Preditors and Editors ™

A guide to publishers and publishing services for serious writers since 1997.

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Submission Tracking

Many writers do themselves a disfavor by not tracking their submissions. If anything, they know less about what's happening than those who do track their submissions.
• One way, and there are many, is to create a list of all your written works. Then create another list of all the publishers you send submissions to. I keep both lists in the same file using the table function in my word processor. Then I don't have to switch back and forth between two files. True, I still have to move up and down on the page as it displays, but I'd have to do that anyway. A spreadsheet will also work just as fine for this kind of tracking.

• For the list of publishers, you should have the publisher's name, info about what the publisher pays, when to submit, how, and where. Sometimes you'll find yourself using one column to hold more than one kind of info. That's okay so long as you remember what it is. Lastly, a column for how many submissions you have sent out at present. This is important since very few publishers are willing to accept more than one submission at a time. For those that are, you'll know if you've reached their limits. For those that won't accept more than one at a time, then the number will always be one or blank (or a zero).

• For the list of works I've written, I have the title and the word count in one column, then a column for who I'm submitting it to, another for the date sent out, and another for tracking the results. Until I receive a reply, that last column serves to give me the expected date of reply. Once the reply comes back, then I replace the date with the results. If it was published, then I put published and the issue it will appear in. If rejected and a reason is given, then I put those. If I find the reasons are valid, then I decide whether to rewrite the story (assuming that I feel it's salvageable).

• The entire list I keep is many pages long as I've been diligent in tracking my submissions. Don't let the short size of this example fool you into thinking that it won't be. You might even reach the point someday where you'll wonder if it might be more practical to split the list into more manageable chunks. The following example is abbreviated in more than one way from the description in this narrative. It also works for poetry though I used stories as examples. It's for the purposes of assisting visualization only.

Publisher:	Pays:	Replies in:	Remarks:	Submitted:
A Pubs	$.0025 pw	unknown	8k max size accepts email sub xxx@xxx.yyy	0
B Pubs	$200 ps	2 months	2.5-6.5k length, action/adv	1
C Pubs	.03 to .05 pw	14 days	5k, action/adv	0

Title:	Submitted to:	Date Mailed:	Results:
X Story 4,000w	B Pubs	3 Sep 97	due Oct 97
Y Story 2,520w	A Pubs C Pubs	1 Sep 96 2 Jan 97	rej-Dec96 rej-Mar 97
Z Story 3,001w	C Pubs	5 Jun 97	PUBLISHED! Issue 10