Revision: Getting Started

Two weeks ago I signed an advance contract for The Fifth Season: A Daughter-in-Law’s Memoir of Caregiving. The completed manuscript is due June 1, and even though my ESL classes aren’t over till the end of April, that still gives me all of May for writing. But what if something comes up in May and I don’t have the time after all? What if the looming deadline makes me so nervous I can’t write? I must begin revisions soon, I told myself two weeks ago. I stared at the manuscript on my desk. And then I went shopping.

A week ago I bought lamps for my writing study (a 6’ x 12’ dark hole in our basement). I put up a wall hanging to soften the space and control the echo. I stared at my manuscript. I bought a printer to replace the one that died immediately after printing out my advance contract. I stared some more. I sprang forward. Brewed coffee. Cranked the space heater, lifted the cover page off my manuscript, turned past the table of contents, and started to read the first chapter.

Three single-spaced pages of editorial feedback guide my revision. This is not about adding an extra twenty-page chapter or revamping the conclusion, but rather adding a sentence here, a paragraph there, a new strand about my family of origin to be woven throughout these two hundred pages.

I picked up my purple pen and began to scribble in the margins. How I can make the chronology more clear? Establish a sense of place that carries consistently through the manuscript? A note here, an edit there. Forty pages later the simplest areas needing clarification have been addressed. There’s plenty of work yet ahead, and I’m already hungry for the long stretches of time I won’t have available until May, but I’m writing. And I’m realizing some things.

On the days when I shopped and decorated my study and stared at the manuscript, my mind and heart were also at work. I was thinking back to the difficult years of caregiving, the hours and days in emergency room hallways, my mother-in-law’s lips turning blue when she wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I remember feeling stressed and anxious, as caregivers so often do. In the manuscript I am absolutely forthright about how difficult everything was. But now, three years after my mother-in-law’s death, I remember more than just the hardships. I also remember how generous Jeanne was, how intimately she allowed me to know her, mind and body both. And I have a perspective now I didn’t have as I furiously typed the hospice chapter of this manuscript in real time, sitting at her bedside while she slept a morphine sleep. I have a perspective now I didn’t have when I submitted this manuscript a year ago as my Master’s thesis. I can’t say at this point how the book may change in small ways, how my voice may even be changed in the revisions here and there, but I know when I submit the final revised manuscript to my press on June 1, The Fifth Season will be a better book. And maybe the book’s author will be a better person.

Do I Need a Book Proposal? (Part 2)

In my last post, I promised to give an overview of the elements in a book proposal. Different sources list variations on what should be included, but here’s a basic outline.

• Overview and Audience
• Marketing Plan
• Competing Titles
• About the Author
• Table of Contents (annotated)
• Synopsis
• Sample Chapter

Overview and Audience 
(sometimes separated out into two sections)

Here’s where you tell what the book is about, what felt needs it meets, who will read it. In my proposal for The Fifth Season: A Daughter-in-Law’s Memoir of Caregiving, I use this first section to reenact a conversation with my friend Karen, whose mother was recovering after another in a long sequence of emergency hospitalizations due to lung disease. I spoke with Karen of my mother-in-law’s death under hospice care in our home and how relieved I felt to see the end to Jeanne’s misery and invasive treatments and false hopes. I urged Karen not to make the same mistakes Jeanne and I had, and we discussed how Karen could recognize the signs and empower her mother to escape painful treatments when she neared the end of life.

“Hurry up and write your book,” Karen said. “There are a whole bunch of us who need this—and we need to know we’re not alone.”

My Overview and Audience section goes on to discuss the large demographic involved in caregiving, the lack of guidance out there for making compassionate medical decisions as our loved ones near end-of-life, and the pressures and loneliness a caregiver experiences. I assert that my memoir offers gentle guidance and honest fellowship, something the “how-to” books don’t provide.

Marketing Plan

This one can be hairy and scary, especially for those of us doing literary writing. In my initial proposal draft, I wrote my marketing plan desperately, listing all the small and kind of lame things I could do to sell the book—like continuing to publish my work in literary journals, where I would mention the book in my bio. I could put up an ad on my blog. Oh, and I have a few editor friends who might be willing to review the book.  When my snarky friend Gretchen read my draft of the marketing plan, she suggested, “Maybe you should also promise to wash and wax the agent’s car. Daily.” I really did sound desperate in that first draft.

I’d read somewhere that for literary publishing you can just omit the marketing section, so I tried that the next time I had a request for the proposal. Not three minutes after I pressed send, I had a reply email asking why the marketing section was missing. In the space of one weekend, I reworked the section, adding some very ambitious (and somewhat less lame) possibilities. It helped when I renamed the section “promotion” which sounds softer to me. Long story short, I now have a promotion section that feels really solid, though modest, to me. I now know how to sell the book. And believe me, as much as you might wish you could just go back into your writer’s den and just write after your book is published, that’s not really what you want. You want people to read your book. You want it to stay in print. You might even want a royalty check now and then, so you can keep yourself in coffee.

Competing Titles

This section is made up of several titles and authors of recent books similar to yours (published in the last year or two). Include a 1-2 sentence summary of each title and then another 1-2 sentences on what your book offers that this particular competing title does not.

I started out at a Barnes & Noble, where to my surprise, I found that memoir is shelved with biography and none of the books on the medical and aging shelves are at all personal in content. I did lots of Internet research and assembled a list of titles, which grew over time. What I couldn’t get via library loan, I purchased.

As new books are published in your subject area, review them and get them onto your competing titles list. I even included one yet-to-be published memoir with my competing titles (my information came from an advance review). Knowing the competition demonstrates that you’re an expert in your subject area.

After I’d read some recent memoirs of caregiving, I changed Competing Titles to Complementary Titles, because I realized how different my book is from what’s already out there—the books dealing with similar material can easily be read alongside mine, not instead of. This section, along with the marketing/promotion section, provides a huge opportunity to give the publisher strong reasons to choose your book. Don’t shirk from this one. And don’t guess based on the Amazon.com sell copy of the book. I guessed on one title in my initial proposal, and when I actually read the book some months later, I realized that the sell copy was misleading and the book really didn’t do what the copy said it would. It happens that one of the publishers on my list (the one that asked for the missing marketing section) had published this very book. I was so relieved I’d amended that book’s summary before sending the proposal. I already looked like enough of a flake not having a complete proposal. Don’t be lazy! You’ve already written a book! You can write the book proposal.

About the Author

Here's where you put your bio. Mine is only about half a page, double spaced, listing my background and publishing credits.


Table of Contents (annotated) 

I think this is the coolest part of the proposal. Your annotated Table of Contents (TOC) is a one- or two-sentence summary of each chapter in the book, and although it is hard to distill your wonderful nuanced and layered writing down to a brief summary, once you do it’s really exciting to read through basically the entire jist of the book in two or three pages. And you can use this annotated TOC to write the last piece, your synopsis.

Synopsis 

The synopsis is a very tight summary of the entire book, distilled down to one to two pages of single-spaced text. My first step was to use the descriptive text from my annotated TOC as a rough draft for the synopsis and to edit from there, adding a zingy line of dialog here and a one-word transition there. My synopsis reads a lot like one of those LOST season summaries: Six Years of LOST Summarized in eight minutes and fifteen seconds.

Sample Chapter

If you’re writing the proposal before you’ve finished your full manuscript, this is the chapter you’ve written to demonstrate your writing chops. In my case, I had a completed manuscript and twenty-some chapters to choose from. Agents and editors often want to see the first or first three chapters, and if that’s what they asked for, that’s what I included. But for Texas Tech University Press, the publisher who bought the book, I included the chapter with a strongest sense of place in Fort Worth, Texas. You can tailor the proposal in small ways for each agent or publisher.

Super helpful books to beg, borrow, or buy

Internet resources just won’t guide you through the full proposal-writing process. I was able to write a good query letter after doing Internet research, but for the proposal writing I purchased two books. Both are geared toward commercial publishing/prescriptive nonfiction, but so long as you don't let yourself off the hook because our work is "literary," you’ll find these books super helpful.

How to Write a Book Proposal by Michael Larsen

Larsen's book has chapters on each component of the proposal, and one of his examples is a memoir (with a commercial angle, but it's still very helpful).

Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction and Get it Published by Susan Rabiner

After reading Rabiner's book, I no longer resented the book proposal: I became a huge fan. I even gave a talk at a conference last spring about how writing a proposal helps an author understand her book so much better. If an editor can understand your passion and key focus in 200 words, why would you prefer that he read all 50,000? The proposal can prime the agent/editor/reader to come to the reading with your presuppositions along with his own.

In Summary
I landed my first book contract without having written a full proposal. In retrospect, I wish I’d written a proposal for Through the Veil. With a proposal I would have known what to do once the book was published—just turn to the Marketing section and start in on the list! 

Now I’m busy with revisions for The Fifth Season, but once I turn in the manuscript on June 1, I’ll have about a year before the book is in print. I’ll be able to work through my publicity/marketing section as a checklist without taking away too much energy from my current writing project. I can’t imagine writing another book and not writing a proposal. I wouldn’t want to cheat myself (and my press!) of understanding the book and its audience and purpose. I might even venture to write the next proposal before the manuscript is complete!

You may have to drag yourself into proposal writing kicking and screaming, but it’s good medicine to think through the issues a proposal will force you to consider. Who knows, you might even find, as I did, that the process is energizing and fun!

Do I Need a Book Proposal? (Part 1 of 2)

I used to be the kind of writer who hated with the utmost hatred the idea of writing a book proposal. I may have even whined that my manuscripts should be judged on literary merit rather than marketing potential. I stubbornly refused to query agents or editors who required book proposals (which severely limited my prospects, by the way).

Then one day I got a boomerang response from an agent who said, “This project sounds poignant and timely. I’d like to read the proposal.”

That week, I wrote my book proposal. I saw the light, repented of my laziness, and accepted the book proposal into my heart. And now I am head over heels. I’m a zealous evangelist for the book proposal, and I am definitely trying to win converts.

Write a book proposal. You will learn so much about your own manuscript. You will influence prospective agents or publishers by sowing key themes in their minds before they even open your manuscript.

Imagine your dream agent or editor sitting at a desk piled high with dozens of manuscripts. What’s better, I ask you—an agent with all those towering dozens of manuscripts skimming yours for the good parts, or that same agent reading your few pages of compelling overview, where you have placed the strengths of the manuscript right there in plain sight?

Again, what’s better—an editor trying to remember what existing books might be similar to what it seems like yours is about and then guessing at the differences, or that editor reading through your tidy list of five competing titles with a very brief summary of each and comparison with your project? In your book proposal, you get to tell the editor exactly what makes your book unique, what makes it stand out in the market. 

What if, while writing the proposal, you realize that your book is not that different from a bunch of other stuff out there? Well, you can revise to make it stand out and increase your chances of seeing your work published. Reading competing titles can be fun and encouraging because you will see exactly how your work is different, and this will give you greater confidence, which of course will come through in your query and proposal. It’s good to know the competition—those authors will soon become your colleagues! 


I put in forty hours or more on this whole query- and proposal-writing process—and that was only for one book manuscript. What editor has that kind of time for each query in the slush pile?

Here’s my challenge to you—don’t be lazy about the proposal. Don’t whine. Open yourself up to the possibilities. Honest, the proposal writing can be fun!

Tomorrow I’ll post an overview of the elements in a book proposal and will recommend some great resources for writing a strong proposal.