I thought I'd do something crazy, and write about something else I'm working on other than writing.

Some of you may have wandered around this site enough to find the software I'm slowly piecing together - SubTracker, which started as a way to track submissions to publishers, because I got sick of working out which magazine would give me the best price / fastest turnaround / take the least rights for any given story or how much any story/publisher had paid me, and because the excel spreadsheet quickly became very, very unwieldy when I added more than a dozen or so publishers. It grew from that into a concept of something to manage the whole business side of writing - basically project management, submissions tracking, sales, revenues, rights and all that jazz. 

This kind of stuff requires a hell of a lot of thinking to do it properly. You can code up a macro-enhanced spreadsheet and be done with it, but the point of SubTracker is that it's eaisier to understand and use, more powerful and (most importantly) can adapt to different needs. Freelancers need different kinds of things than novelists, indie-publishers need different things to tradpubbers. Then there are the poets, comic writers, script writers, screenplay writers and researchers; the agents, magazines, competitions and grants, workshops and editors, indie-pubbers (Amazon), indie-aggregators (Smashwords) and traditional houses. All of those have different requirements, and I haven't even gotten into rights and contracts, yet.

You would be amazed how much information you're playing with when you try to turn the literary industry into a dataset and a list of rules.We have so many exceptions, so many little by-laws and secret rules. And when you have a problem like that, you have two options: create a simple one-size-kinda-fits-all-with-some-shoving which offers little support to the user, or build a complex system that "understands" the information it's playing with, and verges on "magical".*

I've chosen the second. Partly because, as I said, I want software that will do the mundane thinking for me. But I also want something that will help educate authors about the information they should be dealing with, and what their options are. Something that will point out that there's information missing from their royalty statements, or that some rights haven't been clearly stipulated in their contract. Something that'll help them feel empowered when dealing with the manipulative double-think they'll encounter. 

There have been about four versions that never made it past alpha-release**, because there were show-stopping problems in the way I was approaching the solution - too close to the one-size-doesn't-fit-anyone-properly. I'm currently designing the fifth, and taking a very different tack, and so far it seems to be working well - there hasn't yet been a scenario that this version wouldn't be able to handle, and it gives me a lot of flexibility to do things for the user.

It does mean I have to start small. The first beta-release (I don't release my alphas publically, they have too much attitude.) will be very small in comparison to the final build - just submitting stuff to people, and some deadline/event management, and not even the full-featured version of that, either. There are some fundamental aspects that need to be tested with the first release, like the basic user-interface concept, that take extra time at the start. And thanks to full time work, househunting, novels and short stories (not to mention research for the actual algorithms and coding), I don't have a date for the beta release yet.

But I am taking names for people interested in testing, and I'm listening if anyone has feature requests in the comments. (No guarantee they'll be implemented, but I'm listening.) Will keep you posted.

-  -  -  -

*I think I lose points for sucumbing to a Steve-Jobs-ism, but "magic" is the kind of impression I'm aiming for.

**For the development-uninitiated: an alpha-release is like a teenager. Nobody likes it,  if you ask it to do something it's just as likely to do something entirely unrelated, it claims that nobody understands it and may well go sulk in its room and paint the walls black. A beta-release is more like a college student: still got a lot of stupid things left to do, but you can generally get it to do what you want, with the occasional surprise frat prank thrown in and a tendency to skive off to attend random protests. A final release is an adult in the workplace: everyone agrees it's supposed to be working and to not poke it too hard in case it stops.