- Kristin Messerli
- Kathy Helbig
- Chelsea Peitz
- Mark Lowham
- Fred Weaver
- Kevin Kauffman
- Kevin McQueen
- Meggen Taylor
- Tigi Tasso (congrats you made top 5!)
OTHER NEWS
Next Monday, we will be launching a new weekly column asking for contributions about your first sale. So if you are interested in participating, please write up a 400ish word post in WordPress and then email me the link or URL. As you write, think about if there were any mistakes you made, what you learned, if anything funny or crazy happened and what it took to close the deal. I think this will be an excellent column, and I look forward to reading your submissions.
SCHEDULING
I finally can announce that we are going with a new scheduling system. We are scrapping the Google Calendar altogether. From now on, when you submit a story, you will get an email from me saying that I have received your story and that I'll get back to you with feedback or next steps. I'll try my best to let you know when that will be, but crazy things happen in publishing from time to time.
Then when I send you a date with next steps, I will do my best to keep it on that day. If it happens to change, as it will occasionally, it will get published in the next 48 hours. I will do my best to email you with those changes if they are dramatic -- as in several days or a different week entirely.
We recently have started using a new WordPress plugin that allows us to make a post in the Inman Contributors Facebook group when the story goes live, which will serve as a notification system that your story has published. With that said, if you are not in that group, please request to join, and I'll admit you.
This is really great news overall because hopefully this will cut down on email interaction about story scheduling, and I'll be able to get answers to you all much quicker and with better feedback. With that in mind, when you send stories, please dot the i's and cross the t's when you submit -- meaning please include takeaways and click-to-tweets if possible.
Takeaways are just three one-sentence items that summarize the story's key points. I will likely not schedule stories without takeaways and send back an email requesting them. I greatly appreciate your help on this and so do your fellow contributors.