- This topic has 9 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated December 2, 2012 at 3:17 pm by
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For those of you using Duotrope for searching markets, tracking your submissions, etc, you’ve got a month left to be free.
Take a read here: https://duotrope.com/notes_current.aspx
I’m annoyed, esp. as I *have* donated some in the past.
On the other hand, I found my novel publisher through them, and if I can’t make $50 a year by writing novels I should go back to flipping burgers!
You’re certainly further advanced than I am.
While notionally I do make enough money writing to justify a subscription (I am a technical writer), I certainly don’t make enough writing fiction. Even though I’ve contributed in the past, I don’t think I’ll be subscribing until I have a few more sale under my belt. I’ll just have to use Sonar for subscription tracking and find a free $5 any month I have something new to send out.
I’m sorry they had to do this–as I say, I did contribute, more than the suggested 10 a year, but I know not everyone did. (Really, 90% of users? Wow.)
Great at theory, terrible at practice.
I think $50 is way too much. Something like $20 is reasonable to help offset their costs, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see people ditch their services and support and use Ralan or others instead. Heck, a year of LiveJournal, or Flickr, or even my Amazon Cloud drive are all in the $20-$25 a year range, and I’ll get infinitely more use out of them. I think they need to rethink their plan.
temporus wrote:I think $50 is way too much. Something like $20 is reasonable to help offset their costs, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see people ditch their services and support and use Ralan or others instead. Heck, a year of LiveJournal, or Flickr, or even my Amazon Cloud drive are all in the $20-$25 a year range, and I’ll get infinitely more use out of them. I think they need to rethink their plan.Though it seems too rich to me, I must admit that it’s in line with what they’ve been saying. The newsletters have generally said that if everyone donated $5 they’d be fine, and the note about their plan to go for subscriptions says that about 10% of the people have paid. Five bucks times ten is fifty.
Great at theory, terrible at practice.
Yes, but if you’re going to start charging everyone for usage, jumping from FREE to $50 is a bit too steep. If they went for $10 a year or $20, they’d get a higher percent of users than 10% that donated. I think it’s not a good idea to assume that the 10% that donated in the past are all going to stick with them and pony up $50 a year. In fact, I’m positive it won’t work out that way. Good luck to them.
I’ll admit, I’m one of those who never donated. I subscribed to the newsletter because so many people recommended Duotrope, but their newsletter only distinguished between pay and free — I had to go to their site to even find out what range the pay was in, then click through to a market’s Website to find out what the actual rate was. The one thing I liked about their site was that they had response times — until they decided you had to be registered to see that information.
When I compare ease of use and information available, for most of my needs (since I no longer try to get my poetry published), Ralan beats Duotrope hands down. (No, it doesn’t have response times, but I’ve been using the Black Hole fir that if I feel a need.) So if I’m donating, that’s where my money will go.
So many writers (myself included) are going to find other alternatives to Duotrope. If Duotrope decides to drop the rate, I’ll subscribe, but not at this rate. (Ed had it with the 0 to $50 in 60 seconds).
The data integrity of the database is going to become useless. sure it’ll still be useful as a search tool for markets, but the response times and statistical data will be useless because:
– a good number of neo-pro writers will not be subscribing and there will be less recording of submissions and responses;
– others will be signing on “once ever few months” to do their searches and such for the lower rate, but if a person records their submissions and responses once every three months, the data will be so skewed, it won’t help the people who are trying to use it to keep track of slush movement.My favorite use is making sure my subs aren’t lost. So if Analog says query at 90 days and I see no activity on Duotrope at all, I’m not worried about my sub. Also at that point, I’m not querying an already overloaded market. Without this glimpse, the markets will be looking at a lot more queries coming in as well.
I’m grateful the service Duotrope has provided in the past. They’ve worked very hard on their database and functions. For all we know, they’re tired of it and this is their out.
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