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:
- Manuscript database
- Quick CSV import
- Basic search
- Submission tracking
- Average response times per market
- Newsletters
Compare this to what you get for free membership of Duotrope:
- Market listings via a direct link (eg from Google or Twitter.
- Twitter feed.
- Monthly newsletter, containing the numbers of new markets added and markets opening/closing, but no actual details, and three recently added listings will also be featured in the newsletter.
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:
- Search feature.
- Market listings index.
- Themes and deadlines calendar.
- Interviews with editors.
- Market listings with response statistics.
- Statistical reports.
- RSS feeds.
- Submissions tracker.
- Weekly newsletter.
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.