Why writers must track submissions carefully – FREE template included

Last Updated on July 11, 2020 by Nathaniel Tower

Submitting your writing is both an art and a science. There’s a lot more to it then making a lasting impression on the editor. You also need to create a submission strategy that will help you get more acceptances and fewer rejections.

At the heart of your submission strategy is the way you track your submissions. This will be your running log of everything you’ve ever sent. By tracking all of your submissions, you will set yourself up for success and also avoid some of the common causes of writerly embarrassment.

In this post, I’ll cover three things:

1. Why you need a submission tracker
2. What you should be tracking
3. How you can easily track all of you submissions

Why you need to track your submissions

 

Keep yourself from over submitting your work

We all like to send out our work to a bunch of places at once. This is commonly referred to as simultaneous submissions. The more places we send something, the more likely that piece will be published. However, if you don’t log all of your submissions, you might send a particular story or poem to too many publications. This ends up being a waste of time for you as a writer. If you’ve sent the same story to 57 publications, then you don’t have a very efficient submission process. By tracking all of your submissions, you can quickly gauge if you’ve sent a story out too many times. How many places should you submit to simultaneously? This is really up to you, but I recommend keeping it to no more than 10. Having one piece under consideration by more than 10 publications at once can be a nightmare to manage.

Prevent yourself from getting a double acceptance

A double acceptance sounds great, right? This occurs when a particular piece of writing is accepted by two publications. However, this is far from a great situation. Ultimately, it means you’re going to have to tell one of the publishers that your work is already taken. This is going to piss them off. After all, the rules of simultaneous submissions dictate that you must withdraw your writing as soon as it is accepted elsewhere. That’s where the submission tracker will help. With a good submission tracker, you can quickly withdraw your work from other venues as soon as it is accepted. If you don’t have a thorough submission tracking process, then you’ll find yourself scrambling to remember where you sent out that piece of work. Inevitably, you’ll miss something and end up with a double acceptance (and an angry editor) down the road.

Make sure none of your stories get forgotten

By carefully logging your submissions, you’ll be able to easily see which stories or poems you haven’t been sending out. If you have dozens of unpublished pieces sitting around on your computer, it can be quite challenging to remember what you’ve sent and what you haven’t. Without a good submission tracking process, you might forget to send out one of your favorite pieces.

Make it easy to follow up

If you aren’t tracking your submissions, you have no idea when it’s acceptable to follow up on a submission. By looking at your submission tracker, you can easily see which publications have taken too long to respond to you. This allows you to send a quick follow up to get the status of a submission.

Measure your success as a writer

Writing success isn’t necessarily measured by the number of acceptances, but being able to quickly calculate your acceptance rate or the amount of income you’ve earned as a writer is incredibly valuable. A submission tracker makes this easy and gives you all that data in a single place.

Determine which publications aren’t a good fit

By logging all of your submissions, you can quickly determine which publications you should submit to again – and which you should stay away from. This can be done in a couple ways. First, you might notice a particular publication has rejected your work 34 times. That’s a really good sign they don’t like the way you write. A second way to accomplish this is by including notes about the publication. If you get an encouraging rejection, you might make a note to submit again in the future (just don’t do it too soon!).

Increase the likelihood of future acceptances

Your submission tracker is an easy way to measure your success as a writer. With a little analysis, you can use the data to button up your submission strategy. In addition to quickly determining which publications aren’t a good fit, you can calculate your acceptance rate, see which stories or poems don’t seem to be publishable, and make many other observations about your processes. If nothing else, knowing just how often you are getting rejected is going to make you double-down on your submissions, which ultimately should result in more acceptances.

What to track when you log your submissions

Every time you submit your work, you should log the following:

• Date submitted
• Title of story/poem/manuscript
• Venue, publication, or agent
• Method of submission (Submittable, email, other submission manager, snail mail, etc.)

Some optional things you might also want to track:

• Expected response date – Knowing this will make it easy for you to follow up
• Possible payment – This will help you see how much income you might have coming in
• Genre or type of submission

After you’ve gotten a response from the publication, you should track the following:

• The type of response – acceptance, form rejection, personal rejection, rewrite request, etc.
• Date of response
• Payment offered
• Anticipated date of publication
• Notes about the publication – For example, if you receive a very harsh rejection, you might make a note not to submit there again

How to easily track your submissions

So how is a writer to do all this? If it seems like a lot of work, it isn’t. It only takes a minute or two per submission, and it will save you a lot of time and pain in the long run.

There are a few ways to track your submissions:

You can use a paid service like Duotrope. Their submission tracker has a lot of options, but it’s a bit clunky and requires a few too many steps for my tastes. Additionally, if you ever decide to cancel your Duotrope subscription, you’ll lose all this data.

Use a submission tracking spreadsheet. It doesn’t have to be overly complicated. In fact, I’ve made it easy on you by creating a free color-coded submission tracker that you can download and use for your own purposes. It has space for most of the things we’ve talked about in this article, but you’re always free to customize it for your needs.

Download your free color-coded submission tracker right here.

Do you have any questions, thoughts, or advice when it comes to tracking submissions? Share in the comments! And please share this post with all your writer friends!