You’ve poured your blood, sweat, and tears into crafting your nonfiction book. At this point, you’d think the hard part would be over, but there’s one more challenge ahead: writing your book proposal.
Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. You’ll need to write a 15- to 30-page book proposal to submit to agents and publishers. That may seem daunting when you’ve already written hundreds of pages, but there’s a silver lining, too. A book proposal can make your work more appealing to agents, which in turn boosts your chances of getting published. Plus, there are professionals who can help craft your proposal if you don’t want to shoulder the task on your own.
If you want your writing to go out into the world to inform, inspire, or teach readers, it’s well worth spending some time writing a book proposal that will really wow potential publishers. Fortunately, there’s a fairly standard template you can follow to write one. In this guide, we’ll walk you through each element of a strong book proposal for a nonfiction title to explain what you need to include and provide tips for making your proposal a winner.
Cover Letter
Writing a cover letter for your book proposal (also known as a query letter) is a bit like writing a cover letter for a job application, except this time, your goal is to be selected by an agent rather than an employer. Your letter should promote your personal expertise and demonstrate how that makes you uniquely qualified for the role of “author.” This is the first thing an agent will read, so you really want it to stand out and make a great first impression.
Your letter should promote your personal expertise and demonstrate how that makes you uniquely qualified for the role of “author.”
The cover letter should be a one- to two-page summary of all the most effective points in your argument for publishing your book, including:
Why it’s different from other books on the market.
How it approaches the topic in a unique way.
Who will want to read your book.
Why you’re qualified to write the book.
While the query letter is the first element of your book proposal, it may be best to write it last after you’ve had a chance to put the other parts of your proposal together. Once you’ve completed these other elements, you’ll have an even better awareness of your book’s biggest strengths and selling points, which makes the cover letter easier to write.
Synopsis
When it’s time to write your synopsis, think of a book jacket: what would yours say? This needs to be a gripping description that pulls potential agents and publishers in right from the get-go. While your cover letter is written in a fairly direct tone, you can use a more literary style when writing the synopsis.
Take this example from Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know:
How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to each other that isn't true?
Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland---throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don't know. And because we don't know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.
This concise-yet-compelling synopsis starts off with a bang by asking questions that the reader immediately wants to discover the answers to. Then, it goes on to note some of the book’s highlights, describes challenges that need to be faced, and promises insightful explanations and solutions for these challenges—all while weaving in the author’s qualifications. In short, it’s a riveting elevator pitch for a book that makes you want to read it right way.
Chapter Outlines
Now that you’ve laid out the overall synopsis for your book, it’s time to provide potential publishers with a more detailed look at each chapter. Start by including your table of contents, then give a quick but captivating chapter-by-chapter overview. Try to limit your chapter summaries to about one or two paragraphs to keep things brief.
The key here is to not only summarize what you’ve written in each chapter, but also make clear how these chapters progress from one to the next. Think of it like walking agents through your book from start to finish, giving a brief overview of each chapter along the way. By the end, they should have a good grasp of the reader’s experience without getting into the nitty-gritty details.
Sample Chapter
Here’s where your work finally gets to take center stage. In your proposal, you get to include one actual chapter straight from your manuscript, so make sure it’s a good one. This chapter should be able to stand on its own and really pull the reader in. It should be engaging and interesting and, most importantly, leave the reader wanting more.
Take your time in selecting a chapter. If you’re having trouble narrowing it down to one, ask a few trusted friends to read each of your top choices and provide their feedback on which one is the most compelling.
Market Analysis
While describing what makes your book special is important, you also need some data to back it up. The market analysis portion of your nonfiction book proposal must include real facts and figures that prove your book belongs on the shelves. A typical analysis will include the following three sections.
1. Competitive Title Analysis
Choose around five to 10 successful books to show that yours has the potential to sell. These books should cover the same topic (like American history or pop culture) and/or be in the same genre (such as memoirs or self-help books) as yours. Besides the title, provide the author, publisher, publication date, ISBN, page count, and the price for each available format (hardback, paperback, e-book, etc.). It’s best to focus mostly on books written within the last few years if possible.
2. Target Audience Stats
Summarize who your target audience will be, then provide data to show just how many people may be interested in buying your book. If you’ve written a book about postpartum depression, for example, you’d explain that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that about 1 in 9 women experience symptoms of postpartum depression.
These kinds of numbers can help quantify the potential readership for your book and make it more marketable to publishers.
If a tidy statistic like this doesn’t apply to your topic, look for other ways to show the size of your audience. Find a popular book that’s similar to yours and mention how long it’s been on the bestsellers list. Provide details about how many members there are in a related Facebook group or how many downloads there have been for a podcast episode on the topic. These kinds of numbers can help quantify the potential readership for your book and make it more marketable to publishers.
3. Marketing Plan
Speaking of marketability, you’ll also need to put together a basic marketing plan for your book that details how you plan to promote it. You can include plans to speak at a conference, market the book through your email newsletter, or connect with a reputable peer in your field to get a blurb for your book. Other options include utilizing your significant social media following or partnering with an organization that you’re a member of (such as a professional association). Your goal in this section is to demonstrate that you have the connections and/or industry prestige to ensure a certain number of sales for your book.
Author Bio
Even with all the research required for your book’s market analysis, some authors find that writing the bio is an even more daunting challenge. After all, it’s hard for most authors to write about themselves—unless you’re a memoirist, of course!
The author bio in your book proposal needs to be more than just a standard professional bio. You really need to home in on what makes you uniquely qualified to write this book. It might be your work experience, your educational background, or even your personal background. The goal is to prove that you have an expertise level that will earn the trust of potential readers.
If you have name recognition in your field, be sure to mention that as well. That could include anything from academic papers you’ve written to media appearances to the stats for your social media followers. These details demonstrate the size of your reach in terms of a potential audience and provide additional credentials that boost your authority on a particular topic.
Some authors find that writing the bio is an even more daunting challenge.
Putting together a proposal for publishers and agents can be a bit daunting if it’s your first time. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it alone. Get help writing your book proposal to ensure that you include all the important details and present a strong argument for your book’s potential success.