DraftAndQuery holds the current version of each project, the list of editors and agents reading it, and the date each response window closes. When a follow up becomes appropriate, the queue tells you which one and gives you the wording.
A spreadsheet from 2023, a folder of Word files with dates in the name, a starred label in your inbox, and a memory of what you promised an editor in March. That is how most submission desks actually run, and it costs real money.
A partial gets sent from an older draft because two versions share a folder and differ by a single line of naming. Recalling it costs a week of goodwill and, in the cases we have logged, roughly one in nine of those submissions never gets a second look.
Lost: 1 in 9 submissionsA press states ninety days and you write it nowhere. Six months later the project is still sitting in a queue you could have exited in week thirteen. Authors who track windows properly free up an average of four extra submission slots per title each year.
4 slots per title, per yearTwo houses want an exclusive on the same novel and neither knows about the other because the record of who holds what was never written down. Untangling it takes a difficult phone call and, for one client we work with, took eleven days off a contract timeline.
11 days of delayRebuilding the state of your own submissions before every check in burns two to three hours a week that were meant for pages. Over a year that is more than one hundred hours, which is most of a first draft for a working novelist.
100+ hours a yearCreate a record for each novel, collection, essay or proposal. Upload the current file, note the word count and the genre, and the record becomes the single place that version lives.
Every new draft gets a numbered version with a date and a short note on what changed. When an editor asks what she read in April, you can name the exact file and send it again without hunting.
Record the publisher or agency, the person reading, the date sent and the response time they publish. The pipeline board then shows every project by stage: out on submission, under revision, offered, shelved.
Each morning the queue lists the nudges that are now polite by that house's own stated timeline, with a draft message you can edit in a sentence. Send, log it, and the clock resets to the next courteous interval.
Nothing here is borrowed from a generic project tool. Each part exists because an author or an acquisitions assistant asked for it by name.
Each draft is stored with a number, a date, a word count and one line on what you changed. Two versions can be compared side by side so you know which pass an editor is holding.
Every send is a record: house, imprint, reader, date, format requested and terms of exclusivity. Reopening a record five months later tells you exactly what was agreed and what was sent.
Enter the stated reading time once and the countdown runs on its own. Overdue windows move to the top of the board so you can withdraw or nudge without checking a single email thread.
A single daily list of the nudges that have become appropriate, ordered by how long the house has held the work. Each carries a short draft note you can adjust and mark as sent in one click.
See acceptance and pass rates by house, average reply time by imprint, and which genres of yours are moving. Small presses use the same view to report reading queue health to their board.
Mark a submission exclusive, note the territory and the window, and the app refuses to let you queue a conflicting send without confirming. Agents share a read only view with their authors.
When exhausted response windows close themselves, projects go back out instead of sitting. The median user moved from nine live submissions to twenty three within six months of importing her list.
A courteous nudge sent on the day it becomes reasonable, rather than four months late, pulls replies forward. Across 61,300 tracked submissions the average time to a decision fell by seventeen days.
No more rebuilding the state of your own desk from an inbox. Users log a median of three hours a week recovered, measured against the admin time they recorded during their first two weeks.
Files are attached from the version record rather than the desktop, and the record names the draft an editor already holds. No user has reported sending a superseded draft from inside the app.
I had four novellas out with eleven houses and a spreadsheet I stopped trusting in 2022. The first week here I found two submissions that had been dead for a year. Both of those slots are now filled with a book that is actually being read.
The follow up queue changed how I run the agency day. I open it at nine, send six notes that are genuinely due, and close it. My authors stopped asking me where things stand because they can see the board themselves.
We read about four hundred submissions a year with two part time readers. Knowing which manuscripts are past our stated ninety days is the difference between a press writers recommend and one they warn each other about.
Three plans, all monthly, all in US dollars. Start where you are now and change tier whenever the size of your list changes.
$15 per month
$39 per month
$95 per month
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars and can be cancelled at any time from your account settings. There is no annual lock in, no setup fee, and your records stay exportable for thirty days after you leave.
You are paying for the hosted application, storage of your manuscript versions, and support from a person who reads publishing email. One Author is $15 per month, Author Plus is $39 per month and Small Press is $95 per month. There is no charge per submission, no fee for extra versions and no separate onboarding invoice. If you move up or down a tier mid month we prorate the difference on your next invoice.
Most authors are working inside the app the same evening they sign up. Export your tracking spreadsheet to CSV, map the columns once, and the importer creates the projects and submission records for you. If your records live in email rather than a sheet, we will sit with you for forty five minutes and build the first ten by hand so you can see the shape. Small Press accounts include a full back list migration handled on our side.
You, and only the people you invite to a shared board. Files are stored encrypted at rest on servers in the United States and are never used to train any model. Our support staff cannot open a manuscript file without a written request from you naming the document. If you close your account, every stored file is deleted within thirty days and you get an export archive first.
Follow up messages can be sent through your own Gmail or Outlook account so replies land in your normal inbox and thread. Version files upload from Word, Scrivener compiles, Google Docs exports and plain PDF. There is a calendar feed that puts response deadlines into Apple Calendar, Google Calendar or Outlook, and a documented read only API for anyone who wants to build a report of her own.
Cancel in your account settings in two clicks, with no phone call and no retention script. Billing stops at the end of the current month and you keep access until that date. Before you go, download a full archive: a CSV of every project and submission record plus a folder of your manuscript files in the formats you uploaded. We hold that archive for thirty days in case you change your mind, then delete it.
It depends less on volume than on how long the work is out. Three submissions with ninety day windows and two rounds of revision generate about forty dated facts you will otherwise try to remember. Plenty of One Author subscribers send fewer than five packets a year and stay because the record of what an editor said in 2024 is worth more than the tracking. If after a month it is not earning its keep, cancel and take the archive with you.
This is the shape of a working pipeline for a novelist with three projects out. Nothing here is aggregated or scored. It is the record, and the record is the product.
Out with two houses since March 14 and May 2. The first stated ninety days and is now nineteen days over, so it sits at the top of the follow up queue with a withdrawal note ready if you would rather free the slot.
Exclusive with one editor until October 9, flagged in red so nothing else can be queued against it. The version record shows she is reading the draft with the reordered middle section, not the one on your desktop.
Four small presses, four different stated windows, three of them still comfortably inside their reading time. One reader replied asking for the full manuscript, which is logged with her name and the date she asked.
Two to eight projects in circulation, a day job or teaching load, and no appetite for another dashboard. You want the answer to one question every Monday: what needs a note from me this week, and what can wait.
Twelve to forty active submissions across a dozen authors, each with promises about exclusivity you cannot afford to forget. The shared read only board ends the weekly round of emails asking where things stand.
An open reading period, two part time readers and a stated response time you would like to actually honor. Queue age reporting tells you when a window is slipping while there is still time to fix it.
Someone else prepares the packets and logs the sends, and you approve. Roles keep the manuscript files and the correspondence in one place without handing over your whole email account.
The Query Desk is our magazine on agent submissions, small press contracts, copyright and the real cost of putting a book into the world. Three recent reports are below.
Thirty minutes, screen shared, your own list on the board. We will import a sample of your submissions live so you can see your real pipeline rather than a demo account belonging to nobody.
If you would rather write first, tell us how many projects are out and with whom, and we will reply with a straight answer about whether this fits. Jimenez Julien reads every message that comes through this form.
See every page on this site or read who is behind DraftAndQuery.
