World Class Poetry Blog

Tropes: Two Writer’s Resources Worth Selling Your Soul For
20 June 2008, the poet @ 7:50 pm

I’ve been playing around with a couple of websites and I just wanted to share a little about them and how working poets can benefit from them. Both of these websites are free, but they’d be valuable even as paid services. If you get a chance I’d encourage you to check them out and start using them:

Duotrope’s Digest - Duotrope’s Digest is an online database of markets for writers. They include markets for short stories, poems, and novels and collections. A very useful tool. But it’s more than just a listing of places to send your work for consideration. It’s much more.

You can look up markets by genre, size of work they publish, whether they pay or not, and by a list of other criteria as well including whether or not the market is a print market or online publication. For each market Duotrope’s will tell you whether they accept simultaneous submissions or previously published material, the expected turnaround time on submissions, and they usually link to the market’s website so you can check it out on your own and read the submission guidelines. Some markets even accept e-mail submissions and Duotrope’s will tell you which ones do and which ones don’t.

But one of the most useful features of Duotrope’s Digest is its online submissions tracker. This is a great tool and I’m going to ditch my Excel Spreadsheet, which I’ve found is rather cumbersome. Duotrope’s isn’t, and it keeps track of my submissions rather nicely. For each poem or story that you submit you can track the date it was sent for consideration, the date you were notified of reception, the date of acceptance or rejection, and Duotrope’s will take that information and roll it into the general feedback that it gives writers to notify them of the expected turnaround time. I like that feature a lot!

Other useful features of Duotrope’s Digest include:

• A theme calendar for upcoming contests
• Search for publications by title
• New changes to markets
• An awesome weekly newsletter
• Interesting statistics for the curious (such as top 25 good, bad, and ugly sites; markets that send the most personal responses; and a whole lot more)

I highly recommend Duotrope’s Digest to any poet at any level of development and, as a side note, you can see the latest updates to Duotrope’s list of markets under the RSS News tab of the World Class Poetry Toolbar.

Zoetrope - Zoetrope Virtual Studio was started by movie-making genius Francis Ford Coppola. So it’s got to be good, right?

You bet it is!

Since it was started by a movie-making icon, Zoetrope has a lot of features that are useful to script writers, producers, actors, and others in the film industry. But it isn’t limited to that scope. If you are a short story writer, poet, novelist, or a visual artist, they have features for you too.

Zoetrope allows you to post your work for others to critique and review. This is a good way to get feedback without having to join an MFA program or shell out thousands of dollars on writer’s retreats and such. Not that those aren’t valuable, and you have to take some criticisms with a grain of salt, but if you can get good feedback on your poetry for free then it’s worth it.

The catch is Zoetrope doesn’t let just anyone dive right in and ruin the party. There are some control measures. First, you are allowed to post a poem for critique and receive feedback right away, but you can’t read your feedback until you’ve provided reviews for five other works yourself. The rooms are split up into categories (i.e. poetry, art/design, novellas, short stories, etc.) and you have to join each room separately, which means that if you are a member of the Poetry and the Flash Fiction rooms then you have to review five of each kind of work before you can see your feedback in the room corresponding to the respective category. After your initial sign up, you have to provide five more reviews before you can submit a second work for review. This ensures that you don’t hog all the attention and that you help others as well. It’s a “pay it forward” system and I like that.

Zoetrope also has other cool features. You can receive mail from other members through Zoetrope, a sort of private messaging system. And all members can create a private office and invite others to their office. Only people you invite have access to your office. So if you like a person’s feedback and you want to offer up a complete portfolio for them to review (and they are willing) then you can do that. Also, each private room has a chat/discussion feature so that you can actually network with others.

I highly recommend Zoetrope and Duotrope’s Digest to poets at any stage of development. Both are free.

1 Comment a “Tropes: Two Writer’s Resources Worth Selling Your Soul For”

1. Jim Murdoch — June 21, 2008 @ 3:22 am
   

   I’ve been a member of Zoetrope for years now. It’s by far the best site of its kind but like all sites its strength lies in its members. I stopped submitting stuff about eight years back because it was eating up my life and I was doing no writing. I returned recently determined to keep a low profile. The people have all changed which helps. I’m sticking to the poetry wing for just now but my experiences on the short story wing were very good, there were people there who were looking to be critiqued properly and gave decent feedback. This is not a site to join if you’re just looking to be told how good you are. Of course there will always be the someone who gets upset or throws a strop but that’s life. I personally stay clear of the offices simply due to past experiences, not bad, just exhausting.

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