Do You Duotrope?

One of the New Year's first big stories in the world of writing and letters is Duotrope's decision to become a subscription-based website. This is not necessarily shocking--after all, very few services in life are free, and we all had a pretty strong notion that Duotrope (an ad-free site) wasn't making much through voluntary user donations (the only other viable source of income for a website). Still, the move ruffled some feathers--plenty of folks have hit the web to voice their displeasure, and why shouldn't they? No one likes to pay for what they used to get for free.

I haven't spoken with the folks at Duotrope, so I am really in no position to talk about any of the factors that went into Duotrope's decision. (I can safely assume it costs a lot more to run Duotrope than it does to run my blog.) That said, I do wonder how many writers (most of whom make no money off their work) they expect to sign up as paying subscribers when there are still other sites on the web offering similar services at no cost. It's a question we'll have an answer to by this time next year, I imagine.

In the mean time, what I'd like to do is take a look at what Duotrope is offering to us writers and offer my opinion as someone who sends out a lot of submissions each year to journals and writing contests. For those who aren't familiar, Duotrope is an online submissions manager and a searchable database of markets. In the old days, before a subscription was required, a person could go to Duotrope's site and browse through hundreds of magazines and journals accepting work in a variety of genres ranging from literary and mainstream to sci-fi, fantasy, erotica, and so forth. Duotrope would provide information on how to submit (electronic or postal? simultaneous subs okay?) and track submission statistics, letting you know just what your odds were of getting published at the journal of your choice. You could also keep track of your own submissions--recording what pieces went where and the results. Finally, one of the more overlooked but useful features was Duotrope's listing of upcoming themed issues. (Got a piece about a zombie who falls in love with an alien? Well, the spring issue of "Zombies vs. Aliens" at Paranormal Magazine might be a good fit. Or maybe the "Romeo and Juliet Re-imagined" issue at Forbidden Love?)

Anyway, use of this website now costs $50 a year. Not a terrible price when you consider your cable bill probably runs somewhere between 2 and 3 times that amount. The big question, however, is whether it's really worth it?

So let's take a closer look at what Duotrope is offering . . . .

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Searchable Journal Database: Duotrope is probably best known for its database of journals, all of them conveniently coded by genre, the new "fledgling" markets identified for us, the "closed" markets also clearly marked. There's no denying that, in the age of the internet where new journals are born and die almost daily, this is/was a convenient resource for a writer to have at his/her fingertips. This database is something of a two-edged sword: on one hand, you get listings of top-shelf literary journals like Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review and the rest. On the other hand, you also get those niche sorts of journals, like this one or this one, which may or may not be what you are looking for. Duotrope is democratic that way--it's not picky in its scope, not interested in vetting or evaluating the quality or prestige of the journals it lists. If you strive to be the next Henry James, you'll find a lot of great journals here focused on Literature (with a capital "L"). If your goal is to become the next E. L. James, you'll find plenty of journals to suit your needs, as well. That said, while the key code often helps direct people to where they want to go, it's not perfect. You're still going to spend a lot of time wading through the lists, you're going to find yourself backtracking sometimes, and it can still be difficult to determine whether some of the listed journals are a good fit for your work or not. For a writer, that kind of exploration can be fun, but it can also be time-consuming.

Which brings me to my bigger point: Duotrope makes it very easy to simply gather a list of names and start sending out at random to journals you've never even read. While I am all about convenience, I don't think this is a good practice. As most journals will tell you, it's useful to have a sense of what they are looking for first, and you get that sense by reading them. Not by stuffing envelopes. That's not to blame Duotrope--they point you to the sites and then it becomes your job to do the heavy lifting. Keeping that in mind, there might be something to be said for having to do a bit more legwork when finding and evaluating journals: speaking with other writers, thumbing through the magazines at your local bookstore (if you have one), or at the very least searching the web the old-fashioned way.

It's also worth noting that there are a lot of websites that provide journal databases for free. Including Newpages.com (which is arguably a better database), Poets & Writers Magazine, and rejectionwiki.com.

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Submissions Tracker: I'm just going to come out and say it, and I'm sure that plenty of others will disagree, but this is kind of a useless feature. It's not necessarily a knock against Duotrope, I just wonder why anyone would pay for this service when you can use Word or Excel to create your own ledger (one that is not only customizable, but probably quicker and easier to maintain). In fact, I'll even share my blank Submissions Ledger with you, free of charge. (Don't say I don't ever give you anything.) Just click here. 

Now, if you are more savvy than I am, you can create a fancy Excel spreadsheet that tracks response times automatically, calculates your success rate, etc., but for most of us a simple chart will suffice. You can add or delete categories as needed, but I recommend the following basics:

• Title -- Obviously, the name of your submission
  
• Genre -- SS, P, E, NC (short story, poem, essay, novel chapter, and so on)
• Journal Name
• Submit Date -- The date you mail/emailed your submission
• Response Date -- the date you received a reply (you might also want to include an "estimated response" column, if you are interested in tracking which journals do the best job of meeting their advertised turn-around times)
• Response -- Accepted, Personal Rejection, Rejection

You might also want to color code your ledger so you can easily see which pieces are still under consideration, which have been rejected, and which have been accepted. This is the kind of thing that takes 10 minutes to create and even less time to update.

Note: More and more journals are using Submishmash for submissions (which also tracks where you've sent work and whether pieces have been accepted/rejected, though it doesn't keep track of other useful data). 

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Theme Calendar: I like this feature of Duotrope's, if for no other reason than it gives me an opportunity to check out all of the unusual topics that journals are featuring in a given issue. That said, I don't like it enough to justify ordering a subscription. And, at the end of the day, if I'm really being honest, I can't recall ever sending to a themed issue because I saw it listed on Duotrope. (After all, how many times do we reasonably discover that a story we wrote also fits a magazine's theme? It's mostly coincidental.)

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Acceptance Data Reports: This is the feature that Duotrope is best known for, and so it is worth us giving it a little consideration. Data Reports contain within them two potential useful bits of information, the average turn-around time for a journal (the amount of time it takes you to receive a response after you send out your work), and the acceptance rate (the percent chance you have of getting your work published in a given journal). So let's look at each:

• Response Times: These are almost always listed among a journal's submission guidelines, but it's useful to see whether or not the journal is keeping its word or not. Any writer will tell you, journals with outlandish response times are not worth sending to. Honestly, neither are journals that don't accept simultaneous submissions. (I don't care how prestigious you are.) So data report that provides this kind of information can save you a lot of time. The only question I have is whether or not Duotrope's data sample is large enough to be statistically relevant. Right now, as I understand it, users have the option to submit this data, but they are not required to do so. I haven't ever sent Duotrope information on turn-around times for the journals I've sent to, and I have to imagine there are a lot of other writers out there who haven't either. (That said, maybe if I were paying for a subscription, I would feel more inclined to get my money's worth out of it.) So, if we are only getting a small percentage of writers adding data (and, we might assume that some of them are submitting data because they are irritated over how long they had to wait), then it stands to reason that this data isn't as accurate as it might be. Now, if the data were collected automatically whenever some updates their submissions manager, that might create a bigger and more relevant sample size, but it's my understanding that this isn't how Duotrope collects its information at present.

          The other important thing to remember is this: How useful is this information to you as a writer? We all know that
          journals are notoriously inconsistent when it comes to turn-around times, so wouldn't a median number be more
          effective than a mean? In other words, is there even such a thing as a "typical" response time? And if there was, would
          it encourage or dissuade you from sending to a place you had otherwise been considering? I don't know the answer to
          those questions, but it is worth considering.

• Acceptance Rate: Again, I wonder about the sample size for this data. More importantly though, I wonder to what degree this information is helpful to a writer? Do we not expect a low acceptance rate for pretty much every journal we send to? Aren't we expecting somewhere between 99% and 95% of our work to be rejected? I can't recall speaking to any writer friends who have said, "Well, I was going to send to journal X, but then I saw that journal Y accepts 11% of its submissions and so I sent there instead." Maybe some writers play the odds, but I'm not one of them. I think we develop a sense of where our work stands a real chance over time--for example, that The New Yorker is almost impossible to get into and that the Rat's Ass Review is probably low-hanging fruit by comparison. I also think we realize that you can't account for taste. I've had enough friends get rejected by the small journals only to have the same piece picked up by a big name publication to know that statistics mean very little to the individual. So I wonder to what degree knowing the odds really helps us to make wise decisions about where we send our work.

For me, I guess it comes down to this: I used to pay a lot of attention to the data reports, but after time, I stopped even bothering with them. They didn't seem to be helping (or hindering) my cause, and when it comes down to it, I'd simply rather look at the journals themselves.

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Final Verdict: I think Duotrope can be a useful site, and over the years, I've especially admired and appreciated their large and updated database of journals. I'll miss it. For a lot of people, especially those folks who enjoy writing as a hobby and as a reprieve from their busy lives/day-jobs/etc., Duotrope can be a great time-saver and a subscription might be money well spent. That said, I won't be subscribing--$50, while very reasonable when you think about it, is still two contest entry fees for me, and I not willing to spend that in exchange for the features Duotrope currently offers. That said, I'm not really interested in convincing you one way or another, Dear Reader. I'd rather give you this information so that you can consider the pros and cons of subscribing on your own.

If you have any thoughts about Duotrope, any experiences you'd like to share, or if you think I'm off-base in my analysis, I'd love to hear from you. Leave me a message in the comments below!