Hello! Again.

This is the second time I have made this introduction, but for those who have never heard of me (in other words, all of you except Patrick) I will do it again.  If you are so inclined, you can go all the way back to 2007 to view my first introduction.

My name is Jason Robinson, and I have been with Query Tracker in some form or another since its inception.  Pat and I have been through the pain of writing and mailing query letters.  Yes, actually putting letters in envelopes, sticking stamps to them, dropping them in a big blue box, and then waiting.  And waiting.  And waiting some more.  It was a trying time for us both, but pain accompanies every birth, and it was through this pain that Query Tracker was born.  No more would struggling authors have to keep handwritten lists of agents they had queried or run the risk of making themselves appear unprofessional by querying the same agent twice.  No more would they be stuck in query limbo, never knowing if their query had been rejected or if that full request had just been lost in the mail.  No!  We would create a tool to make this process less painful and less confusing.  We would give authors the resources they needed to first find literary agents and then target their queries to the right agents.  Ah, yes, we would bring new hope to the next Stephen King and JK Rowling.  Well, Patrick would.  I mostly just cheered him on.

It is important to note the motivation behind all this.  Patrick gets asked all the time, "How can you offer this for free?  What's in it for you?"  The answer is pretty simple.  We wanted to help people.  There were plenty of sites and services out there that were happy to take advantage of writers who didn't understand the industry, and in the beginning, we waded through all that muck and tried to figure it out on our own.  That wasn't fun.  We passed along what we had learned and at the same time tried to make querying just a little bit easier for those whose pain we understand very well.

So, I will be around here to present my musings, share my struggles, and offer advice.  I am excited to once again be a visible member of the QT team.  Lurking in the shadows was fun too, but that's a story for another post.

Keep rewriting,
Jason