The Writer’s DB Blog

Starting this week, there is yet another way to see your WritersDB data without making a special trip to this site. If you use Netvibes as your start page—as many thousands of people do—then you can keep a list of your pending submissions close at hand.

To check out the new goodies, go here:
Writer’s Database widget for Netvibes

As always, the older goodies can be found on our Tools page.

The market sharing feature on the Writers Database site just got a tiny bit better. When you’re looking at a market listing shared by another user, you can now scroll down to the bottom of the listing, click on their name (where it says “Record owned by:“), and see a list of all the other market listings shared by that same person.

It stands to reason that if another writer is submitting to one of the same markets as you, maybe their work is similar enough to yours that some of their other markets will be a good fit for your work as well.

Found myself with a spare hour tonight, which is an unusual occurrence lately. So I decided to implement one of the quicker items on the to-do list for the Writers Database.

Now at the bottom of the page for any individual market listing, you’ll see a link to view all of your submissions to that particular market.

It’s the kind of obvious feature that should have been present all along; it simply required that I find the hour necessary to implement it. More innovative features are still planned, for when my schedule loosens up a bit.

Looking back over my previous posts, I realize I never announced the latest new feature when I added it.

Mac OS X users may be pleased to find that we now have a Dashboard widget (version 1.0) to let you view your pending submissions.

Want to keep track of which manuscripts have been out the longest, so you’ll know when it’s time to query? Just obsessed with the up-to-the-minute number of submissions you’ve got circulating Out There?

Clicking on the “Pending Subs” link in the widget will bring you straight to your Pending Submissions page on the site, in your default web browser.

The Tools section of the Writer’s Database site is no longer just an empty placeholder. We’ve published our first tool for use outside of the site proper.

It’s a Google Gadget, a little portable list displaying up to three of your pending submissions–those manuscripts that have gone out into the world and haven’t come back from the markets yet. This can be installed in your Google Personalized Homepage, if you have one. (And if you don’t, it’s free and easy to set one up.) I haven’t yet tested it in Google Desktop, but the documentation seems to indicate that it should work there as well.

The instructions for installation are on the Tools page of the main site. Note that you’ll need to enter your Widget Key (available on that same Tools page), and not your password, into the widget. Since the key allows read-only access to your account, and currently only to the Pending Submissions data, typing that into a third-party site is not so much of a security risk as asking you to give them your account password.