Most writers are intimidated by book proposals. I can see why. Writers are writers, not salesmen, not marketers, not researchers, and not necessarily aggressive self-promoters. But all of these qualities are necessary when you are putting together your proposal.
I don’t think proposals are that hard, that is unless you don’t have a clear idea of what your book is about. And even then, I have found that in the process of writing the proposal, the writer’s ideas become clarified, the structure of the book tightened up, weaknesses become apparent, and more often than not the concept of the book gets strengthened. Writing the proposal is time well spent. And a good agent will lead you through that process.
Simply put, a book proposal is a business plan. The purpose of the proposal is to describe your book idea to a publisher and to get them excited about it. But you also need to be careful not to oversell. Publishers are going to give you a lot of money (well, probably only an insultingly small amount of money) based on the material in the proposal, and they have a right to know what they are buying. Trying to dazzle them with hype or baffle them with bullshit isn’t going to work. We have heard the pitches a million times about the book being a shoe-in for Oprah, being the newest Eat Pray Love, or the next Spielberg blockbuster. Certainly all of those things would be nice, but they usually don’t happen. Trying to oversell the book sends the message that the writer is either unrealistic or manipulative. These are messages you don’t want to convey in the proposal.
A good proposal anticipates the questions and concerns an editor is going to bring to her reading of your proposal. I did a blog post about this last year called “Think Like an Editor.” You need to know what those questions are, and your proposal needs to answer them convincingly.
Of course, the $64,000 question is going to be whether your book will make money. And one of the questions you will need to answer is “what will the writer do to help sell the book”. That question needs to be addressed in the “marketing” section of the book proposal. That’s usually the section that authors have the most difficulty with. So let’s talk about that today.
The marketing sections that come to me in draft proposals usually fall between the Scylla of being totally lame and the Charybdis of grandiosity. I’ve previously written a blog post called “The Art of the Pitch” where I tried to evaluate pitches that work compared to those that don’t. We have already mentioned above some examples of grandiosity. I will not allow the word “Oprah” to be mentioned in a proposal that I am submitting, unless you happen to be sleeping with Oprah’s latest diet guru. At the other end of the scale, I see marketing plans which tell the publisher that the author will have a publication party at her mom’s house and might contact local booksellers to (try to) schedule events. These pitches are totally lame. My favorite pitch was by an author who said that he would agree to be on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, time permitting.
Remember that the marketing section is about what you are going to do. You don’t have to advise the publisher about what they already know. You don’t have to make a list of major national periodicals to send review copies to. But if you are aware of niches that the publisher might not know about, you should bring that up.
And you should be quite emphatic about what you will do. And that means don’t fill up the proposal with errant speculation and wishful thinking. I generally tell my clients not to use the word “might” in their marketing section. It’s weak and sends the message that you also “might not” do what you are proposing and probably won’t. And while you are at it, don’t use the word “try” either (as in “I will try to get Cameron Diaz to give me a blurb.)
