Not on the right track …
I’ve been working on WriteTrack whenever I have a spare moment. In case you’re wondering, WriteTrack is this submission tracking program that I’ve been working on. When I first started submitting my novel to agents, I didn’t keep track of submissions at all. Then, when I started seeing the same agent listed on another website and couldn’t remember if I’d queried them or not, I began keeping track in an Excel spreadsheet. I wanted to write WriteTrack at that point but I was too busy with other stuff to actually get around to it.
Now that I’m becalmed again, waiting for an agent to get back to me, I thought I might as well get started on the project. Especially since this agent is really taking their time and it probably will end up in me looking for another agent after I finally hear back from them :p I’d looked at a few other submission tracking applications out there and while I liked some of them, none of them had all the features I wanted. I didn’t simply want a tool to track submissions I’d already made, I wanted a tool which would actually do the submissions for me as well. Doing the first part, tracking submissions that I’d already made, turned out to be rather easy and so I got that done and put the first beta of WriteTrack up for download – go on over to the Bits & Bytes page and get your copy if you’re interested 🙂
The next part, the one I really wanted, proved to be a bit tougher. Not only did I need a mail merge facility so that I can have a template which could be filled in with random bits of data such a agent details, book title, synopsis etc., I also needed a way for the user to select multiple contacts/agents from a list and then either mail them or e-mail them enmass. I haven’t even gotten around to the e-mail part though I’m hoping to use the default mailing app on the user computer and simply send all the information over to the mailing app via MAPI or something. What I’m stuck on at the moment is setting up a user-friendly mechanism to select multiple contacts :p Sure, you can do the whole CTRL+click or SHIFT+click thing but that is not intuitive. It would be much easier if the user had a list of contacts and they could check a box to indicate that they wanted to mail such and such a contact – but that’s proving to be harder than I thought with the approach I’m taking. Oh well, sooner or later I’ll crack it I guess …
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