Producing Your First Proposal
Book Prospectus Writing for Nonfiction Authors
An article in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, right? All about proposals.
Fiction writers, imagine if you will, a world in which you do not need to complete and polish your manuscript before you begin querying agents and editors. A world in which you develop your concept, write a chapter or two, and then submit your proposal to finish writing the rest of the book. Imagine, knowing before you put in the effort whether agents are interested in repping you or not. Imagine saving time by querying while you take a break from drafting.
This is the world our nonfiction-writing peers already live in. Jealous?
I’ll cut to the chase and just confirm for any fiction writers who are wondering where this is going, fiction writers do need to complete a manuscript before querying. Preferably polished and as ready for primetime as you can make it. There are vanishingly few agents and editors who will consider offering representation for a fiction manuscript before seeing the whole thing. If you encounter an agent or editor saying they’ll sign your novel before it’s complete . . . look, you need to verify very carefully that they are not scamming you somehow.
Nonfiction is a whole other ballgame. Nonfiction is all about selling manuscripts before they’re done—sometimes when they’re barely started. Today’s article is on why that’s the way of the market, how you get a deal for a nonfiction book before it’s done or even begun, and who gets these kinds of book deals.
Caveats first: Does fiction ever sell from a proposal? Sure. If you’re already well-known with a proven track record of selling things like tickets to see you, products, or, you know, earlier books you’ve written. Famous people can often line up a book deal before they begin writing, even for fiction. Another big caveat: While you may think of your memoir as nonfiction, memoir sells like fiction—the manuscript has to be done before you start querying (again, unless you’re somebody famous or your books have sold well before).
Somebody on writing Twitter today wanted to know if they had to finish writing their fiction manuscript before querying agents. The answer is yes. If the guidance for your genre is 90k words and you wrote 93k words you’re probably gonna be fine. If the agent said “don’t query anything unfinished” and your query says “I am currently working on” that query goes right in the trash no matter how good the idea. Worse, if you query something as though it were finished and you get asked for a full and it turns out it’s not finished . . . just do not do that. Don’t create a book proposal for fiction. That is not what today’s Shelf Life is about.
Today’s Shelf Life is for the person thinking about writing their first book proposal to sell a nonfiction manuscript. Why your first proposal? Because if you’ve sold nonfic from proposal before you don’t need this article. But if you are kicking around the idea of shopping a nonfiction book and you’re not sure what to do or how to get started, I have some pointers. Source: Lot of years in commercial, scholarly, and academic nonfiction book publishing.
So you’re writing a nonfiction book, or you’re thinking about it. First of all good for you. Writing books is hard.
When you’re writing nonfiction, there’s an expectation that you are writing from a place of expertise in this subject matter or in this type of writing. For instance: A successful nonfiction book on personal finance is likely be written by someone with some kind of personal finance credentials. Someone like an accountant or a financial advisor (someone like Suze Orman), or perhaps a regular person who is well-known for turning their own financial life or others’ financial lives around (like financial activist Dasha Kennedy). You would probably not want to read a personal finance book from your pal Catherine, a publishing industry expert with zero personal finance cred. Even if I had something valuable or worthwhile to say, there is no reason for you or anyone else to think I might. If I were to take a personal finance proposal to a nonfiction editor or an agent who reps those, it would be a really hard sell.
Another angle for approaching nonfiction writing is to already be a professional nonfiction writer. For instance, Rebecca Skloot is not a cell biologist or oncology researcher, but she published essays and feature stories in science and medicine before she sold The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. She was already well-known as a science journalist. That was her credential to tackle the story of Henrietta Lacks and her descendants.
That’s actually key to why nonfiction tends to sell from a proposal rather than requiring a finished manuscript: Agents and editors understand that the people who write nonfiction generally (not always) already have a successful career doing the type of thing they are proposing to write about. They are already making money from this expertise and experience every day. They are—theoretically—not going to just spend months or years working on a book without a reasonable expectation of payment for that work. Just as an established, successful fiction writer might have a reasonable expectation that their next manuscript will sell before they put in work on it, so does the qualified person who puts in work on a nonfiction manuscript.
That’s who usually gets a nonfiction book deal up front: People with a track record of prior successful nonfiction writing in smaller media like essays or news, and people with specific expertise or knowledge of the subject on which they are writing. And that’s why folks like that are able to sell nonfiction from a proposal. Next: How do you do it?
You put together your proposal, which some publishers will call a prospectus. The term prospectus usually refers to an informational advertising document and that’s what this is: A document full of information about the book you propose to write that you use to sell the proposal to a publisher or agent.
What goes into the prospectus? Good question: That depends! There are some elements that probably any book proposal package is going to have, like sample chapters and a draft table of contents. Other elements vary depending on who and where you’re submitting. Just like a resume, if you’re submitting to multiple places you’ll almost certainly need to tweak your book proposal to fit the specific requirements of each place.
O’Reilly, for instance, is a technology and business training company that hosts a robust online learning platform, conducts conferences, and publishes books. If you wish to submit a book proposal to O’Reilly, you’re asked to download their template, fill out the requested information—some of which will be universal, like your comps; and some of which will be unique to your O’Reilly proposal, like your specific O’Reilly published comps—and then submit the resulting proposal to them via email. O’Reilly expects to receive proposals in a very specific, uniform format. If you fill out the supplied template completely, there’s no guessing on your part that you’ve given them everything they wanted to see.
Another well-known publisher of trade nonfiction is Chronicle, which has an open submission policy and does not require submissions come via agent. Let’s take a look at Chronicle’s submission guidelines for adult trade nonfiction (I’ll paraphrase here for space):
A one-page cover letter with a project description explaining why Chronicle is a good fit;
Any available sample content;
Analysis of the potential readership with comp titles; and
A biography with your publishing credits or other specific credentials.
That is so vague. While they give a lot of examples about what might constitute “available sample content” (an outline or some recipes or some chapters or some photos or) it really doesn’t tell you what Chronicle needs to receive to help them make a decision or what any given editor at Chronicle might want to see. This isn’t because the folks at Chronicle are being irresponsible. I think the good folks at Chronicle probably expect that you are in one of two situations:
You already have a fairly polished proposal that you will send them and they just want to make sure it includes a few specifics; or
You have no idea what you’re doing and these guidelines will not be enough for you in any case, hopefully you will do some research on what a nonfiction proposal should include.
If number 1 is you, you’re not reading this anyway. If number 2 is you, good thing you’re reading. So what should your book proposal include for those publishers who, unlike O’Reilly, don’t spell out exactly what they want to get?
Cover Page
This could be your cover letter or the first page of your proposal if you’re putting it into all one document. This is going to include all the vitals like your name and contact information (including your Twitter handle, website URL, and LinkedIn profile), the working title of your book, and the proposed word count.
A Word on Word Count
Hey how do you know how many words you should aim for? Look at how many words are in your comps. People will say “oh nonfiction should be 80,000 words” but take that with a grain of salt. Nonfiction is a wide slate of book types. Self-help can run 40,000 to 60,000, biographies are usually in the 80,000 to 100,000 range, and textbooks—that’s also nonfiction!—can run to 200,000 or more words. If somebody tells you a word count range to aim for in “nonfiction” without knowing what you’re writing, don’t trust it.
Synopsis
Just as the fiction writer must write a synopsis, so must the nonfiction writer. This is the doom of all who write books. Unlike in fiction, where you’re trying to synopsize your novel into a short paragraph to fit within your single-page query letter, a nonfiction proposal has room for the synopsis to breathe. This could be a full page to several pages. You can really give a full and detailed synopsis. While drafting this, keep in mind a principle from journalistic writing: Use an inverted-pyramid structure. The first paragraph should contain all the important elements but in low amounts of detail, which you can then expand into greater detail in later paragraphs. This is because—as is often discussed in Shelf Life and is something to keep in mind whenever there’s going to be a reader involved in anything—readers will peel off and stop reading at every opportunity. Try to get as much important info in front of them fast and let them read on to get their questions about all of that answered, rather than trying to give them a lot of information about each point before moving onto the next. They could peel off at any second.
Contents/Outline
You don’t have to have your full book written but you should have a good sense of what it’s going to cover, and in what order, before you propose it to a publisher. This (usually?) isn’t like fiction where sometimes your characters surprise you in act three and take the story somewhere you weren’t expecting. You won’t know exactly the content of every page but you should know generally. It goes without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that you can’t turn in a book proposal with a table of contents that says: Preface; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1; Chapter 2; Chapter 3; and so on. You need to be specific about what each chapter will cover. Many types of nonfiction have complex tables of contents that include level-1 subhead and sometimes even level-2 subheads. Even if your book’s table of contents will ultimately not be that complex, you should make it very detailed for your proposal. It’s as much an outline as it is the contents. If your chapters will be organized into thematic parts, include those. Include subheads under your chapters to show what the main points within each chapter will be.
Author Bio
This is not the bio that goes on the back of the book, like “Catherine is an editor and lives in Maryland near a big mall.” This is a brief bio of your credentials to write this book. If I were proposing to write a book about the publishing industry, therefore, I’d include things like “Catherine has spent nearly two decades working in the publishing industry” and “Catherine writes dozens of essays per year about the publishing industry in her newsletter, Shelf Life.” You are looking to convey not only your expertise but also any platform you already have where people are interested in reading your thoughts or following you, and any built-in audience you already have. If you were writing a book on makeup artistry, this would be a place to include not only your experience and credentials like “worked as a makeup artist in the film industry” and “worked at a MAC retail location” and “has an aesthetician’s license” but also “has 2 million TikTok followers.”
Market/Audience Information
This is the part of your proposal that contains information about the market and where your book will fit into it. What shelf will it go on in the bookstore? What books will be shelved nearby (your comp titles)? Who is likely to read your book, and why? What’s the demographic information of that reader, if you know? What can you do, as the author, to help promote the book? As noted above, if you have 2 million TikTok followers, then your plan to release promotional videos to BookTok is important information. If you have a blog, what’s the regular readership? Do you have Twitter followers? What other authors might blurb your book?
Sample Chapters
Finally, the sample chapters. All the above information we’ve talked about might be on point, but can you write nonfiction? The sample chapters will tell. The editor, agent, or publisher will want to see some proof of concept. Most nonfiction submission guidelines I’ve seen don’t specify which chapters you need to send. My advice, if the publisher doesn’t specifically want, for instance, “the first two chapters,” is to send them your best chapters. Well, duh. I mean, send them the chapters that were the most fun and interesting for you to write, if you have enough material completed to choose from. The ones that were most fun for you to write will probably be the most fun for someone to read. These chapters should be as polished as you can make them. That doesn’t mean you have to hire someone to copyedit them and make them spotless; just make sure they’re complete, revised, and you’ve run spellcheck.
There are other things that some publishers may want, and others may not. For instance, the timeline on which you can write the rest of the book. Some publishers expect to get this with your proposal, others will want to negotiate it with you, others will have a firm deadline in mind by which they must have that finished manuscript in order to fit the project into their editorial calendar. Can it hurt to propose a timeline? I don’t think so—but also bear in mind that it will likely be taken as a starting point for negotiation and not set in stone. What about your CV or resume or publication history or—? Again, different recipients will have different expectations. As with applying for jobs or querying fiction, you’ll need to tailor your proposal somewhat for each recipient. But if you’re prepared with the items above, you’re going to find it a pretty simple job because just about everybody is going to want those things.
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