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.

The Fifth Season

This afternoon I signed a book contract with Texas Tech University Press for my second book, The Fifth Season: A Daughter-in-Law’s Memoir of Caregiving. The book will be published in fall 2013. (Subject to change, of course.)

Many of you know that I shared a household with my mother-in-law, Jeanne, for seven years and became her primary caregiver near the end of that time. And those of you who knew Jeanne also knew I was writing my way through the last year of her life. I completed the manuscript, which was also my MFA thesis, last year and began approaching publishers this past fall. The Fifth Season tells about my relationship with Jeanne, with a special focus on caregiving, hospice, and end-of-life issues.

The book project was accepted on what’s called an “advance contract,” meaning there’s still some writing to be done but the publisher likes the project enough to give me a contract in advance, complete with a deadline and word-count limit. Those of you who know how university press peer review works may be interested to hear that the contract was granted on the basis of just one peer review, and the second peer review (by a medical expert) will be conducted this summer, once the manuscript is complete. I have a deadline of June 1 and a cap of seven thousand more words if I need them, along with specific editorial guidance to fill out the manuscript in several areas. I’ve always enjoyed revision, and I’m looking forward to the process. 

Nearing Solstice

Think back to June and those long days nearing solstice. Think back further to the longer days of childhood. Read this essay with your first cup of morning warmth, when the world still sleeps and you are alone with your longings. 


I'll meet you there.

My Graduate Reading

As part of my MFA graduation week, I read from my thesis (which is also my second book), The Fifth Season: A Daughter-in-Law's Memoir of Caregiving. 


Thanks to my friend John Engler for recording the reading, which is about thirteen minutes long.

Kyoko Mori says this about Through the Veil

Through the Veil didn't win the Oregon Book Award, but the judge, Kyoko Mori, wrote a lovely review of my book. Mori is the author of the memoir Yarn: Remembering the Way Home (2009). She has also published a book of essays, a memoir, and three novels. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Missouri Review, Harvard Review and elsewhere. Here's what she says about Through the Veil.

In writing about the years she lived in the Middle East, Lisa Ohlen Harris displays her skills as a trained ethnographic observer and as a memoirist. In one single sentence, she can present facts, evoke a sense of irony, build suspense, and communicate the absurdity of the situation: “Carrying that symbol of peace [an olivewood dove from an evangelical Christian bookstore in Jerusalem] wrapped in tissue paper, I came out of the shop and stepped off the curb to avoid an Israeli soldier with machine gun ammunition draped across his chest, like the banner of a beauty queen.” Her portraits of the women she encountered are respectful, empathetic, and yet unflinching. She does not hide her own confusion when a woman who seemed to befriend her seemed puzzlingly distant—only to write to her years later about how her departure had broken her heart. Some things will always remain a mystery, like the blue eyes of the veiled women who surrounded her in a market place in Damascus. The book leaves these mysteries intact while shedding light on all it can. In addition to the compelling portraits it offers, the book’s ultimate strength is in its ability to imagine and understand how the American narrator might have come across to the people she encountered.

Through the Veil is now available at independent booksellers throughout Oregon, or you can order online. There's a Kindle version available now, too!

Manzanita Author Tour

This past weekend Todd and I traveled to Manzanita, on the northern Oregon coast, as part of the Oregon Book Awards tour. I arrived early at the Hoffman Center in Manzanita and met Susan Denning, the Literary Arts program director. We shook hands, then hugged—how could I do anything but embrace this woman whose name I will forever associate with the best email I received all year? My friends Lynn and Colleen from my Newberg writing group arrived—familiar faces from home! I spotted one of the other authors, K.B. Hixon, who introduced himself as Ken and pulled his wife Sandy over to meet me, too. I shook hands with the third reader, Emily Chenoweth, just before we took the stage together, and I was first to read.

The spotlights were bright and hot (just like my theater days in college—I’d forgotten!), so I scanned the room and smiled and pretended to make eye contact as I gazed blindly out toward the house in between paragraphs. I was surprised how easily I was able to look up from the page as I read; these words and cadences came from my heart when I wrote them five years ago, and I have many phrases memorized simply because they are mine. Ken read after me, a wonderfully fragmented excerpt from his novel, A Painter’s Life, which is constructed like a scrapbook, like the linguistic equivalent of an artist’s studio, like stepping for a moment into the workings of a painter’s mind. Oh—and Ken's book is really, really funny.

And then Emily Chenoweth got up to read. Emily, who not long before the reading was carrying her infant daughter in a front carrier, read a chapter from her novel about a dying woman and her young daughter, Hello, Goodbye. The mother, grown frail from cancer, wonders how she’d ever hated her wide thighs that bore her up so faithfully, how she had neglected to worship her own strong body while she had it. All I could think as I listened was, I must read this book.

Local and visiting writers were then invited for an open mic. Lynn read—wonderful stuff—three poems I knew and one I didn’t. Lynn slipped out without hearing what I heard during conversations after the event: Who was that visiting poet? I hope she comes back. I really enjoyed her reading—does anyone know who she is? I half expected to find Lynn’s glass slipper outside the Hoffman Center when we left at the end of the evening to walk a few blocks to a local writer’s home for a glass of wine and a very relaxed private reception.

I have to tell you that I love Susan, Ken, and Emily. I love them. They’re all so down to earth, so honest, so unpretentious. I want Ken and Emily to win the Oregon Book Award, both for the quality of their writing and for who they are. They can’t both win, because they’re up for the same fiction prize, but there was no sense of competition between them, only camaraderie. What a privilege to read together, to relax and visit and enjoy one another.

The next morning after a walk on the beach, Todd and I checked out of the hotel and joined the others for breakfast together at a local café. Susan held up her camera and interviewed Ken, Emily, and me. I really need to work on keeping my eyes open while I’m talking!

This weekend I heard some great writing by wonderful people. I’m so grateful for the writing community I’m a part of, both here in Newberg and in the state of Oregon. Thank you, Oregon Literary Arts!