Those of you who aren’t writers probably have no interest in this blog post, while those of you who ARE writers probably know all about the wonderful service that is The Grinder…yet I’m writing this post anyway.
The Grinder is a FREE site that operates as a market database and submissions tracker for all works of fiction. You can search for a place to submit a particular story by specifying genre, length, and desired pay. You can read about the different markets and follow links to their website.
You can see handy statistics like this:
How cool is that? Before you submit to this particular magazine, you already know they accept 6.25% of submissions and how long it generally takes to hear back from them. The long times (like 478 max days waiting) probably means that someone didn’t update what happened with a submission and NOT that the market actually takes that long. The data does get skewed that way, so when YOU log YOUR submissions, please make sure to update what happens to maintain accuracy for us all.
Now…here’s the part with the obsessive refreshing…
When you list a piece with The Grinder, you log your submission of that piece. Then you click on the market and see a graph like this:
This is where it gets SUPER COOL. See that black dot? That’s my submission (or your submission, when you do this). We can see I submitted to this market November 20th. All the pending pieces are in purple, so we know that one other person (who logged on The Grinder) also submitted that day and has a pending piece. We can see two pieces submitted that day have been rejected, in addition to several pieces submitted after that day.
Judging from this graph, I know I may hear something about this piece soon. When I look at the graphs for some of my other submissions, I can see I won’t hear anything for weeks and weeks–so I’m not waiting on pins and needles or anything.
HOW COOL IS THIS?
If you’re a writer and you don’t already use The Grinder, you should go there right now, set up a profile, enter info about your current pieces, and update info about submissions as you can. Your participation helps ALL of us have accurate data about the markets! 🙂
Sarah E. Stevens 