Jeremiah Tolbert

The title is the ques­tion I’d like you to think about, my writer friends, estab­lished pros, aspir­ing authors, and any­one who car­ries a torch for the writ­ten word.    What could com­put­ers and tech­nol­ogy do to make the writ­ing life eas­ier for you?

Here are some ideas to get you started:

1.  I’d like (and am think­ing about build­ing) an online sub­mis­sion tracker soft­ware that’s as easy to use as Gmail and that can actu­ally rec­om­mend mar­kets to me for pieces.  I’d like it to track key­words asso­ci­ated with my work.  And after I sell a piece, I’d like to keep track of what rights I’ve sold, where to, and have it sug­gest reprint oppor­tu­ni­ties to con­sider.   In addi­tion, the site would pro­vide detailed sta­tis­tics on mar­kets, with graphs, culled anony­mously from user data.

2. I’d like this same soft­ware to track my head­count progress and help me set goals.  I’d like it to graph my pro­duc­tiv­ity, and com­pare it against the aver­age user of the site.   I’d like a sim­ple script to add to my site that will act as a word progress bar that updates itself auto­mat­i­cally based on what I enter in my software.

3. I’d like to be able to actu­ally load my sub­mis­sions into these pro­grams.  Then I’d like to tell it where I am sub­mit­ting next, and have it auto­mat­i­cally for­mat my cover let­ter and story in the pre­ferred for­mat and present it to me for printing.

4.  I’d like to be able to set a queue for each story, so that when a story is rejected, and I enter it into the soft­ware, it read­ies it for the next loca­tion auto­mat­i­cally.  Basically, automat­ing my workflow.

What else could your com­puter do for your writ­ing?  And yes, be fore­warned that I may bor­row your idea as a fea­ture for an appli­ca­tion I’m con­sid­er­ing building.

So what are some prob­lems you’d like to see solved?

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