The Writer’s DB Blog

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.)

One of the better inspirational posts I’ve seen on the writing mindset in a while:

A student asked, How often do you sing? [Pavarotti] answered with a single word: Always. When prompted he elaborated that he sings constantly—not always aloud—but even if only in his mind, he was almost constantly rehearsing.

When do you write?

Full article here: http://www.take2max.com/writing/2007/12/04/finding-the-time/

My Clarion buddy Trent Hergenrader makes an excellent point about the importance of being Earnest, where Earnest is a writer who keeps careful track of his submissions.

Out of 125 submissions, that’s my fifth instance of something getting lost in transit . . . It sucks, but it happens, even with electronic submissions.

Frankly, I don’t understand not carefully tracking submissions. It’s hard to remember what you sent where and when without at least a spreadsheet.

Yes, Trent’s post is a few months old. I’ve been meaning to link to it for a while now, but have delayed because I wanted to think of something to add. Tonight, I’ve belatedly come to the conclusion that nothing needs to be added.

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!)

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 commenting feature on this blog is now closed.

I may re-open it again when I have some time to research spam-fighting plug-ins for this blogging software. But for now, we’re receiving around six comments per day, and 100% of them are spam. Or else they’re carefully targeted, helpful messages based on the certain knowledge that writers are likely to be in the market for viagra, replica watches, cheap unsecured loans, etc. — and I’m doing all of my subscribers a great disservice by not passing those messages along.

I’m still interested in giving my subscribers a platform for open discussion, but for now, this ain’t it.