Why It’s Better to Write a Short Book Proposal than a Long One

You’ve probably heard some version of the saying, “I would’ve written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have enough time.” I’ve seen it attributed to Winston Churchill and Mark Twain, though it appears to date back to the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal.

Regardless whether Pascal actually said it first or whether Churchill or Twain said it at all, the quote has rooted in the collective consciousness because it reflects something we intuitively know to be true: when it comes to quality, pithiness beats wordiness.

How does this apply to your book proposal? Well, if you haven’t taken the time to write something (relatively) short well, why should a publisher trust that you’re going to take the time to write something much longer well? Which brings me to the main takeaway of this blog post:

If you want to grab the attention of an editor or literary agent, take as much time as you need to write a succinct, polished proposal.

When I worked at Shambhala Publications, I always felt I would much rather get a tight thirty-page proposal—even if it left me with a few unanswered questions—than have to wade through an uneven and disorganized proposal of sixty, seventy, or more pages. In truth, I didn’t usually wade all the way to the end of a proposal such as that; I’d usually wade just long enough to find a reason to say “no” to the project.

Let’s get into the deets…

What is a book proposal?

First-time authors seeking a traditional publisher nearly always need to prepare a formal proposal for the book they want to publish, and that usually holds true for subsequent books as well. Most publishers have a proposal template for that purpose—here, for instance, are the Shambhala Publications submission guidelines, which include a link to a recommended template. Book proposal templates vary between publishers and genres, but they usually include sections such as these:

• Working title: If you’ve got a great hook of a title, that’ll help your proposal a lot. (That said, publishers are heavily involved in book titling, so knowing your title in advance isn’t a necessity. And, be prepared, your title will probably change even if you love what you’ve got.)

• Keynote or sales handle: A one-sentence summary of your book, such as would appear near the top of its Amazon page.

• Brief description: A one- or two-paragraph description, like an early version of the book’s cover copy or online description.

• Brief author bio: Two or three sentences, like what will eventually appear on the book’s cover.

• Details of author platform: I’m not going to delve into author platform here, but this piece is critical. If you’re not familiar with the concept, take a look at this excellent article on it.

• Comparative titles: Four to six books that you see as comps. Include title, author, publisher, publication date, price, and a link to each book’s Amazon page. Annotate each comp with one or two paragraphs saying what’ll be similar or different about your book. The purpose of this section is to show you’re aware of the category of books into which you’re writing, both in terms of content expertise and where your book fits in the market. It’s ok to have one or two older books, but most of them should be books that have been published in the last five years, and ideally a few from the last two years.

• Chapter outline and sample material: See below where I expand on these sections.

In the end, it’s less important that you follow any given proposal template than that you understand the purpose the proposal is serving. If an agent or editor senses that you grasp the purpose of the proposal, they’re not going to sweat that it’s missing this or that detail. So, without further ado:

The purpose of a book proposal is to present your book idea in a condensed version so that agents and editors can efficiently assess its marketability, content, and the quality of your writing.

If you’re wincing that marketability comes before content and writing quality in the preceding list, read on…

What if I prefer to write the manuscript before the proposal?

No one’s going to stop you from the writing your book before you try to shop it. But unless you feel entirely comfortable with the possibility of self-publishing, writing a complete draft manuscript first is a risk. The reason is that, to any traditional publisher, a book is not just a set of ideas and stories put into writing. Of course, it is that—and loving sets of ideas and stories put into writing, and wanting to share them with others, is why most publishing professionals go into the business.

But to a publishing house, every book is also an investment. It’s an investment of money for the author advance and for the cost of printing, distributing, and advertising the book. Likewise, it’s an investment of time (which is also money, in the form of salaries) on the part of numerous staff members—executives, editors, production and design staff, marketing and publicity folks, accountants, administrators. Even for a book with a modest advance and a no-frills editorial and production process, this amounts to tens of thousands of dollars.

Like any reasonable investor, the publisher wants to know what they’re investing in, and publishers usually feel more comfortable if they have a hand in guiding the creation of the book, or at least have a very clear sense of its vision, from an early stage.

I’ve seen cases where an author sends in a nice proposal along with a completed draft manuscript, but that’s more typical from experienced authors who know their readership and are already familiar with the publishing industry. If you’re a first-time author or an author who hasn’t published a book in many years, it’s a significant risk to assume that you can write the manuscript first and find an agent or publisher for it later. 

I’m going to spend months or years of my life writing this book, so why does the publisher need such a succinct version of what I’m trying to do? Isn’t one of the virtues of books their long format?

That’s true, and in an ideal world agents and acquisitions editors would have limitless time to spend considering every proposal they’re interested in and talking at length with authors about their ideas. But the reality for nearly all professional editors and agents is that that’s simply not the case. They receive way too many proposals to have that kind of time. I mean, way too many…

This tweet is from a book reviewer rather than a publisher, and most publishers insist on electronic submissions rather than paper ones. But take the visual impact of the picture, transpose it into an email inbox, and you get the gist.

This brings me to a fundamental asymmetry between how an author and their prospective editor views their book. For most authors, the book they’re working on is the one book they’re working on, at least for now. This doesn’t mean they’re not busy—many of the authors I work with are tremendously busy in their careers and personal lives. But their book is their one book.

For agents and editors, there’s never just one book. Each book sits horizontally with all the other books they’re currently considering acquiring or are actively editing, along with those that are in the production process or are near to or just after publication and still need their attention.

For editors, each book also sits vertically in the list of the publishing house they work for—that is, it needs to make sense in general for the publisher’s list and in particular for its planned year and season.

And lastly, each book sits precariously in the astounding hyperobject that is contemporary capitalism. Because agents’ and editors’ livelihoods depend on their signing or acquiring books that help pay their companies’ bills, they of necessity see every book against the tumultuous backdrop of the book market.

This asymmetry between author and agent or editor isn’t a problem—it’s part of the working relationship, and each side needs to describe what they’re seeing and advocate for their opinions from the place where they stand. It does mean, however, that your proposal is entering a competitive field that you can only partly see, and so it behooves you to make that sucker do as much work as it can as succinctly as it can.

You can always hope your prospective agent or editor will see the diamond in the rough and be willing take a chance on it. That happens, for sure—but it happens much, much less than a scenario such as this: a person in one of those roles thinks, “There could be a diamond in the rough there, but more likely it’s just another stone, and I don’t have time to find out.”

So, cut and polish that diamond!

How long should my chapter outline and sample material be?

Chapter outline

A preliminary chapter outline is an important and useful tool for an agent or editor to assess your book. Since you’ll need to spend time doing one anyway, it’s best to take it seriously. That means being willing to think through questions of sequence and flow in your writing. Here, for example, are some questions you might ask yourself:

• Do you hope to have a foreword from a prominent author or person in your field? If so, could you ask them now if they’d be willing to do so? 

• Would it be helpful for your book to have parts or only chapters? If parts, what would they be and how would they help structure your content?

• What length of chapters would fit your writing style and the topic of the book? Do you plan to use subheadings within chapters?

• Do you plan to have practice sections of any kind for your book (guided meditations, exercises, journaling prompts, etc.)? If so, will they be interspersed within chapters or set more apart, like at the end of each chapter or as appendices?

Lastly, after you’ve written a first draft of the outline, look at it a million times and ask yourself these questions each time:

• Is this clear and easy to read?

• Would my target readers truly understand what I want to do based on what I’ve written here?

Sample material

There’s no set number of chapters for sample material because chapter length varies so much from book to book. An author whose chapters will be short might need to submit several, whereas one whose chapters are going to be five thousand words or more each might only submit one.

Sample material, in one sense, is the exception to the need for brevity in a proposal. This writing is the only material in your proposal that’s intended to create the reading experience of the book itself, and so it should be the length that organically makes sense.

That open invitation to length, however, emphatically does not mean that you should give your internal editor leave. To the contrary. If you’re telling an agent or publisher that you’re going to write something worth their time and money to represent or publish, it’s critically important that you provide a sample that grabs their attention.

Of course, it’s hard to know exactly which topics and hence chapters will make the final cut for a book. But it doesn’t matter if that chapter ends up in the final book. What matters is that you turn over a representative piece of writing that’s truly the best you can do. Good writing is all about revision, and revision is all about persistence. If you’re not willing to put in dozens of hours on that sample material and dozens more on the rest of the proposal, you might need to ask yourself…

What if I only have time to write a long proposal rather than a short one?

Yes, that is where the rubber meets the road. But this blog post encouraging brevity has gone on long enough, so you’ll have to take a look at my next post, “Is now a good time for you to write your book?”

Is Now a Good Time to Write Your Book?

You’ve got a great idea for a nonfiction book. Maybe it’s a breakthrough insight that’s helping your students or clients make big leaps in their spiritual practice or therapy. Or it’s a lecture or workshop topic that draws in twice as many attendees as your other topics, a research synthesis that sheds a whole new light on your field, or a heart-rending memoir that you can just picture in Oprah’s Book Club.

The energy is there, and when you think about the components of the proposal, the ideas just start flowing out. But . . . you’ve got a career, family and friends, obligations, and it’s not exactly clear how writing a book would come together, time-wise.

In this blog post, I offer four areas to consider in relation to the question, “Is now a good time for you to write your book?” If you think through your career trajectory, your money situation, your time situation, and whether it’s likely to ever be easier than now, it should become much clearer whether now is the right time for you to try to make your idea into a book—or shelve it for the time being.

Your career trajectory

Unless you are famous or have an outstanding author platform—and, good news for the non-famous, these two have less overlap than you might think—the benefit of publishing a book is more about long term career dividends than short term financial benefit.

From a career development standpoint, it’s best to think about a book as a potent device to magnetize attention to what you’re already doing. If your book gets some decent publicity and has good word of mouth, it will draw people to your website, events, and the services you offer. So, if the way you make money in your career is decently well established, publishing a book can result in a quantum leap—more traffic, more attendees, more clients, and new opportunities.

On the other hand, if the way you make money from your career is still in a nascent or experimental phase, it might be too soon for you to publish a book. Let’s imagine a couple of examples to make this clearer.

Michelle is a successful organizational coach who, after years of building her brand, is meeting all of her income goals. Her social media presence is also strong, with thousands of followers and more all the time. Michelle’s coaching has focused primarily on executive time management, and that’s what most of her clients still book her for. But she’s really excited to pivot to DEI work with whole organizations, and that’s what her book idea is about.

In Michelle’s case, she’s more likely to receive an offer for a book on the area where she has demonstrated strength—executive coaching—than in the area that’s newer. She might want to spend six months or longer developing momentum toward her new direction before going for the book deal. Publishing a book could give her pivot the momentum it needs to succeed, so it’s wise to take it at a slow enough pace that she can create the biggest version of that book.

Darren is a therapist who’s finding his feet in private practice. He has a passion for the modality he uses in one-on-one sessions, and he’s been having impressive breakthroughs with clients based on an innovation he’s made. The content for the book, centered on that innovation, seems like it’s there, but most of Darren’s professional time is going to attracting new clients to sustain his practice. Also, he makes more money administering groups for the clinic where he did his internship than in the private sessions.

In Darren’s case, it might make more sense for him to spend another year or more stabilizing his private practice before committing himself to the book publishing process. It’d be a shame for him to publish a great book on his therapeutic intervention only to find that he has no time to promote it because he’s so financially strapped.

In sum, an effective nonfiction book will be like a turbo boost to push your career in the direction it’s already pointed, so it’s worth taking the time to get your career pointed more-or-less in the direction you want to go before publishing. 

Your money situation

Getting a publication offer for a book project is well worth celebrating. It means you’re through the door to traditional publishing, and you can start to sense that your idea is going to materialize as a book in readers’ hands. And, how nice that the first chunk of your author advance will be on its way as soon as the contract is signed! But . . . how much money are we talking about here?

Again, unless someone is famous or has a really top-notch author platform—and thus their agent can trigger a bidding war between several publishers—author advances tend to be pretty modest. It’s not possible to determine a precise average because there are so many variables and because not all book deals are public info, but $5,000 to $20,000 is a commonly stated range, and many books fall below the $5,000 line. (When I published a chapter in a book, I was offered either $100 or a few free copies.)

The modesty of such a range becomes especially clear when you spread the lump sum across the length of time you’ll need to be working on your book. Advances are typically split into thirds (sometimes halves, sometimes other fractions). When I worked at Shambhala Publications, they were most often given as one-third on contract signature, one-third on manuscript acceptance (which means after you’ve gone through the developmental editing process and your editor has approved the complete draft manuscript), and one-third on publication.

Let’s take a number in the middle of the range given above—$12,500. Three advance payments of over $4,000 each is nothing to scoff at, but when you’re putting in dozens of hours a month over the course of a year or two, it’s also nothing to retire on. I’ve seen plenty of cases where, if we’d done the math, the author’s advance would have boiled down to $8.50 an hour or something like that.

Likewise, make sure you understand that the advance is called an advance because the publisher is advancing you money against your future royalties. Though authors almost never have to pay back their advances if their books don’t sell (never at all that I’ve personally seen), they also don’t see any additional money until their advance “earns out,” in the industry parlance. So, if your book takes, say, ten years to earn out that $12,500 advance, you won’t see a royalty check till year eleven. And, quite a few books never earn out, meaning the advance is all the money you’ll ever see from it—except in terms of how it boosts your career.

Publishing a nonfiction book certainly can provide financial support, but it typically does so in an indirect way. Unless your book happens to be a breakout hit, or you develop such a robust author platform that publishers start competing for your next book, the book will be a vehicle for making money, not a significant direct money maker.

So, if you’re not on basically sound financial footing from your other sources of income, it might make more sense to focus on those for now, then turn to your book idea when your financial life is a bit more stable.

Your time situation

Anyone who’s educated knows how to write . . . sort of. I mean, we can all put words on a page and make ourselves more or less understood. So anyone can write a book, right?

Let’s imagine that, instead of wanting to write a book, you wanted to make a beautiful end table, bake a perfectly caramelized pear galette, or sing a gorgeous solo in a choir. You’ve made things and baked things and sung songs—so, just dive in, right?!? Of course not. Unless you happen to have a great deal of experience with woodworking, baking, or choral singing, you would start these projects from a clear understanding that you’ll need to learn a lot and make a lot of mistakes along the way.

By contrast, the ubiquity of the written word tends to obscure just how difficult it is to write well, much less to write well for the length of an entire book. If you don’t believe me, have a listen to National Book Award-winner Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Since, if you’re pursuing traditional publishing, you’ll need to draft a polished, succinct proposal including a sample chapter or two, it’s great to take the proposal writing process as a test case. If you can find a way to carve out enough time in your schedule over the course of a number of months to write a great proposal, you’ll already have established a writing habit that could carry you through writing the book itself.

Different writers find different ways of working that fit for them. For some folks, it’s critical to carve out time every day, or four days a week, or twice a week all day. For others, it works to write in more of a retreat style—taking out a week, a few weeks, or a few months at a time—and not trying to cram writing time into their normal routine. Some benefit from having a writing group, accountability partner, or coach, while others thrive on solo time.

If you’re new to writing, try out a few ways and see what feels better to you. In the end, the proof is on the page. If you find yourself taking shortcuts on the proposal and sample material, that’s a red flag that you might be trying to cram your book writing process into a schedule that doesn’t accommodate it. The result will likely either be that you’ll have to abandon the project later or that the final product will not be what you’d hoped. 

Will it ever be easier than now?

If any or all of the above three topics have been a downer for you, this one will be cheerier. I’ll put it bluntly:

-       your career trajectory might never be totally clear

-       you’ll probably always have money concerns

-       you’ll never have enough time

So, why not write your book now?

For many aspiring first-time authors, to publish a book would be the fulfillment of a dream. And for those who have real passion for their topic, it can feel like a necessity to get that book out there to do its work in the world.

In the face of dreams and passion, who am I—who is anyone—to say that now isn’t the right time for you to start your book? It might never be easier than now. Hell, your life might change in totally unexpected ways that make it tougher to write than it is now. It’s good not to postpone one’s dreams for too long.

If your inner sense is that now is the time, maybe it is. If so, I wish you all the best, and I’d be happy to talk to you about your next steps.