The dream is that you wrestle with your inner demons and the particular monsters of your peculiar experience to create a story that is so brilliant that its genius cannot be denied.
The reality is that you write a story, it gets rejected, you write another, it goes the same way, you write a hundred more, and maybe get one accepted.
So, with a hundred stories, and an uncountable number of target magazine/journals/websites, how do you keep track of your own submissions and the places you could possibly submit to in the future.
Now, my amazing idea when I started submitting the stories I wrote, not so very long ago, was to create a Google Doc with all the targets and my stories. I figured I’d fiddle with it a little over the coming months, hone it down to a perfect piece of productive software, then let others have it…
Yep, great idea.
Well, here it is: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BPeq0K-CBqrk6AJtiFBxXGDY91kL13PnOJ1OoGtGCMw/edit#gid=552055455/copy
It’s a pretty useful tool as it contains a number of targets you can apply to, along with their details, as well as a place to store your stories and see what’s happening with them, and an automatic count of your submissions, rejections and acceptances.
(note: there may be a problem with the automatic count, which means you need to copy the special code on this page to a script (Data–>script editor))
HOWEVER
HOWEVER
HOWEVER
With experience comes knowledge! (Remember that, you snot-nosed infants… but even more you snot-nosed OAPs). Today I found a tool (that most people more experienced know about) that is really useful. This is Submission Grinder. This is a great way to see different magazines/journals/websites that you can target, and also see their stats (mean number of days till they read you story, etc).
Ok, it isn’t quite the same personalised experience as the Google Doc I was making, but it’s damn useful.
As well as this, the best I’ve come across is Submittable (which you probably know if you’ve submitted anything).
If you know other ways to keep track of what you’re doing and of the places to submit to, please let me know.
Tris Matthews 