QueryTracker vs Duotrope
- QueryTracker: agent database, submission tracking, and community response-time data; free tier plus premium around $25 per year.
- Duotrope: market listings for short fiction, poetry, and novels, with response statistics; subscription around $50 per year.
- QueryTracker's timeline data shows how long specific agents actually take to respond.
- Duotrope's strength is breadth of literary magazine and small press listings.
- Both let you log submissions, but neither drafts or stores the query letter itself.
QueryTracker is the default tool for querying literary agents with a novel: a large agent database, per-agent response statistics, and free submission tracking. Duotrope covers short fiction, poetry, and magazine markets far better. Novelists use QueryTracker; short story writers and poets use Duotrope. Writers doing both often pay for both.
Chapter i·Why it matters
Picking the wrong one wastes months. A poet who signs up for QueryTracker finds almost nothing relevant. A novelist on Duotrope misses the community response data that tells her an agent has been silent for 200 days and is effectively a no. The databases are built for different submission economies.
Chapter ii·What to include
- What you are submitting: novel, short fiction, poetry, or a mix.
- Response-time data quality for the specific agents or markets on your list.
- Whether the free tier covers what you need before paying.
- Export options, so your submission log is not trapped in the tool.
- Genre coverage depth, checked against ten real targets before subscribing.
- Where the query letter and synopsis themselves will live, since neither tool holds them well.
Chapter iii·Example
A writer querying a literary novel used QueryTracker's response data to see that four agents on her list had not replied to anyone in eight months, and reallocated those slots to agents with a 40-day median.
Chapter iv·Related questions
In WriteLoom
Stop running your query on a spreadsheet
WriteLoom's Pitch studio keeps the query letter, synopsis, comps, and agent list in one project so the tracker is not the only record.
Not ready for a workspace yet? Get the free six-part series on winning the writing game: finishing drafts, editing in the right order, querying with real math, and launching on a runway.