It tracks your submissions of writing-stuff to people-who-accept-writing-stuff. But that's like saying Google just make search engines...

I read once in a blog post of Dean Wesley Smith (Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing: Can't Make Money in Fiction - it's a good read) about the concept of the Magic Bakery.

It runs similar to the Australia classic of The Magic Pudding - the "cut-an'-come-again" pudding (Smith uses pie, but I prefer pudding. Besides, a lot of my writing is just as bad tempered and obstreperous as Albert.). Every piece of fiction / article / poetry / whatever you write is a Magic Pudding - you can sell all different slices (rights) individually, and most of them will return eventually, so you can sell them over and over again. (We're excluding "first publishing" rights, and the like obviously.) Once you have a lot of these Magic Puddings, you have a Magic Bakery, where all manner of pudding-slices are coming and going. For someone like Smith, with over 200 puddings, that's a lot of slices to track.

I read that, and after the initial thrill at the idea of genuinely making money writing, I thought "How the hell am I going to keep track of all those puddings?" I'd already been trying to devise a spreadsheet-type system which would show me which stories I'd submitted where, and when, and where I planned to send them if and when they returned. It was already not-the-greatest, and I hadn't even thought of things like multiple rights, sales, money and all the other aspects of the business I'd want to track.

So - SubTracker, to handle all of that - suggesting where my story should be sent next, reminding me when I haven't heard back, or when some rights have returned to me and I should shop them out again, showing me where my stories are at any point in time - basically, managing my Magic Bakery. See a proposed feature list here.

I could have called it Magic Bakery Manager, but that sounds too much like a Facebook game.