Book proposals – beyond the hearts and flowers

As I took notes furiously during a recent meeting of the Writers Guild of Texas, speaker P.J. Gover used a term that that brought me up short. Proposal. No, it wasn’t the kind of proposal you might hope for from your beloved on Valentine’s Day. It was a book proposal. And although I’d learned to expect the term in connection with nonfiction narratives, what truly shocked me was its use in querying agents for fiction manuscripts.

Ms. Gover’s agent, she said, had told her he loved to hear that novelists could actually furnish a proposal for their books. My right hand stopped taking notes and shot up questioningly. In all my contacts with agents, no one had ever mentioned writing a proposal for a novel. But as I returned to listening, it became clearer that they had. Just not in so many words.

It felt kind of like the way a beloved might start discussing wedding venues without so much as uttering the words, “marry me.”

Maybe an explanation is in order. In some ways resembling a marriage proposal, a book proposal is a sales pitch. Only instead of explaining to the recipient why this guy/gal is THE ONE to invest your life to, a book proposal explains why this book is the one an agent/editor/publisher should invest time and money in. 

Although there’s no single way to write a book proposal, it typically includes the following sections:

·       Competitive title analysis

·       Target market or target audience

·       Marketing plan

·       Author bio

·       Overview (summary of the project)

·       Chapter outline (or table of contents)

·       Sample chapters

At this point, readers who’ve paid attention to posts about writing query letters will be saying, hey, this looks a lot like that. Because with the exception of the chapter outline (which sounds a lot like a synopsis) and the sample chapters, both elements an agent may ask to see, a query letter is indeed the very short version – think of it as the CliffsNotes version – of a proposal.

image: pixabay

Target market/audience? It’s the stuff of the first paragraph of a query – age of audience, genre and word count – adult, 90,000-word thriller, for instance. 

Overview and competitive (or comparative) title analysis? That’s a query’s middle two-three paragraphs: who did what to whom and why, and what other recent (and notable) books does this one resemble? However, in looking for other tips on writing proposals, I particularly loved the suggestion of marketing strategist Jane Friedman – “Rather than focusing on the content, focus on why the content will benefit the reader or why the reader will care.” Oh. Yeah. Because you’ve got to care before you say, “I do!”

Author bio/marketing plan: It’s that last paragraph of the query – who the writer is and what chops that person can bring to get this book into readers hands and hearts.

(At this point, I must also thank Writer’s Digest for its post, “How to Write the Perfect Query Letter.") 

Nonfiction writers typically will not have written their entire manuscript beyond outlining and sample chapters. Even so, their book proposals (without sample chapters) may extend to 40 pages or more. At that point, they’ll start shopping the proposal to agents or publishers before investing themselves more fully in the writing. 

Writers of fiction, and often memoirs, however, generally must have a completed manuscript before approaching agents. So which comes first – chicken or egg, novel or proposal? The answer may be – either one.  

If we first write a proposal (minus the sample chapters), we’ll have a plan to steer out book through the time it takes to write it. Equally, over those months, maybe years, it takes to write and revise (and re-revise, etc.) a novel that may stretch to nearly 300 pages (or more!) we writers may not know for sure what we’ve written until we hit “save” on that final version. We may have outlined it fairly well upfront, only to find our outline morphing somewhere along the writing journey. So our initial proposal may morph as well – maybe into something that would have been unrecognizable when we began the writing journey.

The actual title of P.J. Gover’s talk – the one that started this whole post – was “Acquiring an Agent, 101.” And yes, she had a lot more to say beyond advising her audience of the benefits of writing book proposals for fiction narratives. As usual, I’ve provided only a smidgen of the information gleaned from groups such as the Writer’s Guild of Texas. For the whole story, you’ll have to ask your own group to invite P.J. and hear her for yourselves!

Wordcraft -- E-mavens and paper-sniffers

In her keynote address at last week’s Writers League of Texas conference in Austin, Jane Friedman had a naughty name for people who disdain e-books: paper- sniffers. I’d only gone wireless with my new laptop the morning before and already I felt prehistoric.

Friedman saturated her audience with statistics -- Amazon now sells more e-books than hardcover and paperback combined; if Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populous in the world. She assured us that there is benefit to not having an intermediary -- the physical bookstore -- standing between publishers and readers. And as the author of an e-book herself, The Future of Publishing: Enigma Variations, as well as being a visiting editor of e-media at the University of Cincinnati (and former publisher of Writer’s Digest), Friedman was cheerleading heavily for the new media.

Back in Dallas, I met a couple of fellow writers for coffee and talk, at, yes, a brick and mortar bookstore. One friend is heavily into genealogy, the other a soon to be retired school librarian. And although they also had plenty of cheers for the new technology -- easier referencing of sources and the possibility, with color-friendly e-readers, of more illustrations -- they also had horror stories about what the librarian termed the lack of respect for print.

I heard anecdotes about the cutting up of books to make digitization easier and government budget cuts that threaten the conservation of paper documents. I’ve written a novel about an archeological investigation, so I’m familiar with the information that can be lost when shards of cuneiform tablets or papyrus fragments are discarded. But it shocked me to think that the information on my own bookshelves, all of it printed in the last hundred years, may one day be gone.

And what will the fate be of my handwritten notebooks? You’d think in a hundred years nobody would care about my story notes and morning pages. But already my family mourns the decision of a previous century’s good housekeeper to toss a trunk full of molding letters from a pioneering member onto a trash fire. Maybe a future generation will find something helpful in a twenty-first century woman’s ruminations written in pencil. (What’s a pencil, Nana?)

Truthfully, I look forward to getting an e-reader -- as soon as the price comes down some more. And I decry the elitism of limiting access to information to those few who know the location of the hidden library stack, the off-the-catalogue volume. I just don’t want the sources for information to be lost forever.

For more of Jane Friedman’s advice for writers, see her blog, There Are No Rules (jane friedman.com.blog/) And the future of e-media? Twitter has offered its files to the Library of Congress. So watch those tweets. And emails and text messages. Who knows what family reunion they’ll turn up at.

(Next Wednesday -- writing for young people -- children, middle grade or young adult?)