This is the slideshow I use in the regular talks I give to writers about writing nonfiction or fiction book proposals.

1. Writing the
Book
Proposal
For Fiction and Nonfiction Writers
Speaker: Emily Grosvenor
www.emilygrosvenor.com

2. What is a Book Proposal
• A Sales Document
• It argues why your book is a marketable
product
It answers the following questions:
SO WHAT? WHO CARES?
WHO ARE YOU?

3. Who uses the book proposal
Agents, acquisitions editors, editors, the marketing team, the publisher

4. Thinking Like the Book Industry
The Book
The Hook
The Cook

5. The Book, The Hook and The Cook

6. Parts of the Nonfiction Book Proposal
• Title page
• Overview / with endorsements
• Audience
• Comp Titles
• Marketing and Promotion
• Bio
• Sample Chapters
• Appendix

7. Parts of the Fiction Book Proposal
• Brief overview: This should read similar to back-cover copy.
• The market
• About the author
• Author marketing
• Comparable books
• Details: How many words will your book be? (Words, not
pages.) How many chapters?
• Longer synopsis: In several pages (2 to 6 is a good guideline)
describe the story.
• Sample chapters: Include the first 40 to 50 pages of your
manuscript

8. The Title Page: Titles and Subtitles
1. Make an obvious promise
2. Identify your target readers
3. Be as specific as possible
4. Differentiate your book from the competition
5. Engage your readers’ curiosity
6. Use metaphor to make it more interesting and memorable
7. Choose the right tone of voice
8. Be as concise as possible
9. Write the way your market speaks
10. Choose a web-friendly book title
http://www.lulu.com/titlescorer/index.php

9. The Overview
Your three sentence description of
your book and why its important,
wrapped in a compelling
introduction to your book (2-5
pages)

10. Sample Overview: The Family Gene
The Family Gene is the story of a medical mystery. It is a story about
science’s shortcomings and its miraculous capabilities. It is also a story
about doctors on a quest to map a gene and understand it. The
astonishing potential to “cure” a genetic illness, and save future
generations from a new and terrible scourge, is merely the icing on the
cake.
This is the story of a daughter trying to make sense of her father’s senseless
death, and of a young woman facing her own mortality. It asks all the
ethical questions that modern genetics brings to humanity’s table: Do we
have a right to alter our own genetic codes and those of our children?
What happens when technology gets so far ahead of us that it ceases to
save lives and begins to destroy them?

11. Endorsements
1. Make a list of colleagues, experts in your
fiend, friends, writers of similar books
2. Plan ahead – give them time to read it
3. Help another writer out
4. Get creative about approaching others
5. ASK
6. Follow up
7. Show your appreciation

12. Audience: Or the Unexpected Benefits
of Numbers in the Writing Career
• Define your audience:
Who will read this book?
• Example: The Scent
Trails, a memoir
– Scent lovers
– The New Domestics
– Transplants

13. Scent lovers
A new market has opened up for people who connect to their
sense of smell. These Scent aficionados are a growing group
of DIY perfumers, sniffaholics, and people who read perfume
blogs/sites like Sniffapalooza.com (site for the world’s major
perfume event), Cafleurbon.com, Fragrantica.com,
ThePerfumePosse.com, Bois de Jasmin, and
NowSmellThis.com. The Scent Trails will serve this audience
with a story filled by folding the latest scientific research
about the sense of smell in an appealing narrative and voice
and by shedding light on the unfolding DIY perfume market in
the United States.

14. The New Domestics
The New Domestics value traditional roles in the home, but with
a twist. They are women who have decided to be stay-at-
home moms while pursuing their life passions. They are at the
point in their lives when they are drawn to things that
surprise them. They are a group that has just started being
chronicled by sociologists, in books such as Emily Matchar’s
Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New
Domesticity.

15. Transplants
These are people who have left their ancestral homes to settle elsewhere.
Americans have always been on the move. According to the Pew Research
Center:
-- More than 6 in 10 adults have switched communities at least once in
their lives.
-- More than 15% have lived in four or more states.
-- A full 38% of Americans say that the place they are living right now isn’t
“home in their heart.”
-- The West remains the least rooted of all American regions, where only
30% of residents live where they grew up.
-- And yet, America is at a point when it is settling down. Roughly 11% of
Americans say they have plans to move within the next five years, the
smallest percentage since the government began tracking this trend in the
late 1940s.
-- The Pacific Northwest is of special interest to transplants. In 2013,
Oregon replaced Washington, D.C. as the number one location to move to
among people who moved from one U.S. state to another.

16. Comp Titles
• Use mid-market titles
• Show how your book is different than what’s
out there, but similar enough to not be re-
inventing the wheel
• Explain why your book can be compared to
these titles
Ex: The Scent Trails will touch on the anxieties of new motherhood in a DIY culture of the
Pacific Northwest in books like Claire Dederer’s wonderful Poser: My Life in 23 Yoga Poses
(Picador, 368 pages, 2012, Trade Paperback reprint, $16.00, ISBN-10: 1250002338), but its
author will find connection and peace by building a sense of place through scent, not
achieving crow pose.

17. Tips for the Comp Title
1. Respect the authors with whom you
compete
2. Objectivity is your friend.
3. Hyperbole is your enemy.
4. Confidence is classy.
5. Be concise
6. It’s ok to use your “voice” here as long as it’s
appropriate

18. Your Bio
• Relevant details wrapped in a compelling
story
• Actually tell a story about who you are,
weaving in details that lend credibility to
being the author of your proposed book
• Ex: Beth Howard, Mrs. American Pie
• Include education when relevant
• Try not to be too cute

19. Marketing and Promotion
You will make yourself available to radio and television.
You will send press releases to major magazines about
your work.
You will start a new Web site to promote your book.
You will promote your book at any public lectures you
do.
You will attend professional conferences and promote
your book there.
You will do any other thing you can think of to
promote.

20. Getting Creative with Marketing and
Promotion
• Social media outreach: Influencers you know
• Media relationships you have
• Bookseller connections
• Connections within the writing community
• Twitter feeds you’re on
• Klout Scores
• It’s unending! Make it stop!

21. Sample Chapters
YOUR VERY BEST WORK

22. The Appendix: It’s all about that
context
• Articles
• Links to YouTube videos you’ve made
• Press about you
• Articles that get at the importance of the
market you are serving
• Any other RELEVANT materials

23. Resources
• How to Write the Nonfiction Book Proposal by
Michael Larson
• Nonfiction Book Proposals Anyone Can Write
by Elizabeth Lyon
• Building Your Writer Platform by Chuck
Sambuchino
• Your Novel Proposal: From Creation to
Contract by Blythe Camenson and Marshall J.
Cook

24. The book proposal s how you carve out a space for your beautiful, star-bright art in the marketplace of ideas.
The book proposal is how you carve out a place in the marketplace of
ideas for your star-bright art.

25. Pitch me an Idea