Last week I mentioned starting work on verifications, but didn’t really explain what that was. The backbone of NSSWM is the listings, and a large part of my job is making sure those listings are up to date. Year round I’m looking for and contacting publishers, magazines/journals, contests and conferences we don’t have in our database. (If you want to be listed, our forms can be found here.) 

I started working on the 2009 edition (which comes out in the fall of 2008) over the summer. The articles and interviews were assigned in August/September, and I’ve already gotten a few drafts from some of my freelance writers. Right now I’m working on the debut authors feature (some good books in there) and doing an email interview with sci-fi author Elizabeth Moon. Soon I'll be getting more interviews and articles from my freelance writers, and I'll need to edit those.

The current phase is verifications. Verifications are the emails/letters we send to those listed in NSSWM with their current information to ask if the data is correct. If it is, we get an “All correct” response, and if not, they write back with the changes clearly indicated by using bold, caps, brackets, colored font or a combination thereof. (Well, most people follow the instructions.)

So if a publisher wanted to change how many debut novels they've published recently, they would do so like this: Plans [2-3] first novels this year.

Sometimes people respond with a request for us to remove their listing. The reasons range from the fact they no longer publish fiction to they're going out of business to wanting fewer submissions, or sometimes we’re not told why. Fortunately, I don’t get very many of those.

As I get the responses I enter the changes in the database and mark the listing as verified. Since this is my first time doing verifications, I have had to decide the best way for me to keep track of which verifications I have or have not entered. In a few weeks I will send out a second email to those who haven’t responded yet. In late December I will send letters to those don’t have email (~sigh~ join the 21st century please) and those who aren’t responding to their email.

Every time I send out verifications I get many eddresses bounced back as invalid, so I get to go to the publisher's website and see if I can track down an accurate email address for them. If not, they get snail mail.

The bulk of the verifications will be done by the end of January, but I’ll be doing these follow-ups through March. It’s a long process because so many people don’t bother to respond or they change their contact info and I have to track them down, plus I’m adding new listings the whole time-just not as many as I was over the summer.

That’s a brief peek into some of what goes into getting this book published, and an explanation as to why I might not be blogging every day.