Book proposal author biography in the back
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Book proposals are used to sell nonfiction books to publishers.
A book proposal argues why your book (idea) is salable and marketable in today&#;s market. It essentially acts as a business case for why your book should exist, and—for many authors—persuades a publisher to man an investment in your work before you sit down to write it.
That&#;s right: nonfiction authors, if they&#;re smart and strategic, will sell a publisher on their book before they&#;ve written very much of it.
Instead of writing the entire book, then trying to interest an editor or agent (which is how it works with novels), you can write the proposal first if you&#;re a nonfiction author. If a publisher is convinced by the proposal, it will contract you and pay you to write the book. This applies to all types of nonfiction, although it can be very challenging for memoirists to sell a project on the grund of a proposal if they are unpublished or without a compelling platform. (More on tha
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How to write a book proposal
Introduction
I have always loved books. When I was a child, our big weekly outing was a visit to the library where my sisters and I were allowed three books each. My mother, an avid reader, kept the house stocked with paperbacks sourced from a local thrift store, so growing up we had at our disposal everything from Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins to Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. For fun, my sister Donna and I even wrote back-cover copy for books of our own invention. When we grew up, we planned to team up to write and illustrate books of our own.
Of course, that is not exactly how things worked out. But I did go on to work in the publishing world as a book designer, editor, and publisher. And, I also did end up writing my own back-cover copy, and later, my own books.
I learned to write book proposals directly from the editors to whom I pitched my first ideas. The first proposal I wrote was for a book abo
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Write On! Writing A Biography Book Proposal
Write On! Writing A Biography Book Proposal by Jeffrey Spivak
Today, I’m in the enviable position of having my second book (a Hollywood biography) published at year’s end. No matter what’s been said about the changing face of the book industry, there remain a number of truisms that most authors must follow if they’re to bring their non-fiction idea to life. Unless you have the clout of Kitty Kelley (who can land a book contract on an idea alone), or are willing to go the self-publishing route and live drably with the results of middling sales and retailer’s consignments, today’s market demands the tried-and-true methods of query letters and book proposals. As stated so eloquently on this site by Carolyn Howard-Johnson in her “Seven Rules for Writing Your Book Proposal” tailoring your proposal to the publisher of your choice is a savvy move.
A successful query letter is analogous to getting your foot in the door at a publishing hou