Cafe in the Woods

Last Saturday, I returned from another zombie outing with my son to learn that Duotrope will be doing what they've been warning us would happen: as of January 1, 2013, Duotrope will be a paid site. Writers up and down the nets have been having their say about it, so what the heck, I'll do so too.

I use Duotrope. Perhaps not as much as when I was a new writer, but what drew me to Duotrope was the saved search function. I could plug in genre, style, wordcount, for any written piece I wanted to submit and get a customized list of markets. Just recently I got the hang of the feature where you can run a search and exclude markets you've already submitted to. I found that pretty neat. I also made use of the submission tracker, which served more as a backup for me since I also keep track of my submissions through Outlook, which I have written about in an earlier post (I have since upgraded to Outlook 2007 and added a few more custom fields, like keeping track of previous markets I've submitted to). I mainly used Duotrope's tracker so I could add my submission statistics to the response time reports.

But all that's going away...or rather, as of 1/1/2013, we'll now have to start paying for saved searches, submission tracking, the control panel, the deadline calendar, response statistics, etc. A lot of people are decrying that, saying Duotrope is charging too much per year, that limiting the response tracker will skew statistics, etc and so forth.

Me? I'm more like meh.

Since I've been focusing more on my novel, I haven't been on the site all that much. I also know the market field much better now, so that I have a running list in my head of places I could send my subs to. The only time when I go on Duotrope is when I've exhausted those places or to see if a market is temporarily closed. I get my new market news and editor info off Twitter and other sources, I use the deadline calendar sparingly, and I don't use the response statistics at all. And I'll go back to using Outlook as a submission tracker. It's probably better this way--I won't be recording the same information in two different places.

This is not to say I won't miss Duotrope. I think it's a fantastic service. Personally, I think it's ridiculous to spend $50/year on the site. If it was $20 or even $30/year, I would subscribe with no hesitation. But I've reached the point in my writing career where I can survive without Duotrope.

What I feel bad for are new writers. They will be the ones who would benefit from Duotrope the most, and there's a good chance they won't be able to afford it. Used to be, I'd suggest Duotrope as the only go-to source for market information. In 2013, I don't think I'll be able to do that. I can't justify telling them to spend $50 a year on the service. 6 months, maybe, but not a full year.  Then again, Duotrope isn't the only one giving market info. Ralan.comis still free, comes with a free monthly newsletter and can be found on Facebook. And there are tons of info on Twitter. For response times, The Black Hole at Critters.org is, surprisingly, still around, so I can report reponse times there.

I've seen some people suggest a tiered payment option where they pay for certain features like only saved searches, and I agree. The way Duotrope has things now, there's hardly anything left free to entice new writers to pay up, and there's nothing to keep those who are familiar with the service from staying.

With that said, though, I'm not writing off Duotrope entirely. Ferrett Steinmetz goes into more detail about this with his post "A Failure of Duotrope,  A Failure of Their Audience: Thoughts by Someone Who's Been There":

The lesson in this is, “If you use a service that you like, and they’re asking you to pay for it, pay them.”  Doesn’t have to be much.  Like I said, if all you can afford is $5, then pay them $5.  If you’re flat broke and would pay them if you could, well, I’ll count those intentions as good.  But the world does not run on free labor, and at some point labors of love fail to pay for the labors of the stomach.

In the future, to avoid this sort of thing, give when you can.  Stop assuming that “free” means “a buffet for you” and start thinking, “How can I reward these people for their work?”  Maybe you pay it back by volunteering at their site, or telling about it to all your rich friends, or whatever.  But stop dining and dashing, and start helping the world be a better place by rewarding those who do good things.

This is very, very true. Duotrope was indeed a site I liked so much, I contributed to it. Several times. It wasn't much, but I felt that it was a worthwhile service. And there's a very good chance that I would do the same thing again down the road--pay $5 to gather some good searches, and then let the subscription lapse for several months. Duotrope did say that information will be kept on file (though I don't know how intermittent usage work with response time statistics--probably not so well, I'm guessing).

So if you want to pay for Duotrope, go ahead and do so. Granted, the way they dropped this news reminded me of the Netflix fiasco earlier this year, but it's still a good site. And if you wish to get an annual subscription, by all means, do so. And if you don't, try some of the other free sites above. Keep track of your subs in a spreadsheet.

Heck, we're writers. We're supposed to be creative about such things.