How to Track Your Nonfiction Queries

As a freelance writer of nonfiction, a big portion of your time is spent doing the business end of freelancing. Tracking your ideas and queries that you are sending out is something you need to stay on top of.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Notebook
• Notecards
• Computer with Excel

1. Notebook. This is the old standby. You can section the notebook off by title and topic of a piece and then simply listthe date you queried and which magazines. Or you can section the notebook by magazines you plan on querying or already have a regular business with and then show each article pitched and sold.

2. Notecards. With computers today you may wonder who would be interested in using notecards, however if you prefer to have a hard copy but want something a little different than a notebook, cards are a great way to cross-reference your work.
   
   Often research you do on a topic can be turned into several pieces of work or different magazines or newspapers. Using notecards you can easily move the information, adding dates as to who you queried and what their response was.
   
   Moving the cards from titled dividers such as Magazines Names, Queried, Published, you can easily see what process a piece of work is in.
   
   Reprints can also be added to the notecards so that you can easily see how many time a certain piece is published.

3. Using Excel is also an easy way to track all your information, such as ideas pitched, what the guidelines are for each magazine, editors names and addresses and word counts required.

Tips & Warnings

• Highlight those projects that are sold and what the copyright status is to help you with reprints.

[choate]

on 6/13/2008 Excellent tip about remembering to track the copyright status.