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Tips for good book proposals?

A reader writes in,

Do any readers of the blog have words of wisdom for putting together a great book proposal? There are scattered tips on Twitter both from academics who have successfully gotten contracts and from people who work for publishers, but I'd like to gather insights in one thread. I've heard writing a book proposal is akin to writing a book review for your own book (that you may not have finished yet).

Additional tips are welcome for the specific experience of writing translation proposals (I'm working on translating lesser-known 20th cen. German philosophy), but I don't want to limit the feedback sourced here to that. Let's hear advice for any kinds of book proposals.

Good question. Although I've written three successful book proposals, I'm not sure that I have any special tips except for this: good book proposals should probably be pitched so that they make a compelling case for the project not just to specialists, but also to editors who aren't specialists themselves. It is, after all, an acquisitions editor who in the first instance will decide whether to move forward with a proposal (e.g., request a draft manuscript or chapters to send to reviewers), and in turn, an entire editorial committee at a press who will decide whether to offer a contract.

So, I guess my one big tip would be this: try to write the proposal in a "down to earth" way that is likely to make the project make sense and be of interest to specialists and non-specialists alike. Another more basic tip would be: look on the websites of various presses how they want book proposals to be structured. Some of them even have templates they'd like you to download and follow, so if you put together and send in a proposal without following their procedure, that might be a bad initial look!

Anyway, these are just a few of my thoughts. What are yours? It would be great to hear from book authors, as well as from editors and reviewers!

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3 responses to “Tips for good book proposals?”

  1. author

    I have published a textbook, two edited collections, and three monographs (all but the first with CUP). I think a proposal has to be really pointed, and address the concerns laid out by the Press in their instructions for book proposals. It should be structured so that it can be read quickly. And there is an element of selling involved that is not part of most writing philosophers do. You need to provide a rationale for why a lot of people should devote a lot of time into get this into print. So you need to say something meaningful and plausible about the market – what is already out there, and what your book will add. Do not oversell it though – good commissioning editors have been around for a while. They know bullshit when they read it.

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  2. Tyler Loveless

    As someone who helps authors write and edit book proposals for a living, I tend to agree with Marcus’s advice. The proposal is, first and foremost, a sales document; it needs to demonstrate to the editor that the book has an audience and that you (the author) know how to reach that audience. This is especially true for a place like Bloomsbury and even presses like MIT and Duke that are seeing success in the trade market. But this is my recommendation regardless of whether the press’s goals are financial or scholarly because, after all, a book can only impact your field if people in your field read it, and academic presses know this.

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  3. Bill Vanderburgh

    A resource that might be helpful:
    Laura Portwood-Stacer, The Book Proposal Book: A Guide for Scholarly Authors, Princeton UP, 2021. She also runs online workshops, has a website, etc.
    For a translation project, especially for work that is by definition little-known, I think it may be difficult to convince a press that there is a large enough audience. Make sure you can make the case that there is.

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