Databases for Professional Writers
I suppose it is still possible to use 3 x 5 cards and file boxes. But databases built with versatile software such as FileMaker Pro are essential management tools for a professional writer today. Here are eighteen databases you might create for yourself to be more efficient, organized, and productive.
- Build a powerful address book of your business contacts: editors, proofreaders, illustrators, indexers, graphic designers, book production service, tech support, drug dealers—whatever you need
- Set up a prioritized list of publishers, with submission guidelines.
- Keep a portfolio of your magazine articles, guest blogs, book contracts, and foreign rights editions sold.
- Tie your portfolio database to bookkeeping/accounting functions, automatically recording your royalty and subsidiary rights payments. (This also follows the “If you build it, they will come” principle.)
- Track your office expenses realistically. Run the reports for tax deductions.
- Gather library and online references that become the bibliography of a project.
- Organize your interview notes with contact info, sorted by topic, date, and project.
- Keep a timesheet so you know what an insane amount of time you’ve really spent on that novel.
- Keep a secure list of all your login IDs and passwords.
- You don’t have to bookmark every interesting website. Capture their URLs, categorize them for quick searches. Create a button on the page that opens the web address in your browser.
- Catalog your own library—books and ebooks. It does not take a Dewey Decimal System; just get the basic title page info in there so you know what you’ve got and where to find it. Add a reading wish list.
- Working on a project with a co-author or contributors? Publish the projects’ resources privately to the web so your collaborators can access the same references and notes.
- Far better than a clunky spreadsheet, build marketing email lists, with bulk email blast capabilities and fields for leads, clients, sales outlets, or bookstore address and phone lists. Automate invoices and letters.
- Schedule and record notes about your appearances and readings.
- Compile a record of reviews and publicity.
- Of course, you need to keep a list of your favorite cafés with wifi in all the towns you visit. Maybe you can load it on your iPhone.
- Organize notes and backstory bios of your fictional characters and locations.
- Run your brainstorms into a database: make it a place to save the half-baked story ideas, with fields that may link them together over time in ways you would not have otherwise seen.