Tracking your submissions
Dustin Wax at The Writer’s Technology Companion has written a four-part series on software to track your submissions. He looks at a number of interesting desktop and Web-based too, along with the good, old-fashioned spreadsheet.
I’ve tried a number of the tools that Dustin mentions, and (of course) there are a couple that I’ve never touched. But I’ve always gone back to the spreadsheet. Why? It’s quick and it’s simple. The spreadsheet layout that he describes in part two of the series is a lot like the one I’ve been using for a long time now. You can download copies of my spreadsheet in Excel and OpenOffice.org Calc formats.
The main difference between my spreadsheet and the one that Dustin describes is that I don’t track payments in it. I use a separate spreadsheet for that. It’s not any more cumbersome to do that.
Over the couple of years or so, I’ve been using the spreadsheet component of Google Docs to track my submissions. It suits my sometimes mobile lifestyle — regardless of what computer I’m using, I can keep an accurate tally of what’s going out.
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