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Guide to Tags BETA (Individual subscribers and Group members only)

Duotrope lists thousands of active publishers and agents. Our search features can help you whittle that down to a reasonable number, but sometimes you may want to take notes or apply your own method to sort through the options. That's where tags come in.

Now, you can come up with your own tags and apply them to any active listing.

How to Add and Manage Tags

Tags are for your use only. No one else will see your tags. Tags can't be more than 24 characters in length, but they can include spaces.

There are a few different ways to add tags:

The simplest is to go to an active listing you wish to tag and look in the sidebar (beneath the cover art) for the "Your Tags" section. Click Update Tags and start adding tags. In the Tag box start typing the first tag and hit Enter when you're done. Type again to add another. Any you have already used on other listings will also be available as you start typing the first few letters. Use the X icon to remove them if necessary. Don't forget to click the Set Tags button when you are done to finalize writing the tags.

You can also access and edit all of your Tags from your Tags page. There, you can create tags, edit any (say, if one has a typo), delete ones you are no longer using, and you can even consolidate one into another (if you had one for non-fiction and one for nonfiction, for example, and you want to combine them). For any given Tag, you can see a complete list of everything you have tagged it with.

If you have already set up tags (either by adding them directly to an active listing or through your Tags page), you can tag listings in bulk from the search results of either the Advanced Publisher Search, Advanced Agent Search, or Smart Search pages.

Tagging Advice

The best advice we can give is to come up with tags that will apply to multiple listings. If you're too specific, they become less useful. Here are some good and bad examples:

  • Good idea: Coming up with a tier system, such as the projects you most want to be published in as Tier 1. Then, Tier 2, etc. Or, use a Grading system if you prefer: A, B, C...
  • Good idea: Using tags to refine your favorite publications by some criteria. For example, maybe you want to be able to locate all your favorite prose poetry or flash fiction listings. Or, perhaps payment is what matters most to you, such as Pays well.
  • Good idea: Using tags to categorize your previous experience with the editors or agent. Such as Encouraging or Non-responsive.
  • Bad idea: Using tags to write very specific comments for a listing that won't apply to other listings as well. (Note: You can add comments to listings in your Favorites and Ignore Lists.)
  • Bad idea: Using tags to track deadlines. We offer separate deadline tracking for that purpose, which is much more effective than using tags.
  • Bad idea: Using tags for time-sensitive information, which can be very challenging to keep up to date.

What else can you do with Tags?

On the Publisher Search or Agent Search page, you can have it show only listing tagged with a certain Tag. You'll find that option in the "Exclusions" tab. Enter the other search options as usual, and then run the search.

On your Favorites and Ignore List, you can filter those pages by Tag.

We have lots of plan for expanding this feature in the future. Stay tuned.


We hope this information has helped you understand how and why to take advantage of Tags. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve this guide or the Tags feature, please let us know.