What are your credentials? Have you spent two months doing research on this topic-in archives all over the world-or 20 years? Does the book grow out of previously published work? Do you teach courses on the topic? Do you have some personal connection to it? For the purposes of a proposal, this section should be more detailed than what you’re used to seeing on the back flap of a book jacket. You need to convince the editor that you are the person to write this book. What I’m offering here is merely one way to think about your proposal.Ībout the author. Like many authors, I am better at some aspects of proposal-writing than other parts.
All of my books-three works of nonfiction and now a novel-were sold based on a proposal. It’s also based on my own trials and errors as an author. My advice is based on my experience as a book editor and on my discussions over many years with editors and agents about how they help writers develop book proposals. I wrote then that I would handle the rest of the proposal, including the hardest part-the overview-in a future column. But I focused on one of them-how to figure out the market for your book-since even academic monographs need to have identifiable, reachable markets.
In a column last February, I described the six main elements of a book proposal: overview, competition, market, author description, table of contents, and sample chapter.
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