Why We Built Taper: The Querying System Was Broken and Nobody Fixed It

The query letter was invented in the 1970s. Think about that for a moment. The primary mechanism by which the publishing industry discovers new books — the format that determines what gets read, what gets published, what reaches readers — was designed before the internet existed, before email, before any of the tools that now dominate professional communication.

Fifty years later, almost nothing has changed.

Authors still write query letters. Agents still receive them via email — thousands of them, managed in Gmail with no purpose-built tooling. Most queries go unanswered. Most authors spend years in a process that was designed for a world that no longer exists.

That’s why we built Taper.

Both Sides of the Problem

What struck us, working through our own querying experiences and talking to agents about their, was that this isn’t a problem with a villain. It’s a structural failure that hurts everyone simultaneously.

Agents are drowning. A working literary agent manages thousands of submissions per year through an inbox that was never designed for the job. They’re trying to find the books that matter — the ones that deserve to exist in the world — while fighting through volume, spam, misfiled queries, and an organizational system held together with folders and hope.

Authors are invisible. The query letter format reduces a writer and their work to 300 words and a subject line. It strips away context, voice, personality — all the things that might actually help an agent understand what they’re looking at. Then it disappears into an inbox where it competes with thousands of other 300-word emails, most of which will never be read.

The data is useless. The tools that exist to help — QueryTracker and its peers — are built on self-reported information that’s incomplete by design. Agents don’t update it. Authors forget. The resulting data creates the appearance of insight while delivering mostly noise.

The Platform vs. The Tracking Tool

The breakthrough insight for Taper was the difference between a tracking tool and a platform.

Tracking tools record what already happened, somewhere else. You submit a query via email, and then — if you remember — you log it in a spreadsheet or a tracking app. The tool is downstream of the actual activity.

A platform is where the activity happens. When querying happens on Taper, the data is native and real-time. The interaction between agent and author is recorded automatically, not manually. There’s nothing to self-report because there’s nothing that happened outside the system.

This changes everything about data quality, about the author experience, about the agent workflow, about what’s even possible in terms of analytics and insight.

What We Set Out to Build

Taper is built around a few core beliefs:

• Agents deserve real tools. Not email with folders. A purpose-built workspace designed for the actual shape of their work — swipe-based triage for high-volume querying, a Rolodex for managing industry relationships, analytics that are actually useful.
• Authors deserve visibility. Not a 300-word cold email. A real profile that represents their work — their voice, their project, their vision — in a format that gives it a fair chance.
• The process should be humane. Querying takes years. It’s stressful, isolating, and often demoralizing. A platform built with attention to those realities can make the experience meaningfully better — not just more efficient.
• Both sides benefit when the platform is two-sided. Agents and authors on the same platform creates the kind of data, communication, and relationship infrastructure that neither side can build alone.

Where We Are Now

Taper is in early access. We’re onboarding agents first — building the community and tooling that authors will arrive to. If you’re a literary agent ready to replace your inbox with something that actually works, request access here.

If you’re an author ready for a querying process that treats your work — and your time — with the respect it deserves, sign up for early access here.

The query letter has had fifty years. It’s time for something better.