Today I thought it would be productive and useful to talk a little bit about tracking submissions.  As a writer still at the beginning of what will hopefully turn into something resembling a career, I've quickly realized the critical importance of monitoring what-piece-has-gone-where.

I've read horror stories about beginning writers who started out thinking that they could simply trust these matters to memory, and have gotten into embarrassing (or even worse, legally problematic) situations with publishers.  At first it seems like something that can be left alone; after all, you might only have one or two pieces out there, and have only submitted them to one or two markets.  Quickly though, as you write more and more, and put work out into the world, I guarantee you will get lost in contracts, rewrite requests, rejections and on and on.

Helga Weber via Compfight cc

So, how do you track submissions?  Well, I can naturally only speak to how I do it, but the bottom line is that you'll have to determine for yourself how best to track your work based on how you write.  I know that's obtuse, but for what it's worth, here's how I look at it.  You want to keep track of:

1.  What piece(s) have been submitted
2.  Where they were submitted to
3.  When they were submitted
4.  If they were accepted/rejected/held

To that end, here's a look at how I organize my submissions, in spreadsheet form (click to enlarge):


It's actually pretty simple.  I sort it as Publisher by Story, with publishers as rows and Stories as columns.  The advantage to plotting it this way is that I can continue to expand the sheet as needed with more stories to the right, and more publishers to the bottom. 

Beside a publisher, I might put a link to their site (if I have it) and any notes that are important to me.  It's also important, in my opinion, to note genre.  I'm not TOO detailed unless the market specifies that it only publishes a narrow subgenre.  It's crucial to keep this info because you can really insult a publisher by not being aware of the work they print.

To make this easier to view across, you'll notice that I've put a "Freeze Pane" in place on the left-most column - that's what the heavier black line is.  Freeze Panes, in case you don't know, are a function that let you keep a selection of cells in view while you scroll around your spreadsheet.  So I can pan right and it looks like this:


So now let's talk about how I color-code this.  From these screenshots, you've already seen the Green-Yellow-Red, and you've probably already guessed what those mean:  Green for accepted, Yellow for "in progress," red for rejected.

All three are vitally important.  If you send a publisher a story they already rejected, God help you.  If you send a publisher a story that someone else already published, again, God help you.  The third aspect is somewhat more murky.

I've heard a school of thought that beginner writers shouldn't really worry about "simultaneous submissions."  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  "Simultaneous submissions" are often referenced on a publishers Submission Guidelines page, and most often they're accompanied by the words "WE DO NOT ACCEPT."  Yes, publishers really don't like it when you fire a story off to several of them at once.  Why?  Well, supposing that a publisher really likes your story, and emails you saying they want to publish it.  But!  You've already agreed to publish with somebody else.

What you've done just now is "burned" the second publisher.  Effectively, you've wasted their time and energy.  See, publishers often assemble their pieces based on themes, or they try to give an anthology or even an entire season of books a kind of "feel" to them.  If you yank your piece abruptly, it's back to the drawing board for them.

Now, going back to what I said about beginner writers:  the theory is that the risk of two or more publishers even wanting your work is very, very low.  This is not a sleight against your work; it's just that, as well know, writing is a difficult business to break into and it's somewhat unbelievable that any writer starting out will instantly be in demand by multiple markets.

Nevertheless, I don't do it.  I think that it's better that a writer assemble a large body of work, and send one story to one publisher at a time.  If you have plenty of pieces to go around, eventually you'll hit that match made in Heaven and your work will be accepted.  So, that's why I have the third colour:  yellow.  So I don't send the same story to another place until I turn it red or green.

Often, I'll also put the date I submitted the piece on, like this:

It's important to keep track of this, because publishers often will say in their submission guidelines that you should contact them if you haven't heard back by a certain point.  This is to ensure your piece wasn't intercepted by spam, lost in the mail, etc.  You have to keep on top of this, because the publisher won't.  Why should they?  You have to be responsible for you own work.

So that's the basics, but now what about more complex things like reprints or different mediums?  In a standard writing contract, you'll see things like "First World Digital Rights," or "First North American Anthology Rights," etc.  Setting aside the details of various rights, there are often situations where you'll be able to sell a story to different markets over and over, maybe because the rights reverted to you - the author - after a set time, or because the market you initially sold to only bought for a specific medium.

That's where spreadsheet links come in handy:



As you can see, I put hyperlinks in my spreadsheets where I have digital information available.  In this case, I can simply click the link...


And that's really all there is to my method!  It's simple, clean, but very, very important.  I hope other writers found this useful, and I welcome any other methods or tips anyone has to add!