Using BCM 2007 to track manuscript submissions

[Michael Ray Brown]

I've been using Outlook 2007 for a couple years, and I just installed BCM in
hopes that the additional functionality can be applied to tracking
manuscript submissions. I'm a published author, with lots of proposals and
speculative manuscripts in circulation. I tend to make the rounds of the
same publishers, and I need to track who has seen what. God forbid I submit
the same manuscript to a publisher who passed on it six months ago! What's
more, when I record a submission, I'd like the software to automatically
prompt me to follow-up on it a month hence. Can I do this in BCM?

I've been creating a task for each submission under a "Submissions" folder
in Outlook, but BCM has only four task folders: Opportunities, Marketing
Campaigns, Business Projects, and Project Tasks. It would be nice if I
could create a Project with the name of the manuscript, and track all the
submissions simply by looking at the history for that Project. However, it
appears that each Project must be assigned to an account or a contact. I
used to be able to track submissions quite elegantly with Ecco Pro, but I've
been struggling since I migrated to Outlook.

 

[Jan K]

I've been using Outlook 2007 for a couple years, and I just installed BCM
in hopes that the additional functionality can be applied to tracking
manuscript submissions. I'm a published author, with lots of proposals
and speculative manuscripts in circulation. I tend to make the rounds of
the same publishers, and I need to track who has seen what. God forbid I
submit the same manuscript to a publisher who passed on it six months ago!
What's more, when I record a submission, I'd like the software to
automatically prompt me to follow-up on it a month hence. Can I do this
in BCM?

I've been creating a task for each submission under a "Submissions" folder
in Outlook, but BCM has only four task folders: Opportunities, Marketing
Campaigns, Business Projects, and Project Tasks. It would be nice if I
could create a Project with the name of the manuscript, and track all the
submissions simply by looking at the history for that Project. However,
it appears that each Project must be assigned to an account or a contact.
I used to be able to track submissions quite elegantly with Ecco Pro, but
I've been struggling since I migrated to Outlook.

Don't think it is possible. BCM is ACOUNTS ACCOUNTS ACCOUNTS, projects
isn''t really supported. Maybe if you focus on your pubishers (accounts) you
can fuind a way which works for you. You will note what you send to a
publiusher in the account info. So, when you call a publisher, you can also
see what you've send them 3 years ago and how they reacted.

 

[Michael Ray Brown]

Don't think it is possible. BCM is ACOUNTS ACCOUNTS ACCOUNTS, projects
isn''t really supported. Maybe if you focus on your pubishers (accounts)
you can fuind a way which works for you. You will note what you send to a
publiusher in the account info. So, when you call a publisher, you can
also see what you've send them 3 years ago and how they reacted.

Thanks for confirming what I suspected. Perhaps I'm looking for a project
manager. I'd like to get a clear picture of who has seen a particular
manuscript, when they saw it, and their response. I can get that now with
Outlook 2007 by filtering the view under a "Submissions" Task folder. I'd
expect BCM to offer something even more sophisticated.

 

[Jan K]

Thanks for confirming what I suspected. Perhaps I'm looking for a project
manager. I'd like to get a clear picture of who has seen a particular
manuscript, when they saw it, and their response. I can get that now with
Outlook 2007 by filtering the view under a "Submissions" Task folder. I'd
expect BCM to offer something even more sophisticated.

Yep, as most of us. i also expected BCM to be of som ehelp. If I only could
add a (or a few) small spreadsheets (columns/rows) to a project, it would
increase the use 1000%, but no, it's just sales.