This month I need to do more of the same, as well as plowing on with my proofreading course - two more units to go and I'll be qualified! Plus I'm thinking of taking some free online courses through Coursera or the like, since they're free and I like to learn things. More on that when I've looked into it further.
I managed to complete my Write 1 Sub 1 goals early in January, with two flash stories and 5000 words of ghostwritten creative writing articles. The articles were subbed, as was a story left over from last year. The two flashes need some editing first.
This month I need to do more of the same, as well as plowing on with my proofreading course - two more units to go and I'll be qualified! Plus I'm thinking of taking some free online courses through Coursera or the like, since they're free and I like to learn things. More on that when I've looked into it further. I seem to have posted this everywhere but here: earlier this week, Rebecca Roland posted an interview with me over at her blog.
A little while ago I posted about Submitomancy, a new website for writers. It combines market listing and submission tracking with in-depth market data and a host of other useful features. I asked creator Sylvia Spruck Wrigley how writers would benefit:
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. _______________________________________________ If you do agree, why not pop over to the Submitomancy page on Indiegogo? In the spirit of starting the year as you mean to go on, I saw the New Year in reading a writing magazine. Then the first thing I did on New Year's Day, after breakfast, was sit down and do some of my proofreading course. I've done my Sub 1 for Write 1 Sub 1 already, and I spent an hour and a half this morning in a coffee shop alternately noodling notes for poetry and writing the first draft of a story.
Of course, all this subject to change once the day job starts crushing my soul again, but so far it's a good start. I've decided that the Write 1 part of W1S1 needs some parameters. For my purposes, only completed first drafts that are typed up on the computer in full count towards it. Drafts in notebooks are no good to anybody because they so often stay that way. No one wants a submission in turquoise ink and my scrawly handwriting. My writer gifts to myself are proving to be worth the investment. The Mslexia diary is a great space-saver, since it has so many blank pages in it (a page for each week and a bunch of extra pages at the back) I don't need to carry a notebook around with me as well "just in case". And my first foray into the Writer's Toolbox garnered me a rough draft, and the idea for another story. After (not much) deliberation, I've also bought a jar of overpriced flavoured coffee (hazelnut, if you're interested). It's expensive, but only in that a 50g jar was slightly more expensive than a large latte - which is still cheaper than drinking the same amount of coffee in a cafe somewhere. The intent is to try and replicate some of the coffee shop vibe at home, with a "treat" drink that I'm only allowed when writing, and the radio on for background noise. Whether this works against distractions remains to be seen, since that's the main point of going out in the first place. The aim this year is to be more productive, so: whatever works! For those of you planning on ditching Duotrope, a quick reminder that today is the last day to export your submission data before you have to pay for the privilege. Likewise the last chance you get to delete the last 12 months of data if you're not inclined to let Duotrope profit from it. I know a lot of people who took this view, and after some debate I joined them.
Despite what Duotrope says about keeping a large number of users, I know a lot of writers who aren't staying with it either because the price point is too high or because of the poor way the switch to paid was handled. It was only a matter of time before someone came up with an alternative, and now someone has. Submitomancy is currently gathering funds on Indiegogo, to make sure that the developers and artists involved receive compensation for their work - and rightly so. There will be two tiers of membership: Free membership gets you:
Compare this to what you get for free membership of Duotrope:
For paid membership of Submitomancy you get all of the free stuff plus expanded databases, power search, detailed market response data, personalised notifications, profile page, status updates, expanded reports, skins, and anything else they come up with. If they hit enough in their funding goals there will be a Word War function, too. For paid membership of Duotrope you get:
Duotrope wants $50 a year or $5 a month for features a lot of which will be in the free version of Submitomancy. The paid version looks to be coming in at around £20/$32 a year (as worked out by James Beamon) - it has more features and it costs less. The free membership of Submitomancy would be enough to meet my needs, but they need cash to get the project off the ground so I've donated what I would have given Duotrope next year, had they still been on the donation model. I hope that other writers out there will consider donating too. This is a project by writers for writers - the project manager Slyvia Spruck Wrigley canvassed writers she knows to find out what they would want from a service before getting together with tech guru Cliff Stanford to put it into practice. As such, I think it's a project worth supporting. I hope you do, too. It's been a little while since I've posted, mostly due to Real Life getting busy all of a sudden. For the last couple of weeks I've been on a writing hiatus, trying to clear everything else so I can have a nice and relaxing, writing-filled holiday.
One of the things I've been doing is gearing up to go Duotrope free next year. While I won't go into details - enough writers have already done so - I don't feel that what they're offering is value for money. So I exported all my data into Sonar, backed up my spreadsheet, and made a note of some free tracker websites to look into. I'll miss having a searchable database of markets, but to be honest I should be aiming for the pro markets first and I have a list of those anyway. I intend to be more productive next year. To this end I've bought myself the Mslexia diary, which is full of writery goodies and will hopefully keep me motivated. This afternoon I went through and wrote "Write 1:" and "Sub 1:" on the first page of every month, since I plan on doing the monthly Write 1 Sub 1 challenge. Part of this will involve going over to Liberty Hall to do the Flash Challenge more often - no doubt there will be months that I need to in order to reach my goal! Other goals include to finish my proofreading course, and to spend some time every week looking into and for different types of freelance work. I want to dye my hair purple, and I can't do that with an office job! Probably the last one of the year, although there'll be a proper blog post after Christmas.
The Duotrope Conundrum - why writer Alex Shvatsman thinks Duotrope's new payment plan is unsustainable. (Hint: most writers I know, including past donators, won't be staying.) 12 Letters That Didn't Make the Alphabet. Blog post by Della Galton on Writing a Serial. Religion in Fantasy World-Building at Genreality. 9 Signs That You Might Be an Introvert. Daily Words with Debie Ridpath Ohi. The Weekend Book Marketing Makeover by Shannon O'Neil and Toni Tesori (I haven't read it yet, but it's downloaded and waiting for me to get to it). Another bunch of writing links I've linked from the last week:
Writing for Women's Magazines Five Ways to Write When You Really Don't Want To The Business of Writing: Turn Your Income Stream into a River and Terry Pratchett interview: Sex, Death and Nature That's pretty much it. I'm behind on my novella, but did manage to get the flash challenge done over at Liberty Hall last night. I updated all the links in the Bibliography section on Saturday, and found a few that are no longer working. That's the reason for putting the stories out in e-books. I should think about doing another one soon, but I think it might be May before enough rights have reverted to me to make it worth doing. Once again I've been a bit lazy on the internetting this last week. Although that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's an interview with me over at Anaea Lay's website today - Telling Lies for Fun and Profit. Some of the answers may seem a little odd: the clue's in the title. My story "The Message" went up at Kazka Press last week. And my copies of Cucurbital 3 arrived as well. And my one and only "Link I Like" collected last week was: Three Signs You're Renovating a Condemned Novel. Only two this week, I've been a little distracted.
Promoting Your Books By Getting Articles in Magazines - Autumn Barlow at Top Hat Books. I'm going to print this out an keep it on my noticeboard. Copyright - Words and Images, Not Ideas, Titles, or Cats - Nicola Morgan |
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