Why do you think Submitomancy is needed?
Over the past few years, I have updated a spreadsheet, a website and a program called Sonar3 in order to track my short story submissions. This has always been a hassle.
Once I realised that the website was no longer going to suit my needs, I started to think seriously about creating the service that I wanted.
I needed a database of all my works including a description and a list of markets that I'd like to submit to, submission history and the statistics for that piece, so I could have the full detail of that story at a glance. I knew that crowd-based data collection was important to me to be able track markets and make the best possible submission choices.
I've also enjoyed sharing the frustrations and successes of my writing but I always worry about boring my non-writerly friends with constant updates about an industry that they know nothing about. I realised I would love to be able to post status updates in a circle of writers who are going through the submission process with me, who understand how painful receiving three rejections in a day can be but also that a personal rejection can be something to celebrate.
And the next thing I knew, I was designing a specification for a website that could do all of these things.
You're currently raising funds for the site through Indiegogo. What made you decide to go the crowd-funding route?
I had three problems to solve:
1) I wanted good people working with me who would prioritise the project. It's really important to me to be able to pay my colleagues for their time and effort and so to do this right, I was going to need funds. And yet, I wanted to offer a free service which meant I couldn't even promise to pay after launch.
2) I needed a critical mass of users at launch. The service is pointless if there's no one on it and so I had a boot-strap issue. How to convince people to sign up from the start?
3) I didn't want to waste other people's time and money. Even using the free service, you don't want to spend the time entering in your titles and submissions on a system that may or may not be useful - and you certainly don't want to pay an annual subscription for a service that looks like a ghost-town!
Crowd-funding offered a solution to all three questions. It meant that I could treat the expensive development costs separately from the running costs, so the site needs only enough income to remain self-sustaining. And most importantly, it meant that I would have a committed userbase ready to start on day one.
The free account offers many basic functions such as a market search and submissions tracker. What are the additional features that you think particularly make the paid accounts attractive?
Basically, the core of the service relies on data so I think it is important that writers are encouraged to submit their data. That data has a huge value, so those aspects of the program that involve data collection must to remain free. So if all you want is a basic tracking service, then there's no charge.
But I know I'm not the only one interested in the results of that data. The subscription service will provide insights into market habits, including recent responses and response reports over the past 30 days.
I can really geek out over numbers, so I have some ambitious plans if the user base is willing to report, I would love to see extended reports for purchasing habits, including word counts, genre preferences, gender splits. I want to know my average story length and if there are common denominators in the stories that get me personal responses and acceptances, how many submissions I've made this year, how many pieces
I've completed this year.
I'm on a fitness site where we all band together to support each other and I would love to create something similar for writers. These social aspects will require a subscription but is a super-exciting concept to me because there's so much room to grow and expand.
Finally, I'm looking at efficiency. Finding time to write is always a challenge and I want to try to cut down on the repetitive tasks like creating cover letters with the correct manuscript information. I have a personal need to not spend quite so much time refreshing market pages to look for updates, so I built in a notification system that would let me know when there was something worth looking at or more important, that a submission needed a query - which again can be generated on the fly.
None of these functions are critical but I think they'd be nice to have and I'm hoping that other writers agree.
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If you do agree, why not pop over to the Submitomancy page on Indiegogo?