Templates

Authors send the same kinds of email over and over. Query letters. Beta reader invitations. Follow-ups to agents who haven’t responded. Thank-yous to readers who sent positive feedback. Rejection responses. Offer acceptance messages. Each one is a specific kind of correspondence with specific conventions, and each one involves typing the same boilerplate you typed last time with the personal details swapped. Templates exist to cut that pattern. A template is a reusable email draft with placeholder fields that get filled in at compose time. Instead of retyping “Dear [Agent], I’m querying you with my [Genre] novel [Title], complete at [Word Count]…” for every agent you submit to, you pick the query letter template, fill in the four or five placeholders, and send. The template system ships with a starter set of common author templates and supports custom templates you create for your own recurring patterns.

The Templates tab is where you manage the template library. Browse existing templates, create new ones, edit the built-in templates to match your preferences, and organize templates by category.

Built-in templates

Ishvana ships with a curated set of templates for common author workflows:

Query and submission

Agent query letter. A standard query with placeholders for agent name, addressing convention (“Dear Ms. Davis,” vs. “Dear Sarah,”), book title, genre, word count, comp titles, the hook, the pitch, book info, personal note, and author bio. Usually 300-400 words.
Agent follow-up. A polite follow-up for agents who haven’t responded within the expected window. Short, referenceable, doesn’t ask for status — just confirms the original query is still under consideration.
Nudge with offer. When you get an offer from one agent, the nudge template notifies others who have your material that you have a pending offer and a deadline to respond.
Decline an offer. Gracefully declining representation after receiving an offer. Handles the awkward case where you’ve decided to go with someone else.
Accept an offer. Accepting representation. Short, gracious, forward-looking.
Withdraw a query. For withdrawing from consideration if you’ve decided not to continue pursuing traditional representation or if circumstances have changed.

Beta readers

Beta reader invitation. An invitation to beta read, with placeholders for the reader’s name, the book’s title, the genre, what kind of feedback you want, the expected timeline, and a link to the manuscript file.
Beta reader thank-you. A thank-you after receiving beta feedback. Short, appreciative, acknowledges specific things they noticed.
Beta reader check-in. A mid-read check-in asking if they’re still on track with the timeline.

Readers and fans

Reader thank-you. Responding to a reader who sent positive feedback about your book.
Reader signed book inquiry. Handling a request for a signed book.
Fan letter response. Longer, more personal than a basic thank-you. For deeper fan correspondence.

Press and marketing

Review copy offer. Offering a review copy to a book reviewer, BookTuber, or book blogger.
Interview request response. Responding to an interview request — accepting, declining, or scheduling.
Podcast guest pitch. Pitching yourself as a podcast guest for book-related podcasts.

Professional

Editor outreach. Introducing yourself to a freelance editor for potential work.
Cover artist inquiry. Asking about commissioning book cover art.
Reply to publisher. Responding to outreach from a publisher.

Each template has placeholders marked clearly in the template body, and the compose view highlights them when the template is applied so you can scan through and fill them in.

Custom templates

You can create your own templates from the Templates tab. Click New Template and you get a creation form with:

Name. The display name that shows up in the Compose tab’s template picker.
Category. The organizational group (Query, Beta, Readers, Press, etc.). You can create new categories as needed.
Subject line. The default subject line, with optional placeholders.
Body. The full message body, with placeholders in {placeholder_name} format.
Placeholders list. A list of the placeholder fields used in the template, with labels and default values.

Save the template and it appears in the template picker alongside built-in templates. Your custom templates are marked visually so you can distinguish them from built-ins.

Placeholder fields

Placeholders are written as {field_name} in the template body. At compose time, each placeholder becomes an editable input field in the compose form. Fill in the value once per message and it gets substituted into the final text.

Common placeholder patterns:

{recipient_name} — The recipient’s first name or full name.
{recipient_greeting} — “Dear Ms. Davis” or “Dear Sarah,” formatted properly.
{book_title} — The book being discussed.
{word_count} — The manuscript’s word count.
{genre} — The book’s genre.
{comp_titles} — A comma-separated list of comp titles.
{pitch} — The book’s pitch paragraph.
{author_name} — Your name.
{date} — The current date.
{custom_note} — A freeform field for personalization.

Some placeholders can be auto-populated from your project’s data. {author_name} pulls from your settings. {book_title}, {word_count}, {genre} pull from the active project or book selection. {comp_titles} pulls from your Market Intel. The auto-population makes templates faster to use because most fields are pre-filled and you only edit the ones that are truly per-message.

Editing built-in templates

Built-in templates can be edited to match your preferences. When you edit a built-in, your version is saved alongside the original — the built-in is preserved, and your edited version takes precedence when the template is used. A “Reset to built-in” action restores the original if you decide the edit was wrong.

This matters because the built-in templates are a starting point, not a mandate. Every author has personal conventions (formal vs. casual greeting, specific hook formulas, signature phrases) and editing the templates lets the defaults match your voice.

Template categories

The Templates tab groups templates by category. The default categories are Query, Beta, Readers, Press, Professional, and Custom, but you can add your own.

Category-based organization matters when you have a large template library. Rather than scrolling through 30 templates to find the right one, you navigate to the category (“Query”) and pick from the 5-6 templates there.

Template variables vs. agent drafting

Templates and Hawken-assisted drafting serve different purposes:

Templates are deterministic. You pick a template, fill in placeholders, and the output is the template with placeholders replaced. Same input → same output. Fast, reliable, consistent across messages.

Hawken drafting is generative. You describe what you want, Hawken writes it fresh each time. Different every time even for the same prompt. Good for one-off messages that don’t fit any template, for first drafts of new template ideas, and for messages where you want the freshness.

Most author correspondence should use templates — query letters, beta reader invitations, follow-ups — because the consistency is valuable and the speed is real. Use Hawken for messages where the recipient is specific and the content needs to be personal enough that a template would feel canned.

A hybrid workflow works well: use Hawken to draft a new kind of message, then save the successful draft as a custom template for future use.

Version tracking

Each template has a version history. When you edit a template, the old version is preserved in the history so you can see how the template has evolved. Useful when you realize a recent edit made the template worse and you want to revert to a specific earlier version.

Templates can be exported as JSON files from the Templates tab. The JSON contains the template’s metadata, body, placeholders, and category. Export is useful for:

Backup. Keep your custom templates safe outside the Ishvana data directory.
Sharing. Send templates to another author. They import the JSON and your template becomes their template.
Moving to a new machine. Export your templates, copy the JSON to the new machine, import.

Import accepts the same JSON format. Importing a template adds it to your library without overwriting existing templates of the same name (the import creates a new copy with a suffix).

What templates aren’t

Not a mail merge tool. Templates support one-to-one personalization via placeholders, but they’re not a bulk mail merge system. For bulk campaigns, use Compose’s campaign mode.
Not scriptable. Templates are static text with placeholder substitution. They don’t support conditionals, loops, or computed values. If you need “this line appears only if the recipient is an agent,” that’s a different template, not a conditional in the same template.
Not workflow automation. Templates don’t trigger automatically based on events. You pick a template when you’re composing a message — there’s no “automatically send a follow-up template if the recipient hasn’t replied in 14 days” feature.

What’s next

Compose Using templates in the compose workflow.

Query Letters The Marketing subtab that coordinates with Query templates for agent submission tracking.

Inbox Where replies to templated messages land.