Sunday 13 January 2013

Duotrope Alternative II: The Submissions Grinder


Hello, all you writers out there. Deborah has been generous enough to  offer a guest post about the exciting new project that we launched  this week--The Submission Grinder



We know it has a violent  sounding name, but we wanted something that would fit in at the lab ofthe mad scientist who graces our Diabolical Plots web page. 

The site is certainly a work in progress. It meets Duotrope's basic  functionality, and we're working to fix bugs and add new features. We  have a submission tracker that is fully functional, and market listings that show response time statistics based on all those entries submitted that are dated within the last year. We have committed to never charging a compulsory subscription fee because we believe that's where Duotrope went wrong. What has really set Duotrope apart is the submissions statistics, and we believe that charging a subscription will drive away that most valuable asset.

We have donations and Kickstarter campaign in mind for the future, but rather than start with a request for money, we wanted to start by providing a usable product, and then if you like what we have done then we can talk about donations then. We have succeeded in our goals of being the first working replacement for Duotrope, which is an effort we are very proud of, putting work in over the 2012 holiday
season to get this done.

Go, check out the site! If you like what we're doing, you can help out right now by doing these things:

  1.  Register on the site.
  2. Did you get an export file from Duotrope? Import that into your account. You can pick up right where you left off and it gives more data to provide more robust statistics, as well as giving us new blank market listings for the markets you've submitted to (which we will fill in as time goes on)
  3. Suggest new market listings.
  4. Submit bug reports, and suggestions for new features/enhancements. We're writers too, and anything that you suggest that would be useful (or at least something that appeals to statistics-lovers even if not strictly useful) will get us excited. The comment thread at this link would be a good place.
  5. Help us spread the word. The more the merrier. The more writers import and track their data, the more useful the statistics will be, the more useful the site as a whole will be, the more users will come. Blog posts, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Stumbleupon, posts on writing forums, emails to writer friends, pigeon messages to your friends, transdimensional telegram, any other way that you can think to share this link with the world.


And thanks, Deborah, for providing this space to talk about this!
--David Steffen

10 comments:

  1. I'll be using this one, mos def; but I also have a list of 100+ markets I submit to regularly as well as the new markets fellow W1S1ers mention in their weekly updates. Sorry, Duotrope; I guess we've grown apart.

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    1. Also wanted to let you know I read your "Venus" story in UFO -- very nice, of course.

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  2. This sounds great, will definitely sign up. Sounds like just what I was looking for. Will try to get the word out.

    cheers,
    mood

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  3. Sounds like a handy thing to have... and I like the name ;)

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  4. Not sure about the 'Grinder' bit. I thought it was part of the gay 'friend finder' app - Grndr.

    Polly

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  5. Looks like something I should sign up for.

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  6. Thanks for that - I've already signed up and started using the site.

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  7. That sounds awesome. Great idea too...very entrepreneurial. If you get a lot of traffic, maybe writing related advertising will put some money in the bank. Or you could expand by offering authorial services like charging for editing, or acting as a publicist (I bet you could make good money at that too).

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  8. Very cool! Sounds like a great option. Thanks for sharing!

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  9. What a cool concept! I think it sounds like a great idea, and will definitely check out the link later as it seems like a good thing to sign up for and support.

    Thanks!
    Anita

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