THE BRYME WRITERS
SEPTEMBER 2026 EDITIONThe business, craft & economics of writing — free, independent, human-verified.

Your pitches

Submission tracker.

Pitching is a numbers game and the numbers are impossible to hold in your head. Track what you sent, where, when, and what came back — so you know which markets to chase and which to stop pitching.

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    Nothing tracked yet. Add your first pitch — or open any opportunity and use “Track this pitch”.

    The stages

    What each status means.

    1. DraftWritten but not sent.
    2. SubmittedSent. Clock started.
    3. WaitingPast the point where you would expect a fast no.
    4. Follow-upTime to nudge, once, politely.
    5. AcceptedCommissioned or taken.
    6. RejectedA no. Log it and pitch it elsewhere.
    7. PaidMoney actually received.

    A listing on BRYME is an invitation to pitch, never a promise of acceptance or payment. Mark something Paid only when the money has actually arrived.

    Next

    While you wait.

    FIND

    Find the next market

    The best answer to one pending pitch is another pitch. Filter by pay, country and status.

    Search opportunities →     PITCH

    Write a better pitch

    What editors actually read, and the follow-up rule.

    Read the guide →     NO

    Handle a rejection

    What a no usually means, and what to do with the piece next.

    Read the guide →

    Page reviewed 27 September 2026 · re-checked at every desk sweep

    Desk notes: what the tracker is for

    The submission tracker is the pipeline ledger the guides keep referencing: it holds what went where, on what date, and what came back — which is the raw material for every timing decision in the follow-up guide and every rate decision in the pricing guide. The desk's honest position: the specific tool matters far less than the habit; a spreadsheet kept daily beats an app opened monthly, and this tracker exists because writers asked for one that matches the desk's own workflow.

    Two fields most writers skip and should not: the response time when it comes (it builds your private database — compare it against The Submission Grinder's crowd data), and the realised hourly when payment lands (the income ledger takes over there). Data entered at the moment of the event is the only data that is ever complete.

    The weekly tracker ritual, five minutes

    The tracker pays when it becomes a Friday habit, so here is the five-minute version: scan the week — anything sent (log date, market, piece), anything answered (log response and its character: accept, decline-with-note, silence), anything due for follow-up per the timing rules (queue the note for Monday morning), anything paid (log the net into the income ledger). Close the laptop. The entire discipline is that nothing is remembered — everything is dated at the moment it happens, because reconstructive memory is where freelance pipelines go to die.

    After a quarter, the tracker's aggregate view starts coaching you: your real response-time curve per market type, your conversion by pitch kind, the markets that answer fast but pay small versus the reverse. That is the data the crowd databases approximate — The Submission Grinder — except this version is about your work specifically, which is the only kind that can set your strategy.

    The Submission Ledger

    A writing tracker turns the submission life into a system: pieces out, responses due, rights returned and the pieces that need a second send. The discipline is five minutes a week; the payoff is that no opportunity dies in an inbox.

    • The master table One row per piece per market, with dates.
    • The follow-up clock Every submission gets a diary date at send time.
    • The rights column Reprints need to know what came back.
    • The acceptance trail Career patterns show up in the data.
    • Simultaneous tracking Overlapping submissions need disambiguation.
    • The yearly review January is when the ledger teaches the strategy.

    Writers who track submissions treat their careers like businesses, and the ledger is the ledger. Five columns and one weekly hour beat any app with a subscription fee.

    See also: B2B Content Writing, How To Write A Cover Letter and How To Write A Press Release for more of the reading pile.

    The Five Columns That Matter

    Five columns run the whole submission life: piece, market, sent date, due date and rights. The five-minute weekly review keeps every follow-up on time and every returned right visible for the next send.

    • Piece and market One row per submission, nothing else tracked.
    • The due clock Every send gets a diary date immediately.
    • Rights column Reprints need to know what came back.
    • The patterns review Career trends surface from honest data.

    Submission tracking is the career's bookkeeping: five columns and one weekly hour replace every expensive tracker app with a subscription fee.

    Follow along — the BRYME weekly digest