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Crafting a Non-Fiction Book Proposal

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Carol Penn-Romine is a Tennessee expat living in Los Angeles with her husband, scifi/fantasy author Andrew Penn Romine and the four cats who own them. She is a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef and a tour guide specializing in culinary tours to Ireland and other destinations as requested. You can find her blog and published work at hungrypassport.com.

After years of writing countless magazine and newspaper articles, blog entries and portions of books, I’ve finally taken the plunge and begun a book of my own. The first step was crafting the proposal. Boo. Hiss. That’s not exactly how I wanted to spend my writing time, but it’s the only way most of us first-time book authors will ever get our books into print.

It’s been a learning process and a humbling one as well. Imagine how you’d feel if you were a strong, confident swimmer with many years of braving the ocean currents under your belt, only to be scooped up and tossed back into the kiddie pool by huge hands slipping water wings onto your suddenly tiny, unmuscled arms. I feel a bit like this, like I’m starting all over again. Yes it’s humbling, but it’s necessary.

And it has taught me a few things:

A book proposal is essentially a business plan. In it you spell out as specifically as possible what you want to do and how you plan to do it. My book is a collection of essays, each of which will stand alone, but all of which will mesh to form a larger narrative. In the section of the proposal where I present a thumbnail of each essay, what I’m doing is crafting an elevator pitch for each one, in addition to the elevator pitch for the book itself. Once I figured this out, those pitches became much easier to write.

Carefully select only what needs to go into the book, and resist the urge to throw in the kitchen sink, even if it’s a really cool kitchen sink. If you have something that’s good but that just doesn’t fit in the particular book you have in mind, don’t try to force it in there. Remember, this won’t be your only book. Keeping something good in reserve gives you valuable material to draw on for your next project and doesn’t dilute the one in front of you.

Show your personality, but be sure the prose is tight. Publishers already have way too much to read, so get your point across as succinctly as possible. If you’re relying on your folksy charm, hold it in reserve for later. Not that you want to use one voice in the proposal and then shift to another in the book, but you don’t want to use up good will of a publisher who is slogging through your precious prose.

Hotlink the articles and essays—including your previous publications—that you mention in your proposal. These days most proposals are sent to publishers electronically. Hotlinks allow them to quickly access what you’re referencing, whether it’s samples of your published work or something key to your proposal.

Gone are the days when publishers had generous marketing budgets to spend on their authors, especially on new ones. The more willing you are to get out there and promote your book, the more work you’ll save for them. So learn all you can about the segment of the market in which you’ll be competing and how you can help market the book, and detail this in your proposal. Also, if your prose would be perfect read aloud on the radio—and you’re willing to put your voice out there—be sure to mention this in the proposal.

Most important, take in all the advice you can get, even if you don’t use it all. Whether it comes from an agent, an editor or a trusted friend who is kind enough to beta read for you, you never know where a nugget of wisdom will come from, the very one that will help you craft the proposal you need to get your book off the ground.

You Can Earn a Living as a Writer

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I’m a writer. I’ve been at it for as long as I can remember. Although you probably don’t know me, I’ll bet that you’ve read some of my stuff.

Growing up in the suburban wastes of Kansas City in the 1970s, most kids I knew spent their free time playing softball on the schoolyard lot off Mission Road. Others went fishing down at the lakes between Manor Road and Meadow Lane. Me? That wasn’t my thing. On a hot summer day, I loved nothing more than to stretch out on the carpet of my living room floor near the air conditioning vent and scribble all over the pages of a Big Chief tablet with a Flair pen until my fingers went stiff. I wrote all kinds of junk. The earliest piece I can remember writing was a fake brochure for some kind of rocket ship / Chevy van hybrid. I was eight years old at the time. It was a bi-fold brochure with color illustrations. I was pretty proud of myself then. Still am.

Although much has changed over the decades – my writing skills have improved, I think – I still write commercial copy. During the daylight hours, I write about lawn mowers and deburring machines and satellite TV. As I said before, you’ve probably read some of my stuff. Planned a trip to Louisiana for Mardi Gras recently? You’ve read my work. Frequent a popular dating website? That’s me too. Spend any amount of time online researching orthodontists, equestrian supplies, building materials, self-storage facilities, or high fashion? I wrote some of that stuff.  I run my own little “content development” company. We’re writers and bloggers for hire. After hours, I write supernatural horror and science fiction. The commercial copy pays the bills, and that’s what this article is really all about.

Since I subscribe to a number of writer’s magazines, I get a lot of junk e-mail about books, DVDs, and seminars where you can quickly learn “how to make a six-figure income writing advertising copy.” Let me say – right here and now – that some of you can. Most cannot. Sure, if you can string together words and phrases and clauses with a fair grasp of sentence structure, punctuation, and grammar, you have a talent that can command a fair income – if you know what you’re doing.

In this age where text-speak has spread like Ebola from cell phones to term papers to casual conversation, many under the age of twenty-five appear to be incapable of putting a convincing argument for one thing over another to pen and paper (my personal opinion, not that of anyone else here at BookLifeNow). And since most marketing – whether in print or online – is driven by written content, there’s a great need for those who can write well. But you have to know the rules – those rules above words and phrases and clauses. Marketing copy is not written like fiction or journalistic articles. I won’t go into deep detail here, simply because there isn’t enough room to spell it all out in a single blog article.

But I’ll give you a peek. Here we go.

1. If you’re writing copy that sells window treatments, roofing supplies, invisible braces, air handling units, bug and tar remover, party supplies, liquid face lifts, or financial products, you have to first identify your audience. Ask yourself: WHO would want this? If you can come up with an answer, you’re well on your way to some compelling copy.

2. Always write to the business purposes at hand. Your client wants to convince the market that they need to pick up the phone or fill out a form or set up an appointment. What you write must gently nudge the readers toward acting on this suggestion.

3. Keep it interesting, engaging, and brief. Most people can read about 350 words (a single page from a paperback novel) in about a minute. They read whole pages because they’re invested in the characters and story. As a writer of commercial copy, you have none of that to your advantage. The average time a reader will spend on any page of content on a website is a whopping 33 seconds. Interesting, engaging, and brief, yeah?

4. Sell! If you’ve never sold anything in your life (cars, computer software, shoes, whatever) you may not have the experience needed to craft compelling sales copy. Selling is more than listing features, advantages, and benefits. It’s about creating an emotional connection between your reader and the product. In sales, we talk a lot about building commonalities, discovering needs, leveraging pain points, and overcoming objections. And it all works beautifully – with practice. Lots of practice.

5. And you must sell without selling. If this sounds like some twisted Kung Fu technique, you’re right. You must strike without being seen. Truly compelling copy leads the reader to believe that their needs are in direct alignment with product features, advantages, and benefits. You can almost see them nodding their heads in agreement as they ponder the words on the page.

6. Learn to write for robots. Pick up a book on the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Online, everything is driven by search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo!). Every piece you write for a website is going to be seeded with keywords and phrases and links. Why? Every search engine employs search bot software to scan every web page for its content and then adds that data to a searchable index. This is how the web works. If you’re writing a page about chocolate chip cookies, you’d better mention “chocolate chip cookies” a few times in the copy.

You can earn a living as a writer. Like many, I’ve had a number of cube farm jobs. Long ago, I decided that I was unsatisfied with corporate life and made a decision to bail. I spent years building a book of business for my content development company. I’m a full-time writer now. It’s a sweet gig but it has its drawbacks. When 5pm rolls around and you’ve been killing yourself to crank out 10,000 words for a plastic surgeon, it isn’t easy to switch gears and be creative. Somebody once said that the worst day job for a writer is as a writer. Some days, I fully agree.

Cheers!

Why You Should Love Fanfiction

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I know I’ll have “made it” as a writer when there’s fanfiction of my work.

For those of you who might be unaware, fanfiction is, well, exactly what it sounds like. Fiction produced by fans, relating to the thing they are a fan of. There’s fanfiction for books, movies, television series, anime, comics, the list goes on. Some of it is bad, some of it is good, some of it is even published. (For example Neil Gaiman’s A Study in Emerald is Cthulhu/Sherlock crossover fanfic, and I say that because well he said it first.) There has been endless e-ink spilled about fanfiction, either slamming the practice and mocking the practitioners, or rushing to its defense and calling it appreciative art in the highest form. And author responses vary along those same lines, from the enthusiastic to the litigious.

If you’re an author and thinking about openly slamming fanfic and hunting down fan writers, I suggest you think again.

Fanfic Is Awesome, Fanfic Writers Are Awesome

So, confession, I totally wrote fanfic in high school. (I know, let us all gasp and clutch our pearls.) In particular Harry Potter, but other fandoms as well. I was a huge fan, and I let that fannishness all hang out. I could go into a lot of details about fandom and my personal experiences, but I’ll go into the part that is relevant to authors: money.

As a result of being a huge turbo fan zomg, I bought books. Plural. I have Harry Potter in hardcover, paperback, and a set from England. I have the little supplement books, you know the ones, Quidditch Through the Ages, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Tales of Beadle the Bard. I’m the one there in line waiting for the book to come out at midnight, staying up all night to read it.

You know what other books I hunted down on their release dates? Recently, the Hunger Games series. The Curse Worker series. Everything by Neil Gaiman. Everything our own Robert Bennett puts out, on release date. Because why? Because fangirl.

And when I wasn’t buying these books, I was convincing others to buy them. I was buying copies and thrusting them into my friends’ hands, shouting, “Read this thing, it will consume you.” I have carefully lured many friends towards series and writers now they stand in those midnight book lines with me, wearing the licensed t-shirts.

Fan’s like this? We are not people you want to alienate.

I feel like this point should be fairly self-evident, but in case it isn’t: when someone is a fan and inspired by your work to create things within your world, that is usually not where it stops. Fans like this are usually involved in communities, and are usually quite evangelical about the work they are a fan of. And as a result, they help your bottom line.

Personally, I would think it would be quite humbling to have fans like that, to have inspired others to create something based on your world. Regardless of the result, that spark is something very special. But if you don’t feel that way, if you see fanfiction as something negative, if you are repulsed by the idea, well, I would suggest you be a little more pragmatic about things.

Okay Sometimes Fanfic Is Not Awesome

So it’s not all sunshine and roses. I’m not talking about the resulting product, the varied levels of writing ability, the romantic pairings that might break your brain, et cetera. I mean when fans cross the line, legally.

Another Hope. Russet Noon. Marion Zimmer Bradley v Jean Lamb. Just to name a few.

The first two are quite clear-cut: a fan wrote a work set in someone else’s universe, and then tried to sell it, violating US copyright law. The fan writers were sued, and the fandoms largely backed the creators, and justice was done. The third, however, is a little foggier.

From what I’m gathering, the response to MZB’s situation was to suggest that authors completely disengage from fans and to disallow fanfiction of their work. While I can appreciate the reasons behind this response, I feel it’s a little strong. MZB’s reaction is her own, and I believe she is one hundred and ten percent justified to feel how she felt, given the situation.

But I might caution other authors on the outside, like myself, to take a different lesson: Support fanfic, but for the love of God, don’t read it.

When someone is attempting to make money off your intellectual property, you have every right to step in with lawyers and say Please Stop. But if money is not being made, simply look the other way. While it might be tempting to engage fans in what they create, you have to protect yourself against any liability. The good thing is, I’ve found most fans are pretty sympathetic to that, and those who aren’t get shushed by fandom fairly quickly.

Appreciate Your Fans

To put it in mercenary terms, fans are what keep the money coming in. They buy your current book so that you can sell the next book. But they also support what you’ve created, and are excited to see the next thing, which can be a great emotional buoy. And, in my opinion, that’s kind of awesome. I mean, I’ve received one fan letter in my life, who am I to talk, but it was pretty uplifting. I know that being part of a passionate fandom was a great experience, and having the creator’s support of that fandom made it all the better. Just like how creators enjoy positive responses to their work, fans enjoy that positive response coming right back at them. It’s a feedback loop of good feels.

If you can’t let yourself just love the fact that there are fans of your work who feel inspired reading what you’ve created, then just smile and move on, no need to call the lawyers. If you love your fans and want to share in that awesome energy, make sure you don’t open yourself up to liability. Regardless of what you do, be sure to thank your fans. Without them, you wouldn’t have much of anything.

Failing, To Begin With.

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Carrie Cuinn is a writer, editor, small press publisher, computer geek, and amiable raconteur. In her spare time she reads, makes things, takes other things apart, and sometimes gets a new tattoo. She has an impressive collection of published fiction and non fiction and has been a guest on SF Signal podcasts multiple times. Her website is www.carriecuinn.com and you can follow her on twitter @CarrieCuinn.

When I was asked to write for BookLife, my immediate reaction was to wonder what I could possibly have to offer. I am a published author, and editor, and own a small press publishing company, but I spent most of 2011 (and the beginning of 2012) dealing with personal issues that kept me from accomplishing many of my professional goals. I’d started off with the production and publication of a great anthology, Cthulhurotica, which was very well received, but what did I do after that?

To put it simply, I failed.

People fail all of the time. We make plans based on exciting new ideas that we actually don’t know how to accomplish. We have family emergencies, or relationship issues, or illnesses, that take up our time and energy. We have financial troubles. We face job losses and sudden moves and starting over in a new town. We fear turning down new opportunities, even when we’re overburdened, because we’re not sure that we’ll get those chances again. When these things happen, our goals and dreams become unfulfilled hopes, unmet deadlines, and disappointments.

In my case it was a combination of almost everything I mentioned above. While different obstacles rose up, and were met with revised plans and a determination not to fail, it was the emotional aspect of failing that threw me the most. I was afraid of letting down the people that were rooting for me, of losing my friends’ respect, and of disappointing the people who were beginning to consider themselves my fans. I should have stopped trying to manage everything all at once, cut back on my production schedule, a long time before I actually did. Eventually I didn’t have a choice; my life got so complicated it ground to a halt.

I felt as if I’d ruined everything. My one chance to be an author and to make books and to become part of the writing community was gone, because I’d screwed it up.

It turns out that doesn’t really happen.

I got my feet under me again and focused on my immediate needs first: I took care of my son and myself. I kept the power on, I kept us fed. Over time, I began to add in the things I felt I could handle: organizing my finances, sorting out school, and getting rid of a lot of things that I didn’t need (both household objects and sources of stress). I started writing again, and sold a few things. I got over my fear of my own contributors and began to let people know just how badly I had failed.

No one hated me. No one thought I’d missed out on my “one chance”. I got support, I got advice, I got offers of help.

“It doesn’t matter how long it takes you to put a book out,” I was told. “It matters how good the book is once it’s out.”

I started to look at my company from the perspective of making the business work, instead of focusing mainly on how exciting it was to work with great authors and artists, or how many ideas I had. I realized that for me, publishing will be about making the best book that I can, not about producing the largest number in the shortest amount of time. I slowed down our schedule, let people know I was sorry but there would be delays.

Now my 2012 books are coming together, and they’re beautiful. It may another year before I’m completely caught up with where I want to be, but I can see now that I’ll get there. In the end, I didn’t lose anything except my own expectations, and I learned a lot about the reasons we fail. I can’t say that I won’t make any mistakes from here on out, but I know now that I’ll learn from them, and that no amount of failure is permanent. There’s no reason to quit trying.

Five things to remember when it seems like everything is falling apart:

1. Know the rewards: each thing you do has a cost and a payout. This can be financial, it can be an amount of time, it can be personal or social. Part of getting your life back on track is knowing how much it’s going to cost you to get the life you want, and whether you can live with what you end up with. This means knowing, for example, that you’ll need to spend 30 hours of work to write a story which will net you $80, but that publication will get you into the SFWA, a goal you think is worthy of the time spent. It’s knowing when a certain deadline or event will mean that you can’t see your significant
other next weekend, or that you’ll need to order takeout for dinner on Friday because you won’t have time to cook (which means, of course, that you’ll be paying for your lack of time now with having to spend more time making money to cover the cost of that take-out).

2. Prioritize your life: there are always more tasks than hours in the day, but some of them are more important than others. Make a list of your deadlines, write to-do lists. If you know what has to get done vs. what you’d like to get done, you know where to start cutting when you only have time or resources to accomplish some of your goals.

3. Learn to say no: One of the biggest problems I had was that I would accept every bit of volunteering that was requested of me, whether it was critiquing stories, doing line edits, or writing guest blog posts. It meant that I wrote fiction for token or non-paying markets. It meant that I helped other companies with their publication projects. As much as I’d love to keep doing all of these things, it contributed to my inability to get everything done, which led to me failing. I still do help out as much as I can, but I have a much better idea of when I can say “yes” and when I have to say “sorry, I can’t right now.”

4. Communication keeps people informed: Tell your coworkers and your family and your friends what’s going on. No one likes it when you just drop out of their lives, and sometimes we take that personally – it can feel like we’re not important if you’re suddenly blowing off deadlines and become impossible to find. Letting people know why your life is upside down may feel like you’re complaining or you’re weak, but in reality, it lets them know that they were on your mind. It tells people that the way you’re treating them and their projects isn’t personal. It’s much easier to work out a new deadline when you’re keeping people informed than it is to try to rebuild those relationships later.

5. Take it one step at a time: when you have a dozen missed deadlines and a handful of future projects, the moment you start as if you can peek your head up again, you’re buried under work. It’s impossible to fix everything all at once, so don’t. Pick the most important thing, based on your analysis of cost and payout and priorities, and do that. It can be reestablishing your social network, it can be quietly finishing a short story or editing job before anyone knows you’re back in the saddle. Whatever it is, do that one thing. Then do the next thing. After that, you do one more thing. It will all get done, and by learning to work as much as you can but not more, you’re learning how to make sure that you don’t overload yourself again in the future.

After all, everyone fails, but the goal is try to only fail in the beginning.