Fiction Writers and Query Letters

See http://flstevens.itmaybeahack.com/writing-world-building-and/ for some back-story on F. L. Stevens and the need to write a *lot* of query letters to agents for fiction. (The non-fiction industry is entirely different; there are acquisition editors who look for technical contributors.)

There's a tiny possibility of a Query Manager Tool (of some kind) on a writer's desktop.

Inputs include:

• Template letter.
• A table of customizations per Agent. The intent is to allow more than simple name and pronoun changes. This includes Agent-specific content requirements. These vary, and can include the synopsis, first chapter, first 10 pages, first 50 pages. They're not email attachments; they have to be part of the main body of the email, so they're easy to prepare.
• Another table of variant pitches to plug into the template. There are a lot of common variations on this theme. Sizes vary from as few as 50 words to almost 300 words. Summaries of published works seem to have a median size of 140 words. A writer may have several (or several dozen) variants to try out.

This can't become a spam engine (agents don't like the idea of an impersonal letter.) 

Also. A stateful list of agents, queries, and responses is important. Some Agents don't necessarily respond to each query; they often offer a blanket apology along the lines of "if you haven't heard back in sixty days, consider it a rejection." So. You want to try again. Eventually. Without being rude. And if you requery, you have to send a different variant on the basic pitch.

Some Agents give a crisp "nope" and you can update your list to avoid requerying.

For new authors (like F. L. Stevens,) there's a kind of manual query tracking mess. It's not really horrible. But it is annoying. Keeping the database up-to-date with responses is about as hard as a tracking spreadsheet, so, there's little value to a lot of fancy Python software.

The csv, string.Temple, email and smtplib components of Python make this really easy to do.  While I think it would be fun to write, creating this would be work avoidance.