August Newsletter: Spreadsheet, Podcasts, Submission Tracking and More

What's the point? Points!

The BSFW Daily Writing Challenge is an ongoing spreadsheet that serves only one purpose: to keep you writing every single day. And what do you get for that? Points, that's what! It's surprisingly motivating. It will only cost you 250 words per day.

The August tab is up and ready to go. If you're not already participating, you should be. To get on board, email Brad.

Kaleidocast needs your stories!

How would you like your stories to appear alongside podcast luminaries like Tim Pratt, Christina Yu and Jonathan Lethem? Well, you could if you submitted a story to the BSFW podcast, Kaleidocast.

We're looking for stories written by members of BSFW, flash fiction (1,500 words or less) and short stories (up to 7,000 words). If you have longer stories, feel free to submit, and we can break them into multiple episodes or do “giant” episodes. Flash and shorter stories will be grouped into episodes. 

Stories must have either been already published elsewhere, or have been through at least one round of critique in the group and edited based on the comments received.

PLEASE BE AWARE: when your story appears in ANY public media, including this podcast, it is considered published, so you will no longer be able to sell first north american serial rights to your story. This article explains it rather well. The best works for this podcast will be either already published, or written for this podcast. If you plan to self-publish later, this won’t matter, but if you’re planning to submit to magazines, agents or publishers, you need to know.

Stories will be protected under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives 3.0 Unported license, which would only allow others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit the author, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

We'll leave the submission period open until we have enough stories for season 1. Details on how to submit are available in the Pages section of our Meetup page. We look forward to seeing your submissions!

The Grinder: A New Submission Tracker

Do you have a story that's ready to go out to publications? Looking for an appropriate market? Give The Grinder a try.

In spite of a rather clunky interface, the genre publication listings are extensive, and offer a number of novel filters, such as Story Subject and Market Qualification, which allows you to filter by SFWA Recognized and Nebula Winning, among other qualifiers.

Another useful feature is the user community's reporting of turnaroud times for story submissions. You can have a good idea ahead of time how long a publication is going to hold on to work before you send it. Give this new resource a try!