6. Prospective endorsements from colleagues: This is terribly important, as it establishes that your agent is not the person besides yourself who supports this project. You should ask professional colleagues, especially colleagues who are published authors and whose names will be known to book editors, for short prospective endorsements to include in the proposal. These endorsements need be only a few sentences long. This may sound like a strange thing to do, as you have not yet written your book, but most published authors are used to being asked by friends and colleagues for prospective endorsements. And most are happy to do it. The number of endorsement you should collect has a great deal to do with the stature of the people giving them. Three endorsements from major figures will be more helpful to you than will be ten endorsements from people whom most editors will not recognize as particularly impressive.

7. At least two highly-polished sample chapters of the book you will deliver: These sample chapters are the main evidence that you will be able to deliver a publishable manuscript. It must be the best writing you are capable of creating, and you should have read and re-read these sample chapters – as you have read and re-read the rest of the book proposal – for grammatical and spelling errors. One of these sample chapters will be, in most cases, the first chapter of the book you propose to write.

8. Author information and platform: Many book proposals include the author’s current resume or professional curriculum vitae. This is a fine and sometimes necessary thing, but you should also write a short narrative passage of no more than two pages that clearly establishes your expertise in the subject area of the book you propose to write. It should also discuss what, in the publishing world, is known as your “platform.” The platform is the breadth and degree of existing public acknowledgement of your expertise on these matters, as evidenced by, for example, the number of people who enroll in your seminars, purchase your self-published materials, watch your regular television show, and/or read your regular column in a major newspaper or magazine. An author’s platform is especially important, particularly for prescriptive nonfiction books like cookbooks, or books on subjects like nutrition, do-in-yourself repairs, hobbies, self-help, relationships or parenting. For these kinds of books, the author’s platform is the starting point for a publisher’s book launch. It is what the author brings to the table around which the publisher’s publicity and sales forces will coordinate their efforts to draw attention to the book. This description of your platform should include an account of your personal and professional contacts in the relevant segments of the media, a clear description of your track record making public appearances, and a description of the public record of your unimpeachable, long-term commitment to the ideas motivating the book you propose to write. NOTE: If your description of your platform strikes even you as slight, this is probably a sign that you have put the cart before the horse. In this case you should spend more time and resources building your platform before circulating your book proposal for the simple reason that, even if an editor falls in love with your book and convinces her colleagues to publish it, the most likely scenario for your book would be a small advance, and a quiet launch with very modest resources for promotion and publicity, resulting in part in unimpressive sales. Such mediocre or poor sales will be an albatross around your neck the next time you want to circulate a book proposal for another book. They will deflate the perceived value of your future projects, and could trap you as a so-called mid-list author when what you may want to be is a front-list bestseller. Unfair? Maybe. But today’s market-driven nonfiction publishing is driven by sales and inventory numbers available to almost everyone in the book business. These numbers are used to predict how an author’s next book will sell. The main predictor is the gross sales figure of that author’s previous book or books. Now, we all know that we can find very obvious exceptions to this scenario – there are a couple of first self-help books by unknown authors published every year that spend many months on the bestseller lists and became international blockbusters, and every year brings another celebrity autobiography that rockets up the charts. But these are very much the rare exceptions that prove the rule. They are not examples of a strategy available to most authors. In the first case it is a matter of rare good fortune; in the second case, of pure celebrity-driven sales. No agent or editor can afford to depend on good fortune in building a career, and neither should you. Proceeding strategically is still the best way for non-celebrities to succeed in publishing, and – unless you are already a celebrity – you should be strategic about building your platform before presenting a book proposal.

9. Formatting the Book Proposal: When it comes to the presentation of your book proposal, your goal should be to make this document the most meticulously written and closely proofread thing you have ever created. Proofread this document. Then proofread it again. It is almost always a good idea to have someone else with good reading and writing skills copy-edit your writing, as that person’s “fresh eyes” will not read over small mistakes that your eyes may see as already-corrected. All the pages of the book proposal should be numbered sequentially (including the sample chapters), and the entire document should be double-spaced, with standard margins, and following all the conventional rules of manuscript formatting. Even a minor mistake of formatting, punctuation, grammar and usage can provide an agent or editor with the justification he seeks for rejecting your project and moving on to the next proposal in his forever self-replenishing “to-read” pile. (Always remember that there is never enough time in an agent’s or editor’s life to catch up on his reading, so the onus is always on you to keep the reader’s interest and attention.) The length of the main body of a completed book proposal usually runs from 10 to 40 pages, not including the length of the sample chapters.

10. Some method to return your materials, if we are not able to take on your project and you would like the materials returned: A self-addressed return mailer, of adequate size and with enough postage already affixed to return your manuscript, should be enclosed with the proposal. Because of the volume of correspondence we receive, we cannot return materials submitted without these provisions. If you do not wish for your materials to be returned, please say in your cover letter that your materials should be discarded.