The Elements of a Book Proposal - article

Each proposal is different, just as each book is different, but there are certain elements that every book proposal should contain. These include an overview, an annotated table of contents (of the book—you should also include a table of contents of the proposal, but that’s just a formatting issue), an author biography (especially important for nonfiction books), a marketing strategy, a note on competition, and an author platform. If you’re looking for an agent, he or she will want to see all of this; a book proposal isn’t just something you send to publishers. And of course you’ll want your proposal to be professionally put together and attractively formatted, with a strong title and subtitle.

The title and subtitle are the first part of the proposal the agent or publisher sees—they’re what open the door for you—so they had better be fantastic. But in addition to being appealing, your title needs to say specifically what your book is about; appealing and vague won’t cut it. The overview is like the overture to a musical or a symphony. It should have a little bit of all the rest of the music in it. So in addition to the title and subtitle, it should include a statement of what the book is about in twenty-five words or less. This statement should usually be at the beginning of the overview, and it’s also a good idea to set it off typographically from the rest of the text by putting it in bold. You also need to include a little bit about the author—for example, if the author is a well-known heart specialist and the book is about heart health, you should mention that. You can then go on to note that he’s appeared on so-and-so’s show or has a column in such-and-such a newspaper to show that there’s a platform there. And then you need to note that there are no other books like this or make a case for how this particular book will stand out from the crowd.

You do need to express your book’s individuality within the proposal, but the proposal’s overall form and focus is, for the most part, determined by industry standards. A proposal for a nonfiction book, for instance, almost always focuses on the credentials of the author, who usually is an authority or has some particular perspective on the book’s subject.

There’s a problem that has come up recently with competition. There are so many books on the market these days that you can undo yourself by listing 29,000 books in your proposal that are sort of like yours or are on the same subject. You really want to mention only two or three, because when this proposal arrives at the publisher or the agent, if they see long list, they’re going to say, “Oh look, there are already all these books that have been done on this.” And you should do the publisher’s homework so that they don’t have to. That means that for every book you list in the competition section, you need to include the exact title, the author, the date of publication, and the publisher, and you should also annotate each entry to demonstrate how your book is like or unlike the books already on the market (and, of course, why it’s better and needs to be published). That’s what the competition section is really about, so you’re doing the editors’ work for them. If there are absolutely no books on a particular subject, that needs to be mentioned, and then you should say some more about why your book needs to be published.

In the proposals I deal with, I like to follow a principle I call the playwright rule. When a playwright mentions something three times over the course of a play, you pay attention to that. A book proposal works the same way. Sometimes, my proposal writers will say, “But I already talked about that in the overview.” And I say, “Mention it again, because that will emphasize it, and then mention it one more time to sum up.”

The author platform section is where you show the agent or publisher that your book already has an audience or explain how you intend to build one. Some people have a built-in platform like my client Saul Williams, a bestselling poet. Before I had him as a client, he was in a very well-known film called Slam. I had no idea what kind of a platform he had; I just wanted to have him as a client because I loved his work. And lo and behold, it turned out he had an amazing platform. He travels around the world performing with major rock bands. He has a lecture agent who sends him out to do university lectures and readings, and people call him up and ask him to perform and pay him a lot of money to do it. He has performed at the Museum of Modern Art.

But of course most authors don’t already have that level of publicity. Even if your platform isn’t as big as you might wish, you have to tell the publisher all the different ways you can help sell your book. At this point, a lot of authors say, “But that’s not my job.” Yes, it is your job. So just do it. Go online, find books about guerilla publicity, and figure out how to present your platform to publishers so they are more inclined to publish your book. It’s always about numbers, unfortunately.

The overview is what editors and agents pull out when they first get a proposal. And then if they like it, they’ll go to the rest of the proposal. The next thing that’s really important is to provide at least one chapter. I always ask for three. For a nonfiction book, one of those chapters should be the first one, and it should be an overview of what the book is about. For fiction, it’s a bit different; I usually ask for a one-page synopsis of the story arc or, for short stories, a list of the stories and what each one is about.