More Stories to More Markets is my motto for 2012. W1S1 was a great help in 2011 but now it is time to step it up a notch. It is hard to get momentum going when you sub a story and then wait. Of course the answer is to have more stories in circulation and when/if it gets rejected then send it to another market. Which brings me to another point which I learned last year - is that the subbing and keeping track of subs is hard. Which market wants what type of story and do I have one sub'ed there already.

I try to use Sonar from Spacejock software but it's not quite what I want (I'm not sure what I want). I've heard good things about Duotrope (I think) as a tracking tool but haven't tried it. I do need to come up with a better plan than send a story to one market and wait for it to come back. We are not supposed to do multiple submissions. Which means sending more than one piece of writing to a magazine at the same time, not to be confused with "simultaneous submissions," which means sending the same piece of work to different publishers at the same time. (I always have to look that up. Does anyone have a good mnemonic to help remember which is which?)

The problem with that is lag time. Some publishers take a very long time to respond. I don't understand how a monthly mag can take three months to decide if they want a piece. I would think that the backlog of undetermined stories would grow exponentially. That lag time kills my momentum. It's hard to keep positive when you get a rejection but not hearing is worse for me. But that's the business (or would be if/when I sell something.)

Then there are the few markets that still want paper. I can't remember the last time I printed out a manuscript formatted story to mail away. It has been well over a year. And that was just after I got the whole formatting thing down to a science. Now I have to figure out how to sub electronically, but more about that next time.