I use an Excel spreadsheet to log when I send a story and when I expect to hear and how much it costs me or how much I get paid if I win or a story is bought. I do not use the Excel spreadsheet to its full extent and admire people who would be able to automatically colour a cell, just because a formula has been fed into the date column: I can’t do that! Green indicates I am still waiting to hear. Conversely, red means I’ve heard, even if it’s a ‘no’. The pink tells me I have ‘used’ the story and it cannot be used again without careful consideration about the rights etc...
Disclaimer: These are not real submissions!
I regularly send to Writing Magazine and sometimes, Woman’s Weekly (used to send to Yours), so on my spreadsheet, I have a colour assigned to each one.
In addition, I’ve found it necessary to do a quick one-liner next to each of my stories as an aide memoire:
This is on the same spreadsheet but too big to print or put on a web page easily.
If you are not remotely tech savvy and the idea of an Excel spreadsheet appals you, then there is nothing wrong with doing the whole thing by hand on paper with ruled lines. I only use it because it already has ruled lines. The beauty of the spreadsheet is the size of the cell increases as you fill it.
This is not for everybody but the key message here is to record what you’ve sent out. Whether you use a manual or digital method, it will still rely on you logging each submission and the result, whenever that is.
The second part of this came as a result of asking on here a couple of years ago how people ‘remembered’ their stories if they were trying to find a different avenue for them. I couldn’t see an easy answer. I hope this might help a few of you.
This week's tip comes from Marguerite and is in response to comments made recently about keeping track of our submissions.
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