The product

A desk for the whole submitting life

Project Virgil is a web application for writers who are querying literary agents, submitting short work to journals, or — as most writers eventually are — doing both at once. It is free to use, it runs in a browser, and there is nothing to install.

The tracker

Every query and every submission is a record with a date, a status and a history. The pipeline board moves a query from researching to queried to requested to offer by dragging it, and the moment you close one out it asks what actually happened — a pass, an offer you declined, a query you withdrew — because those are not the same thing and a record that files them all as “rejected” is a record you cannot learn from.

Around that sit the things you would otherwise keep in your head: how long each agent says they take, which of your queries are now overdue, which have expired under a no-response policy, and which have been nudged already.

The offer protocol

When an offer arrives you have roughly two weeks and a lot of letters to write. The app writes them: a note to every agent holding a query, a partial or a full, carrying both dates — the day you have been asked to answer by, and the day you need them by, two days before yours. It never names the agent who offered, because you should not either.

When a piece is accepted

The submissions side has the same problem in reverse. Mark the acceptance, and the app withdraws that piece from every other magazine still holding it and writes each note for you — addressed to the magazine, because the editor reading it may not be the one who took your submission. Withdrawing is meant to happen the same day, and it is the thing that goes wrong when you are doing it from memory at eleven at night.

The directory

A shared directory of agents, agencies, journals and events that writers build together, so the research one writer does is not thrown away when the next one starts. It records what an agent represents, what they have said about response times, whether they are open, and when they are expected to reopen.

Your own layer on top of it stays private: your tier for each agent, your notes, where you met, why they are on your list. Other writers never see it.

The calendar

Reading windows, reopening dates, contest deadlines, conference dates and your own reminders on one calendar — and it can be subscribed to from whichever calendar app you already live in, so the dates turn up next to the rest of your week rather than in a tab you have to remember to open.

The community

The other half of the product is other writers: a public face where you choose exactly what is shown — your projects, your query package, the agents you have queried, or none of it. You can look around it right now without an account.

What your own history tells you

Once there are a few dozen queries in there, the charts start answering questions you cannot answer by feel: your request rate, how long replies actually take, which months an agent historically opens, and how your own numbers compare with what other writers are seeing from the same agent.

Your data

It is yours, and it leaves easily: a spreadsheet export of everything, and a JSON backup that restores. The app works offline and syncs when you are back; when you sign out, what it kept on that machine is cleared — apart from a change that never reached the server, which is held until it does, because that copy is the only one. The whole of it is on the privacy page.

What it costs

Nothing today. It is built and run by one writer, and there is a donation link inside for anyone who wants to help with the hosting.