​You’ll need to write somewhere between 8,000 and 15,000 words in total.  A non-fiction book proposal should include the following elements:

 

1. Overview: what is this book? 

About 1,500 words explaining what the book is, who it is for and why it must be read.  One way to see this is as a very extended book blurb (i.e. what is written on the cover of a finished book), or an absolute rave book review.

 

2. Author biography: why your book and not someone else’s?

Who you are, and why you are the ideal person to write this book. It might be your academic or business credentials or qualifications, your lived experience, or your media profile (on social or traditional media, public talks and so on). This should be written in the third person. 

 

3. List of comparable titles, and why yours is different.

You can work this into the overview or keep it as a separate section.

 

4. List of chapters with short summaries of each. 

A few paragraphs per chapter, explaining what you’ll say in this chapter, any particular case studies or other stories you might bring in. Each chapter summary should be a continuous narrative, not a series of bullet points. This is essentially the book’s skeleton, and when writing a book proposal it can be the best place to start.

 

5. Sample writing.

Ideally a whole chapter or two. It’s usually best to write the first chapter.

 

6. Practical stuff.

Word count (typically 70,000-100,000), whether you’ll include illustrations, and how long you think you might take to write the book. If you are an academic, you can include scholarly apparatus (bibliography, endnotes) but you need to demonstrate that your book will appeal to a general audience. That means avoiding academic prose and/or overly technical language.

 

You will also need a ‘selling’ title and subtitle, but those often emerge later on.

 

The paragraph below was written by a very senior publisher at Transworld (part of Penguin Random House). It’s a perfect, succinct explanation of what publishers look for in non-fiction:

 

“I look for a strong title, a coherent proposal, and at least one and preferably two, three or more sample chapters with an author biography that pinpoints exactly why a reader would trust the author and care what they have to say. Our reps and account managers may have 30 seconds or less to sell a book to retailers. That means that for a book to have a chance to succeed it needs a powerful one line pitch that clearly identifies subject and target market.”

​

In the age of Amazon it helps if you can also write a four-line pitch for your book, not including title and subtitle.  (Because browsers are shown roughly four lines of the retailer description on the product page before clicking ‘read more’.)  

​

Kate Barker

@Kate7Barker