Where are the email templates? There aren't any, and here is where you actually change how your emails sound

You read a draft Booked Solid wrote for you and something is off. "How do I edit the outgoing templates that Booked Solid is using?" "Some of it sounds a little bit too hippy or AI-generated, and I'd like to be able to warm it up a little bit." "It sounds robotic." "It sounds canned and generic, not like me." So you go looking for the templates screen, and there isn't one.

That is not a missing feature. Booked Solid has no email templates, on purpose, and knowing why saves you from spending an afternoon hunting for a folder that will not fix the thing that is bothering you. This article explains what is there instead, and gives you the four places you actually change how your emails read, in the order that gets you the biggest change for the least work.

Why there are no templates

A template is a finished sentence with blanks in it. Every performer using it sends the same email, and buyers who get two of them notice. What Booked Solid holds instead is instructions: rules about what a good first reply does, plus everything it has learned about how you write, and it composes each email from scratch against both.

Think of it as a person you trained rather than a folder of stationery. You do not fix a trained person by rewriting their filing cabinet. You tell them what you did not like, and they write the next one differently. That is the whole model, and every route below is a version of that same move.

It also means the fix is durable. Edit a template and you have fixed one email. Change a rule and every email from that moment on is different, including the kinds you have not run into yet.

1. House Rules: the fastest change, and it reaches everything

This is the one to do first. Your House Rules are loaded into the instructions on every single draft, in the app and in the terminal, so one edit reaches every email, quote, and follow-up you will ever get.

1. Open the Settings tab in the right pane. The panel is headed House rules & autonomy.
2. Stay on the General sub-tab. The house rules cluster sits near the top, just below the autonomy dial.
3. In the Your house rules box, write your rules in plain English, one per line.
4. Click anywhere outside the box. There is no Save button, and a small Saved marker appears next to the heading.

If the complaint is that drafts sound AI-generated, these are the lines that fix it, and you can paste them in as they are:

• never use em dashes, use a normal dash or a comma
• never open with "I hope this email finds you well"
• never say "reach out", "circle back", "touch base", "delighted", or "excited to"
• no exclamation marks after the greeting, and never two
• two or three sentences per paragraph, one idea each
• open with one specific detail from their message, so it reads like a person read it
• end with a plain question, not a call to action
• sign off with just my first name

That list is most of what people mean by "it sounds like AI". The stock phrases, the exclamation marks, the cheerful throat-clearing before the point. Ban them once and they are gone from every draft.

House Rules are obeyed while the draft is being written, so a phrasing ban never shows up as a blocked button. Do not wait for a greyed-out Approve as proof it worked. Read the next draft instead. There is more on this in Otto keeps using a line you told him never to use: make it a House Rule so it sticks.

2. Your voice profile: the thing that makes it sound like you specifically

House Rules say what to avoid. Your voice profile is the positive half: how you actually write when nobody is watching. It lives at brain/voice.md inside your Booking HQ folder, and it is what every draft imitates.

The best way to fill it is to let Booked Solid read your real sent emails and work it out. Run the Learn My Voice play, or just say in chat: "read my sent replies and learn how I write". It produces a written profile covering your tone, how long your sentences run, the words you use, the words you never use, and how you sign off.

You can also open brain/voice.md and edit it by hand. It is plain text and it is yours. A useful thing to add, which the automatic pass cannot know, is the words you personally avoid, and one or two paragraphs of your own writing pasted in as a sample.

Worth saying plainly: an empty or thin voice profile is the single most common reason drafts read generic. If nobody has told it how you write, it falls back on how everybody writes, and how everybody writes is exactly what reads as AI.

3. Correct the draft, then say "learn this"

This is the route most performers end up using every day, and it is the one that compounds.

When a draft comes back not quite right, do not just fix it and send. Fix it, then paste your edited version back into chat and say "this is how I would have written it, learn from it". It reads the difference between its version and yours and files what it learned, so the next draft starts closer.

Do it every time for a couple of weeks and the gap closes on its own. One performer doing this reached sixty-four accumulated rules, and at that point the drafts stop needing edits at all.

Anything that should be permanent gets filed as a proposed change and waits for your approval on the Brain tab, in the More menu at the end of the tab row. Nothing changes your standing rules until you tap approve, and every approved change is listed in What's changed with a Put it back button if you want it reversed. See The Brain: what's working, and approving Otto's proposed changes.

4. Tone, and writing your own workflow

Two smaller levers, useful once the three above are in place.

• Tone. Most plays have a Tone control you set when you run them: warm, crisp, playful, or formal. It shifts the register of that one run without touching your standing rules.
• Your own workflow. If you want a specific email to follow a specific shape every time, write it as a workflow. In the sidebar under Workflows, choose Edit menu, then Add workflow, then Create a new workflow. Give it a name like "First reply to a wedding enquiry" and type the instructions in plain English, including the exact questions you want asked and the order you want them in. It pins to your workflow menu and runs like any built-in one.

That last one is the closest thing to a template you can build, and it is better than a template because it still gets written in your voice against your rules.

Can I just ask it to list all the templates?

You can ask, and it will try to be helpful, but it will not give you what you are picturing, because the list does not exist. You will get a description of the stages of the booking pipeline rather than a set of email bodies you can open and edit.

Ask this instead, which does work: "show me the rules you are using when you write my first reply to an enquiry, and tell me which ones I can change". That gets you the real answer for your own setup, and you can change any of them from there in the same conversation.

If you work in the terminal build, there IS a templates folder, and editing it is a trap

Read this part carefully if you are running Booked Solid from the terminal rather than the desktop app, because here the answer genuinely differs and there is a way to lose work.

The terminal build's Booking HQ does contain a templates/ folder. Open it and you will find things like rate-card.md, performance-agreement.md, counter-offer-draft.md, and a post-gig/ folder with a review request, a referral ask, and an occasion touch. So if you went looking and found files with a lot of instructions inside them, you were not imagining it.

Two things to know about them:

• They are structures, not sentences. Each one says so at the top. The placeholders and the notes are there to be filled from your lead folder and your voice file and then rewritten in your own words, which is why they read as instructions rather than as an email. They were never meant to be sent as they stand.
• They are replaced when you update. The terminal updater refreshes the playbook, and templates/ is on its replace list along with CLAUDE.md, stages/, references/, setup/ and scripts/. Anything you hand-edit in there is overwritten the next time you update. This is the one place people lose a week of careful rewriting.

The folders the updater never touches are _config/, brain/, leads/, inbox/ and queue/. So on the terminal build, put your changes here instead:

• _config/voice.md for how you write. Same job as the app's voice profile, and it survives every update.
• _config/house-rules.md for standing bans and rules. Append a line and it is obeyed on the very next message, with no restart and nothing to export.
• _config/policies.md for your booking policies.

If you use both the app and the terminal, you do not have to keep two sets of rules. The app writes a copy of your House Rules into your Booking HQ's own CLAUDE.md, between two marked comment lines, so the terminal follows the same rules. Anything you wrote in that file outside those markers is left exactly as you wrote it.

One more terminal note: if you want to change what the first reply to an enquiry does structurally, that logic is in stages/01-inquiry/CONTEXT.md and the other stage files. You can read them to understand what it is doing, and they are useful reading. Just do not make your permanent changes there, because stages/ is on the replace list too.

How to check it worked

Three things trip people up when they think a change did not take.

1. Read a new draft, not an old one. A draft already sitting in your queue was written under the old rules. Generate a fresh one.
2. Check the proposal was approved. If your change went in as a proposed change, it does nothing until you approve it on the Brain tab.
3. Give it a specific test. Ask for a first reply to a made-up enquiry, read it, and see whether the banned phrases are gone. That takes a minute and tells you more than reading the rules back.

None of this is one-way. Every rule, voice note and workflow can be changed again at any time, and the new version applies from the next draft onward.

Still stuck? Submit a ticket from this help center. Paste the draft that sounded wrong and tell us in your own words what you would have written instead, and we'll take it from there.