Completed Projects Template

Since I’ve been doing a lot of submitting, and I now have a number of manuscripts I’m revising, or working on, I needed to wrap my head around what I had, and put it all in ONE place.

I do have this organization system, where I can visually see manuscript folders, what I’m working on, and what’s out on submission. But I needed more.

Each time I wrote a query letter, I found myself trying to find the latest bio from the latest query. Then I needed to find the paragraph that described the book. I knew there had to be an easier way.

This technique is probably only helpful for you if you have a number of manuscripts. If you just have one or two, your head probably isn’t about to explode with keeping track–yet.

I created one document which I called my COMPLETED PROJECTS document.

BIO:

On the top, I have my bio. If I update it, I update it there. Now, all I have to do is copy and paste into the bio section of my query letter. Sometimes I have to tailor it for a particular website where I’m guest posting, but this one works for almost all queries.

 

COMPLETED PICTURE BOOKS:

In this section, I list the title, word count, and paragraph synopsis of each picture book. When I’m ready to query that picture book, I can copy and paste the synopsis into my query letter.

Having the bio and the synopsis at the ready makes query writing so much easier. Then all I have to do is personalize the letter.

COMPLETED NOVELS:

I have two novels that I’m finished with and trying to query. Here is the area where I put the title, genre, word count, and synopsis for the novels.

NONFICTION BOOK PROPOSALS

Last year I worked on a couple of book proposals. I have synopses on those as well.

WORKS-IN-PROGRESS

I have several books that I’m working on that aren’t ready for submission yet. I put working synopses there.

Obviously, whatever genre you write in, you could tweak this to keep track. This just helps me have one document to go to help me write the query letters I need. It’s also an at-a-glance for me to see what items I might like to send as I get requests for more work. It’s also organized enough that if an agent wanted to know the breadth of my work, I could send this document as a whole.

Here’s the template. Feel free to tweak it to meet your needs. 

Check out last week’s template for developing a Picture Book Status Chart.