That’s my new tagline for Act 3. (Waaay back in Act 1, I would have snorted tea up my nose if someone had suggested that I needed a tagline. What can I say? Times change.) I love writing books, but I also love helping other writers shape their book ideas and bring them…
Tag: Book Proposals
Book proposal basics
Like most agents (like most anyone), I spend my days juggling a lot of competing priorities. I always have more opportunities — in terms of clients I could take on, editors I could schmooze with, colleagues I could connect with, projects I could work on — than I have actual time and energy. So here’s…
Meditation on book proposals
If you want to write a non-fiction book, you need a book proposal to convince agents to represent your book and to convince editors to publish it. As a writer, I’ve found that the process of writing the proposal helps me wrestle with the prospect of spending the next year with this project. Do I love…
How to: Your book and its competition
One of the most difficult parts of writing a non-fiction book proposal is putting together the competitive analysis (this goes by various names but is basically the section where you compare your book to others like it). People often make several common mistakes. 1. They write the competitive analysis after they’ve written the rest of the proposal —…