I’ve written previously about when to propose your book and of course you can always refer to our book proposal form as well as our guidance notes to help you complete it . After last week’s tips on writing your manuscript I thought it would be helpful to highlight some major do’s and don’ts for putting together your book proposal.
Your proposal is for your publisher as well as your reviewers
This means you need to appeal both to a non-expert looking to understand in relatively broad terms what your book is about, and to experts who will want to get more into the detail of what precisely you are proposing. Some of this contradiction can be overcome by sample material, which your publisher can engage with as they see fit, while your reviewers can use it to get a richer sense of what you are proposing to write. Within the proposal itself you want to keep things relatively simple, at least to begin with. Make clear the stakes of your project before diving into the specific context and outlining your approach.
Always ask yourself – So what?
One of the most common frustrations I have as a commissioning editor is reading proposals that take too long to outline what it is they are contributing to the field. Sometimes a bit of introductory context is necessary, but you really shouldn’t be getting on to your second page of synopsis before you write a sentence beginning something like “In this book I will…”. Commissioning editors tend to find their way into understanding a book from the elevator pitch outward, so it makes our lives considerably easier if you write your initial synopsis in that way too.
Don’t overwrite your synopsis (or copy and paste your introduction)
It’s hard to give meaningful quantitative guidance on how long your synopsis should be. Some can be a couple of paragraphs, others need to be a couple of pages. Generally speaking you want to keep this very pared down, especially if you have also drafted your introduction and are able to supply this as a sample. If it is running longer than two pages, it’s worth asking whether all of this information is really necessary at this stage for someone finding their way into understanding what the book will be.
You absolutely should not copy and paste your introduction into your proposal to serve as a synopsis. Even if you have a well-polished, succinctly-written and clear introduction ready to go, it will not serve the same function as your synopsis and will (or should) be considerably longer. This is even worse if it’s the un-adapted introduction from your PhD thesis, or a journal paper that you’re planning to modify later to serve that purpose.
Chapter summaries are always helpful, A-heads rarely are
Most publishers will want to have an outline of your table of contents, with short summaries of each chapter. Ideally, you would supply both a simple table of contents (ie, just the sequence of chapter titles) and also a series of one or two paragraph synopses of each individual chapter. For your publisher it’s helpful to properly understand what the book will include and in what sequence, it’s the sort of thing on which editors are sometimes able to provide meaningful feedback. For your reviewers, it will give a much fuller sense than your whole-book synopsis of exactly what direction you’re taking your topic in and how much detail you will go into.
Some authors are inclined to include planned A-heads (the main headings to be used within the chapter) either in the short table of contents, or in lieu of chapter summaries in prose. This is rarely of much use to anyone, because it doesn’t really give us a feel for what you will be saying about the thing mentioned in the A-head, how much of a focus it will be, or what the relevance of it is. It’s much better to provide a degree of explication here, rather than a shopping list of bullet points.
Very few books are truly unique, and that’s a good thing…
It’s common for publishers to ask you to write about “related titles” or – usually for textbook projects – “competing titles”. This is very valuable to publishers and reviewers, because it provides a broader context for your book. We want to know how crowded the area you’re contributing to is, and have your sense of why there is room for your book.
Sometimes this is very obvious, there are a number of titles trying to do very similar things, you pick the closest three or so and explain why your book is different in a meaningful way from each of them. This helps us to think about how specific we need to be when identifying your books’ unique selling points, and helps reviewers both to understand what is unique about your book, and to know that you are in fact aware of these similar titles.
Other times, you might find yourself thinking that your book is so unique that you really can’t see anything to put in this section of your proposal. If so, it’s well worth asking yourself whether it’s really true that nobody has ever done anything quite like this. Are there, for example, books that take a similar methodological or stylistic approach to examining a different phenomenon? Or are you taking a novel new approach but looking at a subject that has been covered differently by more traditional books in the past? Again, this is helpful to us because we then know we can sell the book in quite broad terms – we don’t necessarily need to highlight very small details, but need to focus on finding the audience for this relatively unusual book. Knowing what the nearest titles are and that they are quite far away really helps us establish our parameters. Similarly for reviewers, it will help them to understand how far you see the project as being from any existing titles, and may have questions about how it relates to any particular titles they have in mind.
If you really can’t come up with any related titles to use as reference points for yours, then it’s a good idea to explain why you think this is. Perhaps the topic you are writing about is so new there just aren’t any other books about it yet. If that’s the case, think about what the likely implications will be if and when others do start writing about this topic. How will your book stand up once it is no longer on its own? For that matter, how long do you think it is likely to be in that situation?
Your proposal wordcount and timeline aren’t formal commitments but do try to be realistic
Your publisher will be using your projected wordcount to help understand how expensive your book will be to produce and what sort of price point they should set it at for the market. These are typically quite fuzzy, ballpark calculations at this stage, but it’s obviously quite unhelpful if your projected 100,000 word manuscript comes in at 25,000 words, or vice versa. Similarly, you can’t know for certain exactly how long your manuscript will take to complete unless you’ve already written it. It is, nevertheless, helpful for us to have a sense of what time frame we’re going to be looking at and beginning to think about our own timetables.
Both of these numbers – your wordcount and your delivery date – will go into the first draft of your publishing contract (assuming your proposal is accepted), but can of course be changed before you sign it, if needed. Only at that point do they go from being a rough estimate to relatively fixed commitments.
That’s all from us this week, if I’ve inspired you to begin working on your proposal, you can find all of our regular guidance here or simply send me an email at simon.bates@tbarnpress.com if you’d like to arrange to have a chat about your idea first.
