Duotrope’s pay-to-play model is even tighter than I thought it would be.  While they haven’t entirely shuttered their shop to “freeloaders,” they’ve effectively cut all services to non-subscribers.

Given this, it’s not surprising that an alternative submission tracker and market search/statistic engine is now crowdsourcing funding for development.  Author Sylvia Spruck Wrigley, who I know from the Codex writing group, is spearheading a project called Submitomancy with “tech guru” Cliff Sanford.  Sylvia has a day job working in web communications and website design, which makes her qualified to pull this off.  I’ve seen the early specs on the project, and it looks like Sylvia has covered all the bases for this: Submitomancy looks like a database that will do everything Duotrope does…plus more…and quite likely for less money.

The Indiegogo project for Submitomancy is basically a pre-sale on subscription, which seems like a great way to go about it.  I particularly like that the submission tracker will be free, allowing the site to collect a lot of market response data from “freeloaders.”  One thing I don’t know is how extensive the market database it will be.  As this searchable database (along with the response statistics) will be the basis of the subscription side of Submitomancy, it will need to be extensive and up to date.  While I’m not sure how useful Submitomancy will be for my purposes, I like the idea of this project.  If you do, too, then pop over to Indiegogo and make a donation and help spread the word.