Good morning, Squiders, I hope you’re all doing well. I haven’t been sleeping so well lately, so I’m a bit sleepy.
I’ve come across a couple of websites lately that I feel could be of interest to other writers and authors, so I thought I’d share them with you all in case you’re unaware of them.
The first is The Grinder, which I found randomly yesterday while I was submitting some short stories to various markets and looking at different anthology calls. Everyone remembers Duotrope, right? Duotrope was (is) a site that kept track of short story markets and allowed you to track your submissions. It had (has) stats for each market based on user input, including likelihood of being accepted. But a while ago it went paid, $50 a year or something. Well, the Grinder aims to do what Duotrope used to do–allow writers to track short story submissions and provide user-based input on markets. It’s still in beta, but if you miss Duotrope, definitely give it a look.
The second is WriterPitch.com, which looks like an interesting concept, but I do not claim any first hand knowledge as I have not personally participated. WriterPitch allows both writers and agents to make accounts, and the idea is that writers can post pitches for their books, and then agents can go through and see if anything interests them. Alternately, agents can post wishlists, and writers can query if they have a story that’s a good match. I have no idea what the writer to agent ratio is (it looks about 10:1 based on number of profiles), whether any agents are seriously looking at the website, and whether anyone has found any sort of success. But if you’re actively looking for an agent, you might give it a look and see if you think it will meet your needs.
Have you noted any interesting websites lately, Squiders? I got an interesting survey from Goodreads some months back, asking about new author features, but to my knowledge, none of those have gone into effect yet.
