Friday Writer Roundup: Sonar

One of the most embarrassing things that can happen to a writer is submitting a piece to a market that already rejected you. I mean, getting rejected once is bad enough as it is, but twice? From the same people? On the same piece? Now, not only do they not want it, but they're starting to question just how desperate/egotistical/insert adjective you are, subbing to them multiple times with this thing?

Well, those worries are ended (and for someone as paranoid as I am, it was a big worry) with Spacejock's Sonar Submission Tracker.

When you first open up Sonar, it can be a little intimidating. There's a touch of a learning curve to it, and the Manual that's provided is sometimes less than helpful, depending on what it is you need to do. But it's well worth the small amount of effort you put forward.

So let's go through it, just very quickly. The very first thing is to start a new file. Call it whatever you like. Mine is 'Submission Tracker.' Cut and dry, easy to find. Once you have that, you'll have this nice blank spreadsheet looking thing.

Now you load up your work(s), one at a time. This is where you can begin to see the first glimmer of hope—this program could rock. You go up to Works, click add, and enter in the vitals of each individual piece: the title, the word count, the genre, any description and comments you might have for it. You can even link to the actual file, right in here, so you can easily access it while you're going through Sonar. So, you set up MegaDoc, your novel about a robot crocodile that got infected by a corrupt Word file. It's all in there, and ready for step two.

Now you set up the markets. For the most part, your markets are probably going to just be the places you submit whatever pieces to, but if you have markets you submit to regularly, it wouldn't hurt to add them in. It's the same shtick for adding a market as it is to add a work. You go to the Markets tab, click Add, and begin. The name of the market, the editor, the guidelines, even all the contact information for them. And you've decided to submit MegaDoc to Corporate ArtSlayer Press, dedicated to wringing every bit of artistic merit out of their books before publication.

Again, we hit the tabs: Submission, Add. Then you pick your work, you pick your market, and you enter the date. Once you do that, it'll tell you exactly what's going on: MegaDoc <> 2014-08-22 <> Sent to Corporate ArtSlayer Press (Out 2 days). And it lets you see if you've sold it, too.

Now, this is where it becomes your safety net. Say that Corporate ArtSlayer doesn't take this genius manuscript, for whatever reason. Bad taste, most likely. It then sits there for a while as you mope and consider if you should maybe cut it down from 400,000 words. But then, as you're looking around one day, inspiration strikes: you should submit it. And you found the perfect press: Corporate ArtSlayer. So, you get ready to go and… wait… Sonar says I've subbed this to them already. Oh lordy lord, thank you for saving me, Sonar!

Now, there are other options for this, although I don't think any of them quite stack up to Sonar in usefulness. Duotrope, of course, has a submission tracking option for paying members, which also gives you access to the response data, something I very much miss. The Submission Grinder has the same exact setup, but they are A: still new, so not very well-known, and B: Free. It's a trade-off, really. Or, you could do what I did before I found Sonar: an Excel document or other spreadsheet. It works, but with Sonar being free, I'd say it's worth it.

Voss

Friday Writer Roundup: The Submission Grinder

This is one I'm particularly in love with. Does anyone remember Duotrope? I mean, Duotrope's still around, but they finally had to become a subscription site in order to cover their costs. For a long time, I missed them greatly. There just wasn't a replacement.

And then, along comes the new kid. Diabolical Plots'Submission Grinder.

It's great. It's almost like having Duotrope back in my life, which pleases me to no end. For anyone who never got to use Duotrope, it was the king of submission aggregators (and still is, actually, but I prefer free, and I prefer to offer you free tools, when possible). It had all the submissions categorized by genre, sub-genre, theme, word count, payscale, type of project, and a handful of other things. It was glorious.

Well, The Submission Grinder does pretty much the same thing. It lacks the subgenre category, which is a slight annoyance on occasion, but it also let's you search for markets with certain qualifications, such as SFWA and RWA Qualified. Which is awesome, from time to time. And, as with Duotrope, you can register in order to help you keep track of your submissions, as well as improve the data The Submission Grinder has to draw from.

Now, as always, there are alternatives. If you just want a listing of open markets, specifically speculative fiction, head over to Ralan.com. It doesn't have a search function, but it has categories based on pay, as well as a category for anthologies, one for contests, and one for miscellaneous things, like flash, poetry, and audio.

Another one, specifically for any erotica authors out and about here on my blog, is ERWA's Author Resources. Now, don't go here if you don't want to risk some explicit language, but, if you writer erotica/erotic romance, it's a good place to find not only anthologies and magazines, but also full-length markets.

And of course, there's Duotrope. It's not exorbitant in any sense of the word. $5 for a month or, if you go for a year subscription $50. I know a lot of authors who will spend that much just on their own website hosting, if not more. If you plan to write, or find yourself writing, a lot of short stories, I would say it's a good investment to at least consider making.

If you liked this and want to learn more about writing tools next week, pop up top and hit subscribe.

Voss

Friday Writer Roundup: Twine

And welcome once again to the Friday Writer Roundup. Today I bring you a piece of software very close to my heart, and possibly very close to the hearts of some of my readers. Did you ever read the Choose Your Own Adventure (or similar) books growing up? They were some of my favorites in elementary school.

That's what Twine is all about. It's a simple program for organizing interactive fiction books, and it then spits them out as HTML, which means that they can be put up just about anywhere on the Internet, from self-publishing sites to blogs to web pages. Or you can use it simply to help you track your interactive fiction and then put the full product together in the word processor of your choice. It's a little more work, doing it that way, but it gives you a lot more freedom when it comes time to hit publish. More on that a little later.

For those unfamiliar with interactive fiction, it's sort of a hybrid. Part game, part story. The writer creates many possible plot arcs for the reader to follow. Traditionally, this is where we actually see second person point-of-view in its natural habitat. You walk into the creepy old house. A puff of dust hits you in the face. If you turn around, go to page 3. If you hold your breath and continue forward, go to page 17.

And it continues from there.

Twine starts you off with three boxes: a title, an author, and a Start. You can mess with whatever you want except for the word Start. It has to remain that way. Otherwise, when you go to try and preview everything (which I recommend whether you intend to compile it in HTML or just use Twine to storyboard), it's going to be all screwy. And, if you go the HTML route, messing with the word Start will change around the HTML file it spits out, too. So don't touch it.

From there, you add your events and, via internal links, begin to open up your lines of interaction. Believe me, having a program to help you keep track of everything is much easier than trying to do it all on paper or, even worse, in your head. You want to leave your reader with as much freedom as you can manage, which means a lot of possible ways of interacting within the fiction.

Now, Twine is not the only one you can use for this, but it is one of the few, and it's the easiest to learn and deal with, even if it doesn't have a nice, flashy appearance. The other one I would recommend possibly looking at is Inform7, but only if you think interactive fiction is going to be a major part of your writing lifestyle. It's a little easier on the eyes, and it, like Twine, is free and cross-platform. Inform7 takes a little bit more dedication to learn than Twine, however, so it's a matter of personal choice. For me, Twine is the best option.

For those who intend to use it just as a storyboarding tool, you don't have too much more work to do. But, when and if you format it for print, you will have to edit it after the fact to put in appropriate page numbers. For eBook, depending on how you go about it, you may be able to just use your exported HTML and keep the links, or you may have to go through and manually add the links after the fact. But I trust you can figure it out.

If you believe me, turn to page 62. If not, turn to page 38. If you want more like this article, go to the top of the page and subscribe.

Voss