Escape Artists

The Lounge at the End of the Universe => The Writing Forum => Topic started by: Unblinking on March 07, 2013, 07:22:40 PM

Title: The Submissions Grinder
Post by: Unblinking on March 07, 2013, 07:22:40 PM
Anyone who sees me at other sites probably already knows about this, but I think this is the first time I've posted here about it.

Anthony Sullivan and I launched a new site The Submissions Grinder (http://thegrinder.diabolicalplots.com) shortly after Duotrope put up their pay wall.   We are doing our best to fill the niche for those writers who liked the Duotrope functionality but don't want to pay $50 per year.  Or who got frustrated with Duotrope for various other reasons.  We have stated since our launch that our features will always be free without cost (we do take donations to help cover costs and to consider more ambitious future plans for the site).  If you were previously a Duotrope user you can start right where you left off there by importing the spreadsheet you exported from there.

The Submissions Grinder offers these main functionalities that are similar to Duotrope:
1.  A submission tracker to help you keep track of what you have out in the markets, and what you have sent out in the past.
2.  fiction market listings with response time statistics for each, which are compiled from the submission tracker data.
3.  a search engine that searches among the listings to help you find markets that fit the genre/length/payscale/whatever that you're looking for.

We've passed 500 users, and have almost 1500 market listings (over half of which are currently open).
But we don't want to become merely a Duotrope lookalike.  We are open to any suggestions from the user base, and we will consider anything that is of the general benefit to the users.  We've already implemented some major features that Duotrope has never had.  For example, the two biggest of these are:
1.  Post-acceptance tracking.  On Duotrope, your tracking ending when the initial submission was resolved, whether by acceptance or rejection or other.  But if you get an acceptance, that's not the end of it.  We help you track additional information like contract date, payment amount and date, and publication date.
2.  Histograms of response time statistics, in addition to the statistics numbers.  At a glance you can see your own submission marked as a dot on the histogram showing past responses, so you can get a very good idea how unusual your wait time is, and whether acceptances tend to come in above or below your current wait.
Here's an example from Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show:
(http://www.diabolicalplots.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/IGMSHistoNew.png)
You can tell very quickly from the graph that most of their responses are received at about 30 days, which is typically when their first reader churns through them like clockwork, with the rest of the responses scattered very thinly in time.  The green bars are acceptance, the red bars rejections, so you can tell that the acceptances are scattered throughout as well.  The dot is my current pending submission at IGMS at 200 days.

Come check it out, you can explore without registering, though you get more features if you register.  If you like what we're doing, you can help by:
1. Signal Boost.   Share the link everywhere that you can, with writers and writers’ groups and re-tweeting and what-have you.  The more users that try it out, the more data we have to summarize and share with all.
2.  Import your Duotrope data.  Each new market imported in Duotrope data becomes an entry for a market that we will update.  
3.  Suggest new markets, with URLs so that we can find them.
4.  Leave suggestions for changes that would make the site even more useful.