The Art of the Book Proposal: Demystifying the Perfect Nonfiction Pitch

It’s no wonder writers are confused about book proposals—they’re essentially the Swiss army knives of documents. Part sales pitch, part outline, part market analysis, part resume, part writing showcase, they’re extremely hardworking for an unassuming PDF or Word doc. This attempt to secure an entire toolkit for book survival into a compact, pocket-sized, versatile instrument feels exhausting. Almost impossible. Particularly for the author tasked with writing one.

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But there’s hope. If we can demystify the aim of a proposal and how they’re created, they become a tool that works for the writer, rather than a feat of engineering. A well-crafted proposal becomes a roadmap authors can utilize as an outreach checklist when it comes time to market the book, an outline touchpoint for the trajectory of where to take your chapters, and a helpful distillation of who exactly your reader is.

Nearly all nonfiction books are sold on proposal (the opposite is true for fiction). Even when an author has written the entire book, I still ask that they write a proposal simply because it’s the form publishers are most accustomed to, and it allows for a certain level of editorial flexibility when the editors have input about how to execute your concept (they always have input). The proposal also includes sales and positioning components publishers use as deciding factors when weighing whether or not to acquire the book.

Ideally an author will have a proposal written prior to querying an agent (though the submission requirements differ across agencies so make sure to check their websites before sending along an entire proposal). But if you’re not able to create an entire proposal, I would recommend at least having a detailed plan ready to send if an agent requests additional material.

But, what is a proposal for, really?

Yes, the goal is to sell your book, but the purpose of the endeavor is key to making the process more interesting and less daunting. The reason for the very particular form a proposal takes is to convey both the depth and breadth of your idea.

The breadth is found in your overview and your chapter summaries, which give an editor an idea of the big picture and arc of the book. And before you tell me your book doesn’t have an arc, I would argue that the purpose of the proposal is to test your idea in this way.

All books should have arcs, and if yours doesn’t then it’s not ready for the big leagues. The arc is the case for your idea living as a book rather than in an article or a Substack. Even cookbooks have a journey, and your job in the proposal is to show there is a good reason you need 250 pages of ink for someone to properly travel along—from beginning, middle, and end—on the journey you’re proposing we all take.

If the majority of sales is education and imagination, clearly explaining your concept and helping the editor who is considering it to imagine how the entire book would sound, feel and work is the mark of a successful proposal that will sail through an acquisitions meeting at the publishing house with the winds of enthusiasm at its back. Essentially, after reading your proposal an editor should feel like they read the book, even though they haven’t.

The depth lies in your sample chapters. This is where you show off the detail and writing prowess you’ll bring to the project. The writing should be rich and immersive. You only have a small space to share your writing style, so it should be immediately apparent.

While the proposal should impress with your credentials, it must also be experiential. How will it feel when the reader cracks open the book? The editor should be involved enough from the first sentence to put down other pressing work and fully engage with your unique voice and perspective, yet bereft when they realize there are no more chapters because you’ve left them wanting more. You’ve given them a short yet satisfying preview of what is to come.

Now, if you look up “how to write a book proposal online,” you’ll likely find a list of components which make up most proposals, which can be helpful. You’ll learn to format like creating a resume—the ingredients for baking a basic cake. And knowing the rules is important, but knowing how to embrace proposal creation as a service to your future book, a testing ground for the validity of your idea, and an invitation for imagining how your book will live in the world, makes it a far more exciting prospect.

In my next column I’ll go over each part of a proposal and how to tackle these components, but if you’re someone who wants to get started now and doesn’t know what the next step is, I’ll leave you with a formula my colleague Margaret and I started using a long time ago when writers needed a pre-proposal writing system for fleshing out ideas. At first, we used it primarily for prescriptive nonfiction but soon found it worked for narrative as well. Here you go:

Try it. And if you do, congratulations are in order. You just got started on your book proposal.

See, it wasn’t that hard after all!