Insider tips: book proposals on easy mode
Avoid pitfalls to craft a winning book proposal
The best advice since sliced bread?
Even a great idea will fizzle out if your proposal is a dud. As an acquisitions editor, I see a lot of book proposals, and here’s how it usually goes—I read about half of a page and determine that it’s not a good fit for the list I’m building. I move on.
So I’m going to start with the bad news: the most likely reasons your proposal would be rejected from a publisher, based entirely on my own experience (any editors reading? Please feel free to chime in with your own reasons!).
Subject matter mismatch. This doesn’t necessarily reflect anything wrong with the proposal, just that it’s, in some way, not the kind of book that editor is looking for.
Audience mismatch. This one is a bit trickier, but it can happen when the subject matter is right for an editor’s list but the audience the author wants to reach is not. For example, a publisher who doesn’t publish high school textbooks would be foolish to accept a proposal for a high school textbook on birds, even if they publish plenty of books for birdwatchers or ornithologists.
Imaginary audience. The book is so important that everyone will be interested if only they hear about it. In fact, you worked it out and at 10% royalties, you’ll probably be a billionaire even if some people share copies.
Oblivious to other books. I need to learn more math to calculate the number of times I’ve seen “the first book on xyz,” or its academic sibling, “fills a gap in the literature.” This feels lazy at best, arrogant at worst.
No platform. This one might feel obnoxious, but a publisher needs to sell books—even the non-profit publishers like university presses. They’re going to look closely at how other similar books have sold and see how your ability to reach people stacks up. This can be overcome, but if you don’t have an established audience you want to make yourself sound like you’re ready to hustle and like you’ve got some idea how to do it.
Bad writing. I’m about the most forgiving editor I’ve ever met when it comes to first-try writing quality. Even so, I’ve learned to see the future in some mundane ways and a badly written book proposal does not bode well. This means a proposal that is garbled, disjointed, or even just boring. If you can’t sustain energy through a few pages of writing here, how are you going to do it over hundreds of pages?
Confusion. The table of contents doesn’t clearly connect to the description of the book, or to the audience described. Maybe everything about the book sounds like a scholarly monograph but the comparable books are all NYT bestsellers.
The unfortunate truth is that there are lots of reasons your proposal might be rejected. Most editors see way more submissions than they can publish in any given year, so a big part of the job is to know what not to pursue.
On the bright side, knowing what some of the filters look like, you can engineer a proposal that will have the greatest possible chance of success. And I will help you.
What really matters in a book proposal
Any book publisher, whether a university press, a big New York Trade press, or a small professional publisher, is going to be looking for similar things in a proposal for a non-fiction book.
Remember this: your proposal is both a pitch for your book and an audition. You have to make the book sound good, and you’ve got to make its author sound good as well. But knowing that (as I’m sure you already do) can easily build the proposal writing process into a major obstacle in your mind. And that can be counterproductive.
So is it more important to focus on the strengths of your proposal, or to avoid making mistakes? I urge you to focus on bolstering the big ideas and their delivery, and to worry less about whether you’re going to run aground on an unseen linguistic shoal.
I will happily forgive grammatical errors, misspellings, and formatting glitches if the ideas are strong and the delivery is compelling. If it’s a mess, I’ll take that as a sign that you don’t have much respect for the process and might not be a good partner down the line when the real work starts, but a few little things here and there won’t bug me too much. Don’t make the big mistakes above and you’ll be fine. Look at the opposite scenario: a perfectly-executed proposal about a very dumb idea isn’t going anywhere.
What should your book proposal look like?
At the baseline, a proposal includes all the important details about the book, your audience, and your expertise. It should be well-written, easy to understand, and easy to follow. Here are some tips:
Start with a one-sentence pitch for the book
You should be able to grab my attention with an idea, story, or facts that create the driving force in your book. “A shocking fact has come to light…” or “People think it’s this, but it’s that…” or if it’s a simpler thing like a guidebook, “I’ll teach first-time pet owners everything they need to ask at their first veterinarian visit.” This part has to be one sentence. I’ll give you a semicolon if you need it, but no funny business.
Description of your readers
Who are they? What do they like to read? What are their interests? Why are you targeting them and why do you think they’ll respond? This will help publishers understand who your book is for and how to market it. You can go about this by describing types of people (doctors, people who Lindy Hop, gardeners), or pointing out other books they’ve read (“people who read Make it Stick are going to love my book, Sticky Wicket).
Longer description of around 300-500 words
This should give a detailed overview of your book's central idea, why it matters, and how you’re going to approach it. This is not the place to spend precious space on methodology (unless that’s a unique selling point) or “the literature.” Talk about your own ideas and why they matter. That’s why we’re here.
Annotated table of contents
Create a table of contents with sharp chapter titles that indicate the promise of each chapter and include a description in just a few sentences that states clearly why each chapter is important and what each will include. This will give publishers an idea of how your book is structured and what they can expect to find in each chapter. When I evaluate proposals that I find intriguing I spend a lot of time on the table of contents to see if it makes sense to connect the topic to the readers the author describes.
Comparable and competitive books
Provide brief summaries of other books published on the same or similar subjects. Newer books are better, though if there are older books that are classics, you can certainly add those to the mix., You can even include some in different subject areas that you want to emulate in one way or another. Maybe it’s the narrative style or maybe you think that the readership will cross over–either way, it can add an interesting angle. Make sure you explain why you’re including each to give publishers an idea of how your book fits into the market.
Highlights of your unique platform
This covers a couple of topics that all circle around the same question. Why are you the right person to write this book. How has your unique blend of experience, education, interest, access, etc, resulted in the ability to write this book? Do you have a platform relevant to the book, such as large social media following, frequent television interviews, or a popular newsletter? In other words, you’ve already described the ideal audience for your book—can you reach them? Publishers have marketing teams, of course, but almost no book succeeds without a committed and capable author. Showing that you have the ability to help promote it effectively will go a long way.
Sample chapter
Include a sample chapter that demonstrates how you're going to pull off everything that your proposal describes. This will give publishers a taste of your writing style and an idea of what they can expect from the rest of the book. Normally the sample chapter comes at the end, but I’ve seen a couple of proposals in recent years that led with narrative to great effect. They followed with details once I was hooked. If you’ve got a lot of confidence in your prose, that could work for you.
There’s a lot more that a publisher might ask for. For example, how long is your book going to be? How many words? Exactly how many figures, and of what type? Unless the answers to these questions are central to your proposal, don’t worry about them too much. If an editor is enticed by your ideas, they’ll ask you for what they need. And that brings me to what might be the most important thing about a book proposal for most academic authors.
Insider tips: book proposals on easy mode
For you estimable readers who’ve stuck around this far, I’ll give you an insider tip. It’s how you can avoid getting rejected based on the first two points at the start of this post. And it’s easy as this:
Research publishers to find the right fit. Look at the best books that have come out in the past two years–the ones you’re adding into your proposal as comps. Look at who published them and read the acknowledgments to see if the editor is mentioned. Now you know who to reach out to.
Your proposal should probably not be your first point of contact with an editor. You can start with a query. That’s a short email detailing your book, its audience, and your expertise. This should be clear and very concise. What your book is about, who your target audience is, and why you’re the person to write this book—and if you can, something about how your book would fit in with the recent books they’ve published. Editors love that.
Even before a query, there’s something else you can do: get to know some editors. Most of us who aren’t at the biggest publishers are actually quite accessible, whether by email or at a conference. Even if you don’t have a book proposal in mind yet, you can always send a note to introduce yourself, describe your work, even offer to be a peer reviewer. Editors don’t just rely on their networks to build great lists–they also genuinely enjoy getting to know interesting people working on interesting stuff. One of my colleagues likes to say that the best proposals usually come in an email that goes, “Hey Matt, remember that idea we were talking about?”
Writing a book proposal and sending it off can be a high-stress project. People worry about this enough to support a small cadre of people who you can hire to coach you through it. What I hope you’ll take away from this is that you can avoid the worst of the stress and the worst pitfalls now that you know what an editor like me really cares about in a proposal.
A book proposal isn’t like doing your taxes, or like a college application. You don’t have to craft a single perfect document and then send it over the transom to fend for itself in the wilds of the slush pile. If you follow the last few pieces of advice here, you will have a great chance of finding the right editor—one who’s eagerly awaiting your proposal.