Journal Entry
Story Tracker
For those of you who read this and are writers, submitting work, you may be interested in Story Tracker.
Story Tracker is a neat submissions tracking program for you iPhone written by Andrew Nicolle. It’s pretty darn slick and I purchased it as a show of support after playing with the free version on my iPhone and gave it 4 stars. It has statistics, lets you ‘trunk’ stories, and is fairly robust.
Alas, I have an excel spreadsheet with 650+ submission entries on it, tracking 130+ short stories or so, I don’t see sitting in place and keying these in by hand into it.
I’d love, love to see an OS-X submission tracker that is elegant and robust enough to handle my submissions the way, say, Scrivener and Storymill handle my writing a novel. I’m a bit stunned no one has risen to this challenge yet, as I’d be the first to lay down cash money for a program that would let me track my submissions, rejections, bibliography, and money earned in an intuitive manner.
In 1999 I handmade a Microsoft Access database with some visual basic to do this, which took me months, and served me well until 2002, when I switched over to using a Filemaker database to present the information in a meaningful manner. In 2006 I spent a couple months trying to freshen up the Filemaker program so that it could be used by others, and not just me (my 2002 incarnation included lots of macros and buttons that I just plugged in to sort data that served me well, but would be confusing to anyone but me, this is why when you download freeware or engineer’s programs they’re a Graphic User Interface nightmare, my own database by evolution of buttons looks like someone vomited on a screen) but that project fell by the wayside as I focused on trying to make a living.
If someone doesn’t start working on an OS-X version, I’ll probably start a Fundable.com campaign to raise enough money for a board of writers to hire someone to code the darn thing.
Filed under the topic Journal on August 20th 2009 at 9:10 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.
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Tobias is a Caribbean-born SF/F novelist who lives in Ohio.
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1. Zachary on Aug 20th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
You know what I know a friend who might be interested in doing something like this. I’ll tell him about it and maybe put him into contact with you.
2. Andrew Nicolle on Aug 20th, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Sent you an email. An OS-X version is an intriguing idea….
3. Martin McClellan on Aug 20th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
I’d love an OS X program for this, especially if it followed the careful consideration that was put into Scrivener. Even better would be one that tied into a web service, so it could share service with an iPhone app.
4. Donal on Aug 21st, 2009 at 4:15 am
It looks like the team who produce the Write Again submission tracking software are restarting development with a roadmap that includes OS X and iPhone support in version 2.0.
5. Jackie Gamber on Aug 21st, 2009 at 8:47 am
I unfortunately don’t know what OS X means (never have gotten deeply into computers besides as a word processor and game playing device), but I’d pay money for a good tracker program like you’ve described.
I don’t know if it could handle the volume of your submissions, but a free website-based service might interest you if you haven’t checked it out before: http://www.duotrope.com
A source for ideas, maybe.
6. Raj on Aug 21st, 2009 at 9:11 am
I’d love something like this as well. I use an excel spreadsheet right now, but it’s constantly out of date and not quite as put-together as I’d want it to be. Something that could generate reports would be nice. I’ll check out the iPhone app for sure.
7. Aidan on Aug 21st, 2009 at 9:42 am
Toby,
You’d recommend Scrivener? I’ve fooled around with the trial, and it seemed interesting, but (like you’re conundrum here), I wasn’t sure whether it would be worth transferring my manuscript into Scrivener by hand.
Did you ever write your thoughts on the program down anywhere?
8. Dru on Aug 21st, 2009 at 10:03 am
Interesting app. I’m more inclined to use duotrope’s tracker so that the stats get aggregated back for the community. Part of the crowd-source attraction is knowing where things are in relation to the general trend for that zine. I’m lazy/focused on writing, there is no way I want to maintain the 60+ pro sff markets stats when someone else is doing a good job on it.
Now if this did feed back to one of the tracking sites, duotrope or Black Hole/whoever… I’d pick it up Story Tracker in a heartbeat. It fills a lot of other gaps that the tracker sites don’t have. And a OSX mothership/mashup that integrated with Scrivner/Storymill? I’d put down the cash for that immediately.
9. Douglas on Aug 21st, 2009 at 10:15 am
Check out RoamBI on the iPhone for a slick if not feature heavy spreadsheet viewer.
10. Guerry on Aug 21st, 2009 at 10:43 am
Scary. I started development on one because I wanted one too, but put it on the backburner a while back. JUST this morning I pulled up the code, and a bunch of firefox tabs researching next steps…and I see your Tweet. LOL.
11. Steven Saus on Aug 21st, 2009 at 3:28 pm
For those of us who are on Windows or Linux, there’s Sonar3 (that’s Sonar v3) by Spacejock Software. It’s a freeware app that works pretty well for me. At least, a heck of a lot better than a spreadsheet did for me.
http://www.spacejock.com/Sonar3.html
http://www.spacejock.com/Sonar3_Linux.html
12. Mary Robinette Kowal on Aug 21st, 2009 at 6:13 pm
1. Have you tried http://writersplanner.com? It’ll do everything except track money earned, and I bet if you asked Kaolin Fire, the creator, might add that feature.
2. Do NOT use Fundable.com by all that is holy. I have been trying to get $1000 back from them since last February. Darn it. I wasn’t going to blog about my experience with them, but I guess I ought to.