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The nonfiction book proposal is a unique creature. It’s an essential package that you must create to attract the attention of publishers and “sell” them on your book, but most writers balk at the thought of spending weeks and even months developing and honing it.

But what if you could accelerate the process of creating your nonfiction book proposal? What if you could write a powerful proposal both quickly and professionally? Ryan G. Van Cleave shows you how with The Weekend Book Proposal, a practical, step-by-step guide to the nuts and bolts of faster, better proposal writing.

Here, Ryan shares three questions you should ask yourself as you start planning your proposal.

1. WHO ARE MY READERS?

Start with your mom, dad, spouse, and immediate family. Then expand this list to any aunts, uncles, and cousins who you can guilt-trip into buying a copy. Great—you’ve sold maybe a dozen copies to people who are buying it merely because they know you. Now the real work starts. Who else is going to be persuaded to buy the book?

Determine the Primary and Secondary Markets

Your primary audience is the ideal group of people who’d love to read your book. If your book is a Florida orchid-growing how-to, the primary audience is Floridians who grow orchids. If your book is a memoir about a forty-something using her renewed Catholic faith and positive thinking to create weight loss and overall health improvement, then the primary audience is health aficionados. But it might also be Catholic women’s groups. And perhaps priests. Most books have a clear primary audience, though books that cover a lot of ground (like the latter example) might have more.

Your secondary audiences are the groups of people beyond the obvious primary audience. For that orchid book? Secondary audiences might be gardeners in Florida or the entire Southeast. Landscapers. Organic farmers. Member groups of the American Orchid Society. Botanical garden gift shops. For that memoir? Any Catholic church. Catholic parenting groups. Fitness clubs. Fans of The Secret and The Law of Attraction. Active forty-somethings and senior citizens. And so on.

Books should always have quite a few reasonable secondary markets. Make sure to mention them, even if they seem fairly small. The primary market should be doing the heavy lifting, yet secondary markets that bring in a couple dozen or a few hundred sales add up quickly.

2. WHAT MAKES MY BOOK SPECIAL?

How are you going to convince a publisher that your book is special? Different? Noteworthy? Reader-friendly?

It comes down to being clear about your book’s features and benefits. But the way to do that is in the context of seeing what’s already available in print—your competitors.

Determine the Existing Titles That Compete with Yours

It’s best to start by gathering the information already out there, so early on in your proposal, include a list of the top four to six books that in some way compete with yours. Don’t be scared to admit that similar books already exist. Editors expect that. In fact, if you can’t find any books that are similar to yours, editors will be leery of taking your book on. The assumption is, if it’s a viable market, someone would’ve already tapped into it. So find and name your main competitors.

Determine Your Book’s Features and Benefits

Here’s the tricky part. Now it’s on you to think through what features or benefits your book has that the competing books don’t (or at least the ones they haven’t done as effectively as you will). Here are a few possible ideas:

• Thoroughness: If your book is the most comprehensive, authoritative book on a certain topic, you’re in great shape.
• Timeliness: Think about all the Y2K books or 2012 Mayan prophecy books that flooded the shelves before a specific calendar date. Dealing with the context of your book—the place and time—can help persuade your audience.
• Access: If your book provides special access to something or someone people want to know more about, that’s a real value.
• Skills: Are you teaching something useful, like how to safely shed two pounds a week by doing yoga in your office chair at work? I wouldn’t know how to do that without reading your book (and perhaps getting more flexible—ouch!).
• Knowledge: Are you making readers more knowledgeable? Are you promising to raise their IQ? Despite having no evidence to support the idea that they raised the intelligence level of children, the Baby Einstein DVDs sold like crazy when they came out. Why? Every parent wanted their kids to be as smart as Albert Einstein.

3. WHO AM I TO WRITE THIS BOOK?

Even if you have an amazing idea and a dynamite book proposal, you might still lose the deal if you don’t present yourself as the single best candidate to do the job. You’ll need to discuss the following in your proposal:

Your Writing Background

If you have previous training in writing or some of your writing has been published somewhere—anywhere—awesome! That’s terrific information to include. Having something you wrote that’s been published says a few things:

• You can complete a written piece.
• You can edit/proofread it to a professional standard.
• You understand how to submit work to a publisher.
• You have worked successfully with a publisher in the past.
• You take yourself seriously as a writer.
• You’re building a writing career.

All of these seem like valuable things to communicate to a prospective publishing partner, no?

If you don’t have professional writing credentials, you might decide to take a bit of time to generate some. Considering how many print and online opportunities there are these days, it’s easier than ever to get something accepted for publication. Begin with local publication opportunities to start racking up credentials.

Your Education

Here’s where you say you went to Stanford (unless, like me, you didn’t!). If you went to a number of different colleges and universities, don’t give the entire laundry list. Give the last one and/or the most prominent. If your education stopped at high school or before, leave that out entirely. Now calm down—I’m not saying you’re a dud because you didn’t go to college. People like John D. Rockefeller, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Dave Thomas, and Henry Ford all did quite well without college, I realize. But it’s just too easy for an editor who’s never met you to have a negative reaction to your not having what’s considered to be the bare minimum of education. (If your book is about succeeding without a college degree, however, by all means, lead with that fact.)

A word of warning: Academic writers are trained to write stuffy, dense, reader-unfriendly works. So if you have advanced degrees, make sure that your entire proposal reads like you’re writing for actual people versus Socrates. Keep the massive, convoluted sentences and exotic vocabulary to a minimum. You’re writing for the twenty-first-century audience, not William Shakespeare.

Education, though, is more than just degree programs. Consider beefing up this area of your bio by taking classes at the local community college. You can find first-rate online classes through Writer’s Digest University (www.writersonlineworkshops.com), Stanford University Continuing Studies (continuingstudies.stanford.edu/courses/onlinewriters.php), and the Gotham Writers’ Workshop (www.writingclasses.com). If you go any of these routes, they’re worth mentioning.

Relevant Background Information

You might be inclined to add that you raise Yorkshire terriers or that you hold three Guinness Book of World Records records relating to bubble gum blowing. Good for you. Just don’t put it in your author bio because it’s not relevant (unless, of course, your book is on raising/hoarding dogs or bubble gum blowing, or if it’s a memoir on your life quest to get as many world records as humanly possible).

If you truly think something is interesting albeit a bit off the topic of your book, fine; just include no more than one of those factoids to give your life a little color. Such an addition might make you stand out from a slew of other authors’ proposals. It also might make sense if you don’t have much to say by way of education or writing background. You have to say something, right? I get that. Just don’t go overboard with hobbies, interests, and skills. This isn’t a job résumé or dating profile, after all.

If you choose to add a nice detail for flavor, see if it can also—on some level—suggest something that might help your cause as a writer. For instance, if you’re a freelance web designer, then you must be pretty creative and industrious. You also probably know how to use the Internet to promote yourself and your book. And if you say you get in at least three rounds of golf a week at the best country club in San Jose (Silicon Valley), it’s reasonable to assume you might have an in with high-tech innovators and dot-com entrepreneurs. If you’re writing a book about the dot-com bubble bursting, then this is crucial information to share.

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Looking for more ways to boost your proposal-writing skills and increase your chances of publication? The Weekend Book Proposal is jam-packed with proven strategies, sample queries and proposals, interviews with publishing experts, and “Hit the Gas” tips for speeding up the proposal process. Whether you’re proposing a nonfiction book, memoir, anthology, textbook, or novel, you’ll learn how to succeed and prosper as a writer—and sell your books before you’ve even written them!

Rachel Randall is the managing editor of Writer’s Digest Books.

Today he shares a somewhat unconventional decision to publish four—yes, four—books in less than a year. Here he is:

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This is the story of how I decided to publish four novels in six months. It begins with a general principle, which is that writing in any form—and certainly storytelling—is a means of communication. I have never subscribed to the belief that writers write solely for themselves.

Even Emily Dickenson, so reclusive that she rarely left her room, sent poems off to be published (although only a dozen or so appeared in print during her lifetime). This proves to me that she must have imagined a reader out there somewhere on the other side of the window for the 1,800 unpublished poems that she also wrote. Shyness couldn’t stop her voice from crying out through the tip of her pen. She wanted to be heard.

It is the same for all who write successfully, I think. (By success, I mean creating what we set out to create, not necessarily raking in the bucks.) We deeply desire to give voice to something within us, and we want someone out there to read our stories. How do we accomplish these twin goals?

As anyone knows who’s attempted to write, while stories still reside solely in our heads, they contain a kind of perfection that we rarely manage to preserve when we attempt to express them in print. And it’s the same with our efforts to bring them out into the light of day. In the perfect world, we can write whatever we want whenever we want to write it, and readers yearn for every word we produce. In the real world, we operate with constraints and may never get discovered.

As a novelist, I think it pays to be aware of the three aspects of the storyteller’s endeavor. First, every story begins with something that interests the author. Second, if storytelling is a form of communication, we must take account of the reader. Finally, an increasingly disrupted marketplace challenges us to find our audience — or, more to the point, to induce them to find us.

Inspiration

Sometimes I feel as if I have a new story idea every day. These stories might float up to me unbidden while I’m driving in the car or dozing off on the couch. But most of the time something instigates them. It could be an item in the news or another work of art or an experience I had. I’ll think, “That would make a great story,” and then I’ll mull over how I might go about telling it.

And then, most of the time, I don’t write that story. I could plead limitations of time — life intervening or some other writing project currently claiming my efforts — but the real reason most of these stories don’t happen is that they’re not ripe. Their day may come, but not yet. Some story ideas marinate this way for years.

Once in a while, however, a story idea comes along that I personally find so compelling I can’t get it out of my head. So it was with my new series, Bomb Squad NYC

Five years ago, my wife, my daughter and I left the New York area for the Brandywine Valley outside Wilmington, Delaware, not far from Philadelphia. We left, but we didn’t leave with both feet, as we decided to buy a smaller house and throw in for an apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, which we visit with some regularity.

We love going to the theater in New York, seeing independent films, window shopping, and the whole foodie scene. Admittedly, we’re pretty spoiled, although the apartment is a petite one-bedroom, and when we’re all in town my daughter sleeps on a pull-out couch.

To the occasional visitor, New York must appear to be an overwhelming agglomeration, but it’s really a collection of distinct neighborhoods, each with its own personality and its quirks. The West Village has become known for its restaurants and access to the Hudson River park, but one of its less remarked-upon features resides in a pair of nondescript garages at the rear of the local police precinct.

When we walked past those closed garage doors we noticed painted shields upon them indicating the headquarters of the NYPD Bomb Squad. One summer evening, as we returned from dinner, we found the doors open wide with a number of cops (all detectives, I’ve since learned) hanging out with a dog in front of the response trucks. We had a nice chat, and they showed us the robots they use. I learned that this wasn’t any old bomb squad, it was the Bomb Squad — the one that strives to keep all of the city safe from explosive devices.

As we walked away from the garage that night, heading for our apartment, it hit me: These guys deserve their own series. Not, I hasten to add, because they’re heroes — although they are. But because, from my perspective as a novelist, their existence carries with it a motherlode of storytelling material that has largely remained untapped.

Lots of bombs go off in thrillers and other novels, of course, but the bomb guys typically get only subplots, if any acknowledgment at all. Few novelists have attempted to crawl inside their heads. I wanted to explore not only what these guys do—which can be highly technical—but how they think, the challenges they face, how they experience life.

For many months I couldn’t get the NYPD Bomb Squad out of my head (news flash: I still can’t!), and the more I thought about it, the more compelling the material looked to me. I decided to pursue the subject with all the vigor I could bring to it.

Creation

I began this series the only way a writer can ever begin anything: with an interest in the subject matter. But then, if writing is primarily a means of communication, how would I connect to the reader? It soon occurred to me that these novels should take the form of thrillers.

The ticking time bomb is the essence of suspense. (Remember Alfred Hitchcock’s explanation: “Four people are sitting around a table talking about baseball or whatever you like. Five minutes of it. Very dull. Suddenly, a bomb goes off. Blows the people to smithereens. What does the audience have? Ten seconds of shock. Now take the same scene and tell the audience there is a bomb under that table and it will go off in five minutes. The whole emotion of the audience is totally different … Now the conversation about baseball becomes very vital. Because they’re saying to you, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Stop talking about baseball. There’s a bomb under there.’”) But it needn’t be an actual time bomb. In some sense any bomb that has not yet detonated is a time bomb. As Hitchcock suggested, the fact that a bomb might soon go off at any moment engages the audience’s attention. Therefore, I concluded, these books called for the thriller genre.

With my novels roughly using the storytelling conventions of thrillers, and with Mark looking over my shoulder, I set about plotting and writing the first book, A Danger to Himself and Others

The more I learned about the real world and about my characters, the more ideas I had for other stories and plot points. Using an ensemble cast, I could see a whole series stretching before me. I’d write two more, however, before rushing into print, because a final consideration remained: How best to bring this series to the public.

Publishing

We all know that book publishing faces forces of massive disruption. Online sales … ebooks … the power of Amazon … publishers consolidating … bookstores closing … the rise of indie publishing … All of these factors can be summed up thusly: It’s easier to get your work out there than ever before, but harder than ever before for a given work to get noticed.

Depending upon personality, one might take the changing landscape as an exciting challenge or a soul-crushing obstacle. I look at it this way: A writer’s gotta write and—eventually—a writer’s gotta publish. It’s just what we do.

In that context, it’s worth noting that we’ve sort of been here before. Mark Twain is reputed to have said (he probably didn’t really say it, but never mind), “History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.” When it comes to publishing, ebooks are relatively new, but disruptive technology isn’t.

Perhaps one can hark back to what the monks thought of Gutenberg’s printing press, but I have something much more contemporary in mind. The publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin, among others, has observed

Without rehashing the entire history of mass market paperback publishing, let’s acknowledge three important elements that impacted the market then and are doing so again: (1) new means of distribution; (2) discount pricing; and (3) binge consumption.

First, neither the distributors of mass market paperbacks nor those of ebooks were content to distribute through old channels. In both instances they realized that new customers could be found for books outside the bookstore. In the case of mass market, that meant newsstands, drugstores, and grocery stores. In the case of ebooks, it meant cyberspace.

Second, technological advances allowed both of these media to set price points well below the price of a hardcover. In fact, the sweet spots of original mass market and current ebook pricing share a ratio. They both correlate closely to approximately 10 or 15 percent of the price of a hardcover book.

Third, as prices drop and novels become more accessible, the average reader can consume with more intensity.

It’s interesting to see all of the press lately about “binge” watching of television series, because binge consumption of genre fiction has been around since the advent of so-called dime novels and continued through the introduction of mass market paperbacks. I distinctly recall my wife discovering mystery writer John D. MacDonald in the ’80s and almost immediately purchasing every Travis McGee mass market paperback she could find. (In those days she had to comb multiple bookstores.) She wouldn’t have behaved the same way for books priced ten times higher.

But many authors who made a name for themselves via mass market publishing encouraged binge reading from the early days. Consider that MacDonald published four Travis McGee novels in 1964 alone. Ed McBain, whose 87^th Precinct series is something of a model for my own, published 54 of those books in 50 years, but 13 in the first five.

Yet by the standards of a few other novelists, those guys were slackers. Louis L’Amour, the legendary writer of westerns, published 100 novels in 37 years. The great science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov published 506 books in 32 years. When I was at Doubleday, just managing Isaac was nearly a full-time job for one of my colleagues.

To take another example, romance author Nora Roberts has published more than 200 books in 31 years and is still going strong. The British mystery author John Creasey, writing under several different pseudonyms, published 600 novels in 41 years.

And in a career spanning 75 years, Barbara Cartland, the mother of all romance writers, published 722 novels. Think of it. That’s almost ten novels a year. In 1983 she published 23 novels!

Does that sound like madness? In a sense, of course it is. But my subject today isn’t what kind of mind it requires to be so so! so!! prolific. It is simply to say that this stream of material made great business sense in the mass-market-paperback age, and it makes great business sense at the dawn of the ebook age.

All of the authors mentioned above wrote genre fiction, and all of them wrote at least a few series. That’s not a coincidence.

Reading novels is an investment not so much of money but of time. Through their buying habits genre readers have told us that they’re more inclined to purchase the books in a series that’s well established. (If the series is working, sales build over time.) But these days, when so many things compete for an audience’s attention, how many opportunities does an author get to establish that series? The answer is: not many.

The triumph of mass market houses in the last century, combined with the rise of mall bookstores and superstore chains, led to the mass marketization of hardcover fiction, whereby authors like Sue Grafton, Lee Child, and John Grisham—to name but a few—could make their names with a single book and subsequently release one title a year to great fanfare.

But if ebooks are the new mass market paperbacks—and I think they are—we’re in a time when newer writers will have to resurrect the old mass market approach to establishing their brand. It isn’t easy, and I won’t be catching up to John Creasey anytime soon. But four books in six months makes a start.

Joe Ponzio on Going from Blog to Book: F Wall Street

Although Joe Ponzio started his blog to draw platform to the book he was planning to write (not necessarily blog), like many blog-to-book success stories he feels “ the book and the blog go hand-in-hand.” In the case of Fwallstreet.com, both the blog and the subsequent book, F Wall Street, Joe Ponzio’s No-Nonsense Approach to Value Investing for the Rest of Us, focus on explaining common sense, long-term value investing in plain English.

“Readers understand one better if they also read the other,” says Ponzio.  “Both have separate content, but there is a small amount of duplication. I’d say that 90 percent of the website is completely new, original content, which is crucial because readers come back to your site looking for more answers, more explanations, and those tidbits that your editor cut out but that you felt were important.”

Adams Media released F Wall Street in June 2009.

1.     Why did you begin blogging?

I launched FWallStreet.com in June of 2007 to accompany the book. I had written a majority of the book at that point, though I didn’t yet have a publisher, and wanted to have an online resource for people to visit and host discussions after reading the book.

I didn’t plan on advertising the website or letting the world know it was out there until the book was published. Still, the website took off. By the end of 2007, just six months after its initial launch, FWallStreet.com had more than one million hits.

2.     How did you choose your topic?

The book actually started as a “how-to” guide for my children, then three and soon-to-be-born. It was a simple, 80-page manual on how to think about investing for the long-term and how to evaluate companies and stocks.

I chose investing because that’s what I do for a living. It’s what I’m passionate about. And there is so much bad information out there that only a small percentage of the population ever hear about, learn about, and stick with value investing. I wanted to make sure that my children would be in that select group if I wasn’t around to teach them personally.

3.     What, if any, market research did you do before beginning your blog?

None. I didn’t think that hard about it when I started, and I figured my blog would be lost in the sea of constantly-updated, keyword-rich, go-go-go stock market blogs. Readers ended up visiting FWallStreet.com, became curious by the design, and stayed for the content. And…they told their friends about it! Most of my early visitors did not come from link exchanges or advertising (I did none) but from emails from other visitors. People would see FWallStreet.com, email it to a friend, and voila!―another visitor.

One thing I learned over time is that content truly is king. If you produce good content, people will want to come and read it. The only way to produce good content is to blog about something you love.

My advice to aspiring bloggers: Stick with topics you truly know and about which you are passionate, and catch the visitors right away with a good design. Content is king, but you have to present it (via a solid design) in a way that makes them want to meet the king.

4.     Did you think you were writing a book, did you plan on blogging a book, or were you simply blogging on your topic? (In retrospect, would doing one or the other have made it easier to later write your book?)

I knew I was writing a book. Rather, I had written a book and knew that the blog was a key part of supporting the book if it were to get picked up by a publisher.

In retrospect, I would have done things the exact same way. I would have written the book (or a majority of it) and then

Tempted by Fame and Fortune

There are lots of distractions on the internet on any given day. This week, I’ve been distracted by a couple writing competitions

$5000/month for six months.

The folks who make Sam-e a natural mood enhancer are looking for a Good Mood Blogger. It’s a promotional thing, of course, designed to get the maximum number of people to visit their website. You must apply, then get your friends to go and vote for you. The top 20 will then be judged by their writing, again with public voting, and the top person is offered a six month run blogging.

250-500 words per day, five days a week, $5000/month for six months. $30,000 is more than many writers make in a year! Hard position to get because you must harness your social network to get the votes. And no guarantee that the best qualified WRITER gets the gig, just the most popular, fairly good writer. Great promo idea, not so great for writers to apply for. If you want to, though, hurry: It closes October 23.

Prestige and $200/week for 13 weeks.

Or, if you prefer, go for the Washington Post’s promo campaign, and become America’s Next Great Pundit. That’s right, if politics is your thing, here’s your “reality show,” newspaper version.

You get only 400 words to impress the editorial staff at the Washington Post. This time, the writing comes first as the Post staff chooses the top 10 entries. Then, there is a three-week test of skills needed to succeed as a pundit today, including working to deadline, holding your own on video, and field questions from Post readers. (Clearly – any children’s book author could do this! Consider our deadlines; the need for book trailers today; fielding questions from kids at a school visit. We’d all be great at this!) Contest entry due by October 21.

The prize is a 13-week column, paid at $200/column. The real prize, of course, if the fame. Heck, you’d probably get a book deal out of it, if you played it right.

Tempting?

Of course. My husband hopefully asked, “Does the Good Mood Blogger have to be in a good mood all the time?”

Well, the regular income would certainly help that vacillating mood.

About the Post gig, DH asked, “Are you sure you’d want to be on video?”

A cameo, I could do; thinking-on-my-feet debating would be unthinkable. Literally.

All of which brings me back to why do I write and what are my writing goals? Fame? Would I want to be the next Pundit (Hindi word for a learned man)? Would I want to be the Good Mood Blogger so I could encourage others to live a happier life, or would I just be doing it for the money?

Why do you write? Do things like this tempt you? Fame? Fortune?

Related posts:

1. Appreciation

What are Your Writing Goals?

What are you writing goals? Have they changed?

I know that one of my early writing goals was to write a great read-aloud picture book. And a second goal was to write a middle grade fantasy. Those are still my goals.

Yet, I’m working on a middle grade, character-driven (definitely NOT a fantasy) novel.

Abandoned or Just Changed Goals

Have my goals developed and changed with time? Or have I abandoned my old goals, betrayed them, so to speak?

I don’t know.

Picture books. Since I started thinking about this, I’ve gone back to the picture books I have in progress and evaluated: could this one be a great read-aloud? If not, is it one that is high priority for me to work on? Why or why not?

I’ve read the WIPs aloud. Have I tried to use language that flows, have I anticipated places where kids can join in a refrain? What are my goals as I work on picture books.

Novels. I’ve also pulled out old drafts of novels. Hey, they read pretty well after sitting a long time. So, what would it take for this fantasy mss to be salable? Is this story a priority?

I’ll finish the novel revision I’m doing now. But I’m evaluating and prioritizing my next efforts. Have my goals changed? Or do I need to return to abandoned goals?

What about you?

Related posts:

1. Brainstorming a New Year of Writing Topics
2. 5 Writing Tasks for Off Days
3. Fearless Writing #1