you’ll see a little box that says: “Avg. response time: 28 days.”

Better still, if you have shared that market listing and other users have subscribed to it, you’ll also see the average response time for all WritersDB users who have submitted to that market. (Note: This only works if multiple users are subscribed to the same listing—not if they have cloned it to their own accounts.) So if your own responses from the Atomic Pigeon Review are averaging 90+ days, but the average response time for all 25 subscribers to the listing is only 21 days, then maybe it’s just your submissions that are confounding the editor.

(Yes, I’ve noticed that there aren’t yet any market listings with 25 writers subscribed. This is one feature that will only become more valuable as we grow toward a critical mass of active users. So if you have writer friends who aren’t tracking their submissions, let them know about the site!)