Twelve Days of Writing

Day Eight:  Track those submissions, baby!

So, yesterday, I listed twelve romance publishers, now, well, I want to talk about the extreme importance of tracking submissions. As soon as you submit a story to someone–a magazine editor, a book editor, an agent–you need to immediately write down that submission. I created a very simple Excel file for my submissions. I just created a couple of columns and listed:  Title of The Work, Person/Publishing House Submitted To (include address here),  Date of Submission, Type of Material Sent (i.e., query letter, partial, full), and Response (yeah, this one will be left blank for a while).

This is the main reason why I like to have a submission file:  So I can know when to follow up on my submissions! If you check out a publisher’s submission guidelines, usually there will be some sort of time-line offered for responses (say, 4 to 6 months). I never wanted to be a pest and hound publishing houses too early, so I waited until my time-line was exhausted, then, I would send a follow-up note or email.

Of course, I also like my submission tracker because it always me to look back over the year and see just what I’ve done. In addition to agents and publishing houses, I also include any contests that I’ve entered in my tracker.

So…do you have a tracker? If not, are you gonna make one?

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 8th, 2007 at 2:06 pm and is filed under Romance. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.