This page is a work in progress and will list tools and resources that I personally use and recommend.
This page will be evolving. If you have any recommendations, feel free to e-mail me.
shannon@101words.org
Duotrope & Submission Grinder
These tools help you find publications that accept submissions. Once you find what you are looking for, they will help you keep track of your submissions. You can search listings using filters such as:
- Category
- Genre and sub-genre
- Style
- Length
- Payment
- Subject
- And more…
Duotrope seems to be more feature rich, but cost starts at $5 a month / $50 annually. They have a 7 day free trial if you want to dip your toes in the water. We saw a significant increase in submissions when we were added to Duotrope.
Submission Grinder is free and was created when Duotrope started charging. They state on their website that it will always be free.
Scrivener
I am a huge fan of simple txt documents and usually like to keep things simple. That said, when your documents start getting complicated there is no better tool than Scrivener to keep them organized.
Scrivener allows you to focus on smaller chunks of txt—such as a chapter in a book—but allows you to organize the overall document by simply dragging chapters around. My favorite way of doing this is with the Index Card view!
Watch this video to see it in action:
I can’t recommend it enough! You can download a fully functional 30 day trial and see for yourself. The great thing about the trial is that it will work for 30 days of actual use, as opposed to 30 consecutive days.
Check out the full list of features and download the 30 day trial.
Learn Scrivener Fast
If you decided to take the plunge and give Scrivener a try, you probably want some tutorials to get up and running fast. The video above covers the basics, but if you want more than that, you might want to give Learn Scrivener Fast a try. I personally have not gone through this course yet, but I plan to in the near future. If you end up going through this course, I would love to hear about it.
More details about Learn Scrivener Fast.
Byword for Mac
Byword is my favorite text editor on the Mac and iOS devices. It is simple and elegant without the feature bloat of applications like Microsoft Word. Put it in fullscreen mode for a beautiful, distraction-free writing environment. All you can see are the words on the page and the word / character counts. It is perfect for short stories.