Toward the end of 2009, I resolved to make Wednesdays my submission days. I had done little submission throughout the year and that needed to change if I wanted to move forward. Wednesday, January 6th was my first opportunity of the new year to put my plan in motion.
As a first step I decided to reevaluate my submission process to-date and straighten out what was not working. Here were the previous shortcomings.
The problem: Discipline
Submission is no fun. It is akin to preparing resumes, a job in itself. Each employer (publication or agent) asks for different formatting (guidelines). They have specific contact people (submission emails). And each is looking for the just the right employee to fit their needs (story). Its a lot of thankless work. One may not find out the result of his work for months. In some cases he may never find out. Wouldn't one rather write?
The solution: Just do it.
Simply put, submission is a necessary evil. It's an unavoidable task if one wants to get published. No sense having my finished works lying around collecting dust. There are no other options.
The problem: Disorganization
Looking back at how I had kept track of publications and agents and all the work I had sent out, I could barely keep track of anything. My spreadsheet was a jumble. Column heads were repeated. Agents and publications were mixed in together. Information was incomplete. And my process needed an overhaul. I was trying to mimic how other writers researched and submitted their work. I found doing so did not work for me.
The solution: Start over with a fresh spreadsheet and a fresh eye
When I first started submitting my work, I had asked other writers how they went about the task. One author showed me her spreadsheet, its nice tidy columns, its colors that depicted pending, follow-up and either rejected or sold. On the surface, it was perfect. After all, she'd gotten published so it must be the way to work. But I'm a visual person and all the boxes and colors and little words screwed me up terribly. I decided to build a new spreadsheet from the ground up. A fair amount of the work was learning how to create a spreadsheet that showed information in the way that would be clear to me. One major key was to include pictures of publications and agents.
In the picture, you can see that I have one sheet dedicated to publications and another dedicated to agents. The cool and helpful part it having the publication logo/home page or the agent pic. having these visual clues makes the agents seem like real people and the publications look like real outfits.
Despite there being a good deal of transferring info into the new format, what I ended up with was something far more useful to me given the way I think.
And I addressed the process I had found so frustrating last year. Instead of finding one publication then putting together all my materials for it, I took the advice of other writers. They suggested I take one submission day and either only gather publisher/agent info or only submit to publications/agents for which I had info. Don't try to combine the two tasks on the same day. They're different tasks and are best separated. Shifting gears over and over slows progress.
By the end of my Jan 6th session, I gave into temptation and submitted to a publication instead of only gathering company info. But the publication seemed perfect for a certain story I had been sitting on, so I made an exception. In this case, the publication's submission guidelines were particularly lax and that translated into a submission that didn't require much outside of sending the short story. If the same situation arises again, I'll probably do the same thing since there was little shifting gears necessary.
Next Wednesday, I'll continue with transferring pub and agent info into the new spreadsheet. Once that is done, I'll collect a few more publications' info to have available for submission day on the 20th when I'll do my first real submissions.
I'm already confident my new approach is the correct one because, unlike every moment I thought about it in 2009, I am not dreading my next submission date in four days.
