Blogger: Rachel Kent
Typically, literary agencies have a format that we request all of our clients’ proposals to be in when they send them to us. At Books & Such we call this template our “style sheet.” It has guidelines for formatting and content for both fiction and nonfiction proposals.
When a proposal from one of our clients comes formatted using our style sheet, we agents do a happy dance because we don’t have to spend our time doing the formatting work and filling in content that was left out by the author. We can read and edit the proposal, suggest some changes (if necessary), and then get the proposal sent out to publishing houses. When the project is sent, it feels great.
When an author doesn’t use the style sheet, getting a proposal ready can take an entire day. Even if the agent doesn’t do the work and just marks where the work needs to be done and sends the proposal back to the author, it still eats up a lot of time and creates a bad impression. The book idea is usually a wonderful one, but if the proposal is missing key information or is a complete mess, there’s no way we can send it out to the publishing houses without putting the work in to make it what it needs to be.
You can save your agent and yourself a lot of time by putting in the time to get the proposal right. And the proposal will be sent out to the publishing houses more quickly, too!
If you aren’t an agented author yet, you too can leave a good impression by putting together a complete proposal in a simple, easy-to-read format.
Here are the things a typical proposal should include:
Fiction:
–Short summary or hook
–Longer summary (a paragraph or two)
–Info about the book, including: genre, audience, manuscript length
–Market comparison
–Author bio
–Synopsis
–Marketing plans
–Three sample chapters
Nonfiction:
–Short summary or hook
–Longer summary (a paragraph or two)
–Info about the book, including: category, audience, manuscript length
–Market comparison
–Affinity groups (What markets or groups will especially connect with this project or topic?)
–Author bio/platform
–Annotated table of contents
–Marketing plans
–Three sample chapters
What is the hardest part of putting together a proposal for you?
That’s useful as always Rachel (if I had a daughter she would have been a Rachel as it is such a strong, evocative name). Anyway, of course a list like this is always relevant, although I would be inclined, as a matter of courtesy, to find out how an agency prefers things done … and that is always pertinent. However, sussing out how an agency thinks and how its values would resonate with mine, to mutual benefit and for the sake of a long-term relationship, is not so easy. I think such a journey must put friendship first. I don’t know you or the rest of the team in any depth, but I have a better sense of all of you and I suspect its a two-way street (for better or worse). That is not enough either, but it is progress. I think that and building the relationship, revealing who we are (leopards don’t change spots easily, so might as well be real) and exposing our writing, our engagement skills, our ability to defend a point and to objectively deal with counter-argument, our world view, our way of working with people – is all important. A great man I knew once, said, “when you join a new firm, shut up for 6 months and listen, build relationships and get the DNA of the place, then speak from a position of empathy and you will be heard”. I guess I listened to that and learnt. As a guy, I intuitively don’t like to ask for help even when I am lost and I have to work at challenging that instinct all the time by adopting a strength I see in female engagement skills – ask, relate, open up, be vulnerable, etc. I think that should all precede what is really the most mechanistic stage in any relationship – the paperwork. Besides, its not just about whether you can represent me, its about how I entrust what I have so carefully stewarded over a long time. I need to get your heart as well – and generally I find a lot of resonance across BAS in terms of values, heartbeat, etc.
You are right, relationship has a lot to do with a successful author/agent partnership!
And I’m glad you like the name Rachel! I had very little to do with picking my name, but I like it, too. 🙂
Rachel, I am backing up a week. Last Friday you asked, “What is the most unusual place you have seen books?” Saturday, I strolled the streets of my hometown and discovered Little Free Libraries, cute boxes homeowners put up by the sidewalk, “Take a book, return a book.” Photos are posted on my blog, Souls Under Construction
I want one. Not for home, where there are almost no pedestrians, but for our church on the main street in a town without a public library.
Fun! Thanks for sharing!
i find it impossible to define my target audience. I’m a non fiction writer and on social media, women in their 40s and 50s tend to interact a lot. But then I get emails/texts/messages from women in their 20s and 30s that my writing has changed the way they live.
At the end of last year, I did a poll on my blog to gauge some demographics and all I could narrow it down to were my readers being adult and American because the people who took the surgery were male and female, all ages, and from all around the country.
What other ways could I accurately figure out this information since every way I’ve tried gives me a broad demographic?
Becky, I started writing for guys, because I am one, but women kept interrupting me in forums to say, “we have that issue too” or “that relates to us as well”. So I abandoned the idea, degenderized my books, and redefined my target demographic around a need. In my own experience of marketing, that is actually the right way. Needs transcend age, gender and culture, but are not necessarily universal – thus, raising kids can be very relevant to a wide age span, from 18 to even as late as 60 (for grandparents), it is also culturally neutral, but possibly just for women. I could go on, but I suspect you need to find a need and relate to that – it is, after all, the raison d’etre of all marketing, but it was probably out of your experience of that need that you wrote at all. I hope it helps. Generally when things don’t make sense to me I revert to first principles, as I did here, an then the elephants stand up in the long grass.
Yes! This is exactly how I write. I write about grief, authenticity, and community. There isn’t one specific target demographic for that.
Can I simply write the above in a proposal or does that sound like I am trying to get out of doing the work of researching my audience?
Finding a need is great – creating one is better.
* How many people knew they needed a pet rock, or a Rubik’s cube?
I don’t think topic is my issue. I’ve gotten response from readers that what I am writing is what they’ve been needing to read but didn’t realize. I have people constantly telling me that they are waiting for when I write something next (due to certain life circumstances I haven’t been able to blog regularly). I have a growing audience, they just aren’t confined to any certain demographic.
~ Becky, a need group could be a proxy for demographic. The research you must do is to try and contextualize that group i.e. so many lose loved ones a year, of which so many are Christian, woman, aged x, etc. That is how I would do it. Its kind of (forgive it sounding cynical), saying “how big is the market for grief support”.
~ You could just go and ask a bunch of psychologists how many grieving clients they see in a period, for how long they need counselling and why. Then extrapolate that to the number of psychs in your target market. I might not do that, as there may be other ways to get a sense of how big your target market is, and so on.
~ You are trying to shoehorn it into a demographic and that is derailing you as there are overlaps. I do find the team at BAS have a great marketing nous, so I trust they can give us examples from their experience and general guidance on the issue. I certainly cannot preempt their needs on this issue, so it is best to hear it from the horse’s mouth???!!
~ Andrew makes a great point, but the only way I can think of creating grief as a need is to do something illegally drastic. Although I know where you come from Andrew (e.g. invent a brand new mousetrap), but investors still need to know how far you expect it to go and what their opportunity is relative to risk taken.
I found the need to write about grief because the print resources are few. For some reason there’s almost an entire genre of books missing from the shelves – I know because I had a hard time finding what I was looking for as a reader. If you are a widow during or after middle age or if you have lost a child, there are plenty of resources. However, the market is slim when it comes to losing a parent, losing a spouse during your 20s/30s, or even just grief in general. I started writing about losing a parent when my dad died 8 hours after my first child was born. I started writing about widowhood when my husband passed away a month before our daughter was born. I’m writing in some niched areas, but my readership is responding in droves out of their own grief. Very few people are responding because they lost a parent or a spouse or experienced significant loss near the time of a child’s birth. Grief doesn’t look like that anyways – you’re never just grieving one thing.
I digress, but I’d be curious to hear about the market/audience related to my writing and future books from an agent or someone else in publishing for sure.
Becky, I have to rush, but if there is such a gap, half of your work may have been done by the WAG method (something to do with his fox derriere). You may have found an opportunity. I wrote on crisis, in my seminal work anyway, so I identify. I was going to say that sizing the market is one leg, then identifying what share of that you can against rival books is the second leg. I can understand why a publishing company needs to determine that, given the financial risks.
Becky, have you read Kate Motaung’s “Letters to Grief”? You might want to check it out –
http://www.katemotaung.com
I write for women because I tend to enjoy the same books (and movies – ‘Notting Hill’ is a favourite, and I will watch anything with Hugh Grant). But I am not a woman, and I think that while my takeaways are parallel, in a sense, they are not the same.
* Take Hugh Grant; the roles he does best have a combination of social clumsiness and sincerity, and a touch of the schoolboy coexisting with the debonair. I like the most of the characters he plays; but I don’t see, and never will, the ‘romantic’ there (for which I am eternally grateful).
* Are my male characters something like that? Probably, yes, but it’s not intentional. Intentionality could become literary Mannerism quite quickly. While modern Mannerists can be successful, it’s not the road I choose to take.
* That said, for me the Market Analysis is still largely a WAG. (For those who may have missed the memo – the W is wild, the G is guess, and Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the A.)
Who do you envision reading your book while you are writing it? It is all right to have a book that appeals to more than just your target audience, but for your proposal you want to state your target audience and then you can list secondary audiences as well.
The synopsis and market analysis are hardest for me. I especially stress over whether I included every necessary plot thread in my synopsis or too many and if the threads I started to explain have the ending in there somewhere or not. Argh!
These two are very hard!
I agree with Kristen; writing a synopsis is drudgery, and the market analysis is a pain in the neck.
* Writing an engaging synopsis is a completely different skill from that required to write a short story, and certainly unlike writing a novel. The best metaphor accessible to me right now is an instruction manual; the reading and understanding of the work is broken down into a linear series of concrete ‘steps’.
* I can understand why you want the market analysis – it’s something of a test, a sign that the author’s going to be willing to show up with Market Savvy during the process of Pitching to Publishers (as well as demonstrating an understanding of what the target audience likes and expects).
* But it’s hard – I think each of us has a different takeaway from the books we read, and it can be different enough to create some terribly false impressions.
* For example, when I read Beverly Lewis’ Amish books, I don’t revel in the charm of buttons, bonnets, and “Ja, naturlich!” For me, the Amish are very similar to other indigenous cultures with whom I’ve had dealings, and Ms. Lewis provides a different lens on that aspect of my experience. They’re a bit like Burmese Karens, and perhaps more like the Nung (ethnic Chinese hailing from Viet Nam); I admit, though, that it might be hard to find an Amish mercenary. Nungs made good ‘uns.
Market analysis is about determining the potential of a book. If the target is too narrow, sales will be too low to justify the investment. Adjusting the book’s positioning might change that. Too broad is a problem too as then it gets lost in a crowded market, won’t stand out and cannot rate on search engines. Analysis is a vital audit of the book’s appeal and whether you resonate with the needs of your target market. It also identifies what you compete against. If other similar books are in the space, that could undermine your own potential, especially if the competing books “own the space”. That will signal the need to reposition your product, either to bring a different angle (as in how Avis chose to be a good follower with “we try harder”) or to target a different market altogether. This is often best analysed graphically. Lastly your analysis should reflect on timing – where is your own product in the context of the market curve i.e. are the issues you explore mature, growing within the social discourse or burnt out. I am no publisher, so let Rachel make it clearer, but that’s my 9 cents worth.
That makes sense. It’s a difficult target, because, insider knowledge absent, there’s nothing other than a rough qualitative comparison that can be made. Amazon sales ranking can help, and so can Goodreads – to a degree.
* To some degree I do think that this can create something of a circular argument within the marketplace; market analysis will filter out books of a certain genre or voice, and therefore the predictive model has a role in driving the market itself.
Peter, I think your nine cents is worth a million bucks. Do I have something unique? Are there enough potential readers to make it work financially? Yes to both, or it won’t fly.
The hardest part of preparing a proposal is preparing the proposal! I use Michael hyatt’s template.
I didn’t know he had a template … I’ll have to find that. 🙂
Hi Rachel!
Oh, the proposal. That wondrous beast. ☺ lol
The hardest part of the proposal for me would be the marketing plans and the info about the book (specifically the audience and genre).
With the marketing, I’m not sure how to list my social media numbers. Do publishers want actual number of followers for each social media account listed on the proposal or do they want this listed another way?
Also with my audience, right now, I have mine listed as “Women in their mid-20s to 50s who enjoy women’s fiction with a historical thread.” Is this too vague or similar to what you would expect for audience?
And for genre I have it listed as “Inspiration Dual Time Fiction.” Do you think this is an accurate genre you’ve seen out there for those of us who write inspirational dual time/time slip novels?
Sorry so many questions! I totally understand if you’re not able to answer them all. I’m wrapping up all my material to attend the ACFW Conference for the first time. And any insight is greatly appreciated! ☺ Thanks!!
Have a great holiday weekend everyone!
Go ahead and list each social media account with the numbers.
Your audience is similar what I would expect.
For the genre, I have seen it as “inspirational fiction set in a split time period,” but I do know what you mean, so yours is probably fine.
Have a great weekend too!
Thank you, Rachel!! Much appreciated! 🙂
Rachel, I would really appreciate an expanded discussion of the market analysis and marketing portions, and I’m sure I’m not the only one here who would love some guidance on these parts. It would make a great future blog to discuss this in some detail.
Is the market comparison mainly the comparison of the content of your work to other successful books on the market, a “how the same-how different” analysis of style and thematic emphasis? Does this involve comments on commercial metrics such as sales rank on Amazon? Are there other components? If so, where/how does an author research them? Since the market that will be buying is 18-24 months out, how does an author identify trends of growth and decline for a particular fiction genre or subgenre? Just how relevant is what is selling well today? Do we just have to assume tomorrow will be the same as today?
What about describing the marketing plans? Examples of what agents/publishers would be looking for? How specific should this be? I have lots of detailed ideas, but I’m not sure this is what is being requested.
Thanks for any guidance you can provide.
I agree … I would love to know your take on it Rachel and how to do in the context of this market, how others have done it, etc.
Hi Carol, This is a blog topic on its own, so I can’t answer it all here, but check out these blogs by Rachelle for help:
https://booksandsuch.com/blog/comparison-good/?preview=true&preview_id=21688&preview_nonce=1d0fc66d0f
http://www.rachellegardner.com/know-your-competition/
Thanks! I’m sure many of us will.
If you offer a “style sheet” to your clients, I can’t imagine anyone sending anything else. You don’t offer this to non-clients, do you? Could you? Would you? Consider it? 🙂 The hardest part of the proposal for me is the hook, longer summary, and synopsis. You want your words to be perfect … it’s a challenge, for sure.
I think sometimes it just seems like too much work to get it just right so authors rush.
And sadly I can’t send it to you at this time, but the basics are in what I posted above.
Market comparison is an area I’ve not known how to approach or how to accomplish. Thanks for the tips that are being shared. Can we recommend helps on this site? I hope this is okay to do (if not, please let me know for future reference). Mary DeMuth offers a book proposal template available for purchase on her website. It appears to cover all the bases (I assume it’s still active).
http://www.rachellegardner.com/know-your-competition/
Check out this blog for some help on comparisons.
Thank you.
I’m always more comfortable using an agency’s style sheet because it tells me exactly what they want, where they want it, and how. With this knowledge, some of the tension drains away. The process dissects the proverbial elephant into manageable, bite-size pieces, and gives me a chance to look at my manuscript with different eyes.
I enjoy using templates as well! It makes things more manageable.