Of all the things that writers have to do, the task that seems the most burdensome is the step that’s most crucial to getting our work into print: submitting it. Sending out submissions isn’t just a bookkeeping nightmare – you have to remember where you sent it and when and how long to wait before following up and whether the work was paid for or not and if not when it’s going to be paid and who you need to contact at each publication and how many times a piece was rejected and when it’s going to be published and… – it’s also an emotionally super-charged experience. Every query or finished piece you send out is yet another chance for some person you don’t know to reject you, and the psychological toll of rejection adds up pretty fast.

WordHustler is a new service that aims to take at least some of the hassle out of submitting. While they don’t offer personal therapy for rejection anxiety sufferers (yet?) they do offer an incredible system for finding markets and contests to submit your work to, sending work out, and tracking your submissions and responses. And it’s a real end-to-end service – they do all the work of evaluating markets, printing manuscripts or queries, and even mailing out your work – all you have to do is select markets, write cover letters, and click “Send”.

Here are some of the things you can do with WordHustler:

• Research markets in their database of over 3,000 magazines, publishing houses, and contests. Each entry is evaluated by hand to weed out scams and assure accuracy.
• Create cover letters and queries using their online LaTeX interface. LaTeX is not a word processor, it’s a typesetting engine, so documents produced on WordHustler look like they’ve been professionally printed. Talk about standing out! (According to Anne Walls, one of the founders, they’re looking at expanding this for the creation of manuscripts as well.)
• Track your projects. You can upload your manuscripts (in PDF format only, for now, but more formats will be accepted down the road), add notes, tags, status, and other information, and search by word count, degree of completeness, or keywords. When a project is done, you can instantly find relevant markets and contests according to genre, tags, and other criteria.
• Send submissions to selected markets. Once you’ve identified a market, written your cover letter, and uploaded your manuscript, WordHustler does the work of assembling your submission, according to the publisher’s guidelines. If the publisher wants the first ten pages, they send the first ten pages. If the publisher wants a reply postcard, they send a reply postcard (pre-addressed to you). Whatever instructions the publisher gives, WordHustler follows.
• Track submissions. Your dashboard lists all the manuscripts you have out, and you can mark off responses as they return.
• Get advice. You and your fellow WordHustlers can comment on markets and vote them up or down, so others benefit from your experience. The WordHustler blog offers advice, interviews, and market information. And they’re growing: more social media and community features are on their way.

The best part is, everything except printing and mailing submissions is free. WordHustler charges only for sending out manuscripts, charging a pretty fair rate for printing, compiling, and shipping your manuscript depending on the size of the submission.

Actually, that’s not the best part. The real best part is that WordHustler is founded and run by two authors, Anne Walls and John L. Singleton, so they know from first-hand experience about the problems writers face. WordHustler was created to manage their own submissions – it grew out of the actual experiences that writers have juggling their submission tracking and market research with the creative work of actually writing. I’ve been emailing back and forth with Walls for the last couple weeks, and it’s clear that her and Singleton’s top priority is to serve the interests of writers.

It’s clear, too, that they continue to look for new ways to add even more value to the service. I emailed Walls with a list of ways I thought WordHustler could be made even more useful; in almost every case, they were already working on the things I’d suggested, and were very open to the few ideas I had that they hadn’t already started working on. That, to me at least, is incredibly promising.

So market listings are free – the point isn’t to profit from listing markets, but to provide writers as much information as possible. Writer feedback on markets is listed, so we all benefit from each other’s experiences. Unethical or predatory markets (like contests that exist solely to drive sales of the published book of “winners”) are removed, or not listed in the first place.

In the final assessment, WordHustler is a well-thought-out and useful service, and I highly recommend writers check it out. As with all tools, it’s entirely possible that it won’t fit your particular style or needs, which is why I put together a whole series on submission tracking techniques and tools – find the one that works for you. But WordHustler is a more-than-worthy addition to that lineup, and goes far beyond just tracking submissions. If you’re an active writer, you will get a lot of use out of WordHustler.

One is the word count tracking feature — you can add a word count to each manuscript as you add it, or go back in and update the word count on a daily basis. Writer’s Database then generates a graph, showing you your output on a weekly basis. Useful for keeping on top of your productivity.

Another useful feature is the “Shared Markets” section. Since Writer’s Database is web-based, users can share information with the entire community. You have the option sharing any new market you add, and clicking “Shared Markets” will show you all the markets other users have shared. This is a great way to find out about new markets.

Everything in Writer’s Database is searchable, as well, which can help you to find markets you’ve forgotten about or submissions when you can’t remember all the details. And a set of new “gadgets” — plugins for your Google or Netvibes homepage, as well as a Yahoo Konfabulator widget and a Mac OSX dashboard widget — allow you to track your submissions in a number of different ways.

Web-based applications aren’t for everyone, but Writer’s Database is well-designed, well-programmed, and more or less intuitive. It’s definitely worth a look, and with the word count tracking, may well become a part of your everyday routine.

Sonar comes from SpaceJock Software, which also produces the yWriter novel-writing program. It runs on all Windows systems, though Vista users should pay special attention to his instructions for Vista — unless you want to fuss with permissions every time you run Sonar, you need to install it to your individual “Documents” folder. There are also instructions to get it running on Linux.

Slushomatic allows you to store documents directly in the program and create and store cover letters with them. When it comes time to send a manuscript, Slushomatic generates formatted, ready-to-print PDF files that can be opened and printed in Adobe Acrobat (or my preference, Foxit Reader), or attached to email for markets that accept electronic submissions. Because it’s written in Java, it should run on any computer that runs Java — Windows, Mac, or Linux.

Writer’s Database was written by writer Simon Kewin, and is the simplest of the three. It’s Windows only, and you most likely have to download and install the VB6 Runtime files (there’s a download link on the site).

All three work basically the same. Each offers three views: Markets, Submissions, and Manuscripts (or some variation of each). In each view, selecting “add new ___” opens a form to add information to. All three are linked, so that when you are creating a new submission, for example, the markets appear in a drop-down. Or when you’re looking at a manuscript, you can easily see which markets it’s been submitted to and what the current status is.

There is really no objective way to rank any of these over the other two. All are well-written and time-tested, so they work well. Each has its own little quirks that will appeal to some users and turn off others? Since all three are free, why not download them all and see which one works best for you?

Title of Piece | Length | Genre/Type | Query or Submission? |Market Submitted to | Market’s Address | Pay | Date Sent | Response Time | Response (Y/N) | Accepted? (Y/N) | Due date | Publish date | Pay date | Paid? (Y/N)

You could also create another sheet with market information, in which case you can skip the “Market’s Address” and “Pay” columns.

As you send pieces or queries out, you fill in a new line. When you receive a response, you go back and put a Y under “Response?” and select either “Yes or No” under “Accepted?” If your piece was accepted, you can add the date it will be published and when you’ll be paid. If it was a query, add the date the finished piece is due.

Using a spreadsheet has an advantage over paper, in that you can sort your columns. So, for instance, you could sort on the “Response?” column to find pieces that are still under consideration by their respective markets — and check the “Response time” column to see whether you should have heard back from them or not. Maybe it’s time to send a reminder?

Or you could sort on “Market” to see who you haven’t submitted anything to in a while. Or “Accepted?” to see what pieces you should be looking at resubmitting elsewhere. Or “Paid?” to see who might be just a little behind in paying their authors. I’m sure it just slipped their mind…

If you have some spreadsheet savvy, you can also add drop-down selectors or check boxes for different options — for example, a check box can replace “Yes/No” in some columns, and a drop-down could list all the different genres or formats you write in (e.g. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Fantasy Romance, Fantasy Horror, Fantasy Horror Romance, Romantic Horrific Fantasy, Fantastic Romancy Horrismcy, etc.).

Using a spreadsheet offers basic functionality, but as it gets larger and larger it’s going to get more and more unwieldy. Plus, every time you submit the same piece to a new market, you’ll need to create a new line, making tracking the history of a specific piece or query idea somewhat difficult. Next, we’ll look as specialty software that addresses some of these issues. Stay tuned!

A lot of writers get by with a binder or note-book, flipping through pages and updating each entry by hand, but this can get messy pretty quickly if you’re at all prolific — and if you’re not, remembering to update your binder (or even remember where it is) when the changes you’re tracking come infrequently can be a problem.

Submission tracking is simple, formulaic, and repetitive — exactly the kind of task that computers are especially good for. There are quite a few ways to track submissions on a computer, from plain text files that reproduce the format of pen-and-paper systems to specialized programs designed particularly for the task.

Any system you use needs to do several things easily and reliably. You need to be able to tell when a piece was sent, whether you’ve heard back yet, and what the response was. You also need to be able to link submissions to the market it was sent to, in case you need to follow up. If you send out queries, your submission tracking system needs to tell you what ideas you need to work into full pieces and when they’re due. And it needs to tell you when to expect payment, and how much — again, so you can follow up if necessary.

Over the course of the week, we’ll look at several different ways to track submissions. Check them out and decide what system is going to work best for you.