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?”