NEW Writer's market!

I'm still old-school and like to buy the hard copy. I love the smell of the pages...I know, I'm weird like that.

Sorry to hear about your problem - can't help you there. But anyway, welcome to AW!


Nickie

Hello there!

Welcome, Josh! I hope you find the answer to this and many other important questions on the next episode of AW Cooler.

Hi Joshua. Welcome to AW. I haven't had anything to do with Writers Market, so can't help you, but I'm sure someone here will respond.

Howdy, Joshua! Welcome to AW.

Bummer about the WM deal... I'm afraid I'm a luddite, too, and prefer the hard copy! But good luck!

FTJoshua,

Welcome to AW!

Hey Josh,

Welcome to the cooler. Bummer about the WM thing. I was always paranoid about something like that happening, that I'd forget to renew my subscription or something and would never be able to access my submissions and such.

Hope it works out for ya soon.

Oh my gosh. I haven't logged on to WM in a while... this prompted me to, and yep! All my dates are gone. Not tragic for me because it's been a long time since I've recorded anything there, but still uncool. I hope this is a temporary problem and they'll put back the data if they hear complaints about it!

I'm going to move this over to the AW Roundtable board, I think... Newbies is meant to just be a place for introductions.

(And hi, by the way!)

Yup. I didn't think about it when they sent me the e-mail. BUt yep. All my dates are gone. Yes they have a glitzy new look, but they used to have it arranged in such a way that it was useful to writers. Now it looks like they're making it useful for dilettantes.

I want my Submission Tracker back. I want my dates.
Yes, I foolishly stopped using a paper record and I stopped putting the stuff on my spread sheet as soon as I discovered WM on line. I always figured I'd print out the tracker when I decided to let my subscription run out.

So, anyway, I e-mailed them and ranted.
Now I have to go home and sort through piles of submission notes, rejection slips, et al just to figure out who had what and when they rejected it.

Grumble grumble

Hi, Joshua, to the cooler and sorry you've had that problem. Sure hope it gets fixed soon.

AAAAHHHHH!!!!!!

I hate the new market. Usually, updates like that are for INCREASED useablility and functionality. But they lost big time. It's awful, and the submission tracker stinks. Like you said...all the dates and notations disappeared.

Let's hope they're not done with it yet and that they'll have it back before long.

BTW, it looks like they're getting ready to add a board.

Also, did you notice they don't have any 'feedback' buttons? It's like they're trying to get rid of subscribers. hmmmm.

They made a big deal about the change, but it was only a “Face-lift” same old mostly outdated information and a serious lack of filters when searching. You can pull up the name of a lot of agents only to discover that many of them don’t accept unpublished authors.

One amusing joke. A publisher they list: “Atlas Variety Publishing” a new publisher that promises to soon have books printed, hasn’t updated it’s website in well over two years. Obviously they’ve moved on to some other line of work and it’s just an orphan site. But Writer’s market hasn’t caught onto it yet.

In all fairness, Writer's Market relies on the publishers and agents to update their information. So you use the 'only recently updated' filter.

But what ticks me off is that it wasn't even a face lift. They actually took away a lot of the functionality...well, on the part of their submission tracker anyway.

Does anyone know of an alternative to Writer's Market.com? My subscription ends this month and I'm questioning whether or not to renew.

I'm so glad to hear that!

All this got me thinking. Why don't I put together my own submission tracker? I started with the website www.mymanuscripts.com.

Anyone want to collaborate (does anyone know how to code?) I'm going with PHP and MySQL. right now I've got a form to fill in publisher info at http://mymanuscripts.com/test1.php. There's a lot of work to do still.

I want to make it so that all the info a user puts in there can be easily downloaded into an excell file...maybe even make the excell file easy to use and change by the users.

Once I get it all together, I'll offer it as a free tool for any writer who signs up. If anyone wants to help, that would be really cool.

Also, if anyone can think of anything that writersmarket was missing (I've got all kinds of ideas bouncing in my head right now) then why don't you post them here and we'll make this thing something that we would all like.

I've developed my own submission tracker, using the time-tested technology of paper and pen. Unless one is making dozens of submissions, it works fine.

Hopefully they'll put it back; I use an offline spreadsheet though, for just that reason. Only trust online storage as a backup.

Yeah, I didn't trust them for the same reason. Mostly, I was worried that my subscription would expire, I wouldn't want to renew and I'd lose my submissions. That's pretty much what happened. Except that I had my submission info on my computer.

Of course, now if I lose it, it'll be my fault.

Sassenach said:

I've developed my own submission tracker, using the time-tested technology of paper and pen. Unless one is making dozens of submissions, it works fine.

Click to expand...

Great minds must think alike. I started to feel stupid reading this thread and everyone talking about their technologically savvy submission tracker system. Then I looked over at my desk and saw my small notebook and pen. My method? I write down three things: The publication I'm sending to, the title of the piece and the date of submission.

Is that too archaic?