written by David Steffen
A couple of new features were released over the last week on the Submission Grinder. For those who don’t know what the Submission Grinder is, it’s a donation-supported website that helps writers finds publishers for their work, as well as providing submission statistics from user data.
The Advanced Search Engine can do a lot of things already. You can search by various parameters like length or pay rate. You can ignore individual markets so they never show up in your search results, or exclude markets where a particular piece has been submitted. But it can only work with the data it has available to it, and sometimes that’s not the sort of data that a program can make sense of. For instance, Beneath Ceaseless Skies takes secondary world fantasy only. The search engine can base its search on genre, so it’ll find BCS in a Fantasy search, so if you search for your contemporary American fantasy you’re going to keep seeing BCS in your search results and you’ll have to remember to ignore that result yourself. Or if you have a piece that doesn’t technically fit the specifications of a market but you have special permission to submit or something, then there would be no way to mark that for yourself.
Now there are things you can do to customize your search results! Now, you can define “piece priorities”, which tell the site special instructions for a combination of a particular piece and a particular market. Besides the default “no priority” setting, there are two other values you can set:
- UNSUITABLE
This priority indicates that you just don’t think this piece is a good fit for this market, even if it fits the defined search parameters. If you set a piece as unsuitable for a market, then that means that when you search for markets for that piece, that market will always be excluded from the results. And if you search for markets for that piece, that market will always be excluded from the results. - PREFERRED
This priority indicates that you think this is a particularly good fit for this market, even if it doesn’t fit the defined search parameters. If you set a piece as preferred for a market, then that means that when you search for markets for that piece, that market will always be shown at the top of the results clearly marked as Preferred, even if it doesn’t fit the search parameters otherwise and even if the market doesn’t qualify for a listing or you’ve marked it as Ignore (but it won’t show up if you’ve already submitted it there). And if you search for pieces for that market, that piece will always be shown at the top of the results clearly marked as Preferred.
I am very excited about these additional features, I think they will be useful in those corner cases the search engine just doesn’t quite cover. Thank you!
You can mark these priorities by clicking the “Piece Priorities” link on any market page while you’re logged in.