Let me start off by saying I am by no means a veteran, I’m
just sharing here the practical lessons I learned as a first-timer writing a
non-fiction book while the experience is fresh on my mind and before I get
distracted gearing up for this week’s episode of Scandal and Downton Abbey.
Practicing “his Lordship” in my best English accent and rehearsing my Olivia
Pope walk really does take a lot of work.
Here are a few thoughts that may help those of you with book
dreams in your heart. Complete a book proposal.
Whether you’ve decided to self-publish or submit your book
to a publisher, a book proposal will help you organize your ideas and see if
they are really book length. Many people come and talk to me after events with
book ideas burning inside of them. They decide this is the time. They are just
going to start writing. Without a book proposal, you may be likely to get
disillusioned with what seems like an awesome idea from the onset. You may find
yourself getting lost in what was your point in the first place.
A couple of my friends bugged, bothered, and encouraged me
until I finally gave in and completed my book proposal. Here’s why a book
proposal can help you:
1.
A book proposal is like a business plan for your
book. The first part will include a chapter outline, description of your
demographic, what qualifies you to write the book, and what makes your book
different from other books on the market on the same topic. The second part is
two sample chapters of your book.
2.
If you can’t finish the proposal, you will know
either your idea is more the length of an article than a book or that your idea
has been written about well and you have nothing fresh to add to the topic.
This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. You could either turn your book idea into
an article or blog, or you can move on from that idea and work on another one.
3.
Your book proposal will help you discover who
your market is. Before you publish a book, you want to have some sort of
readership in mind, other than your mom or best friend.
4.
A book proposal will provide you with a sketch
with which you can write your book. It’s much easier to write a book when you
have a sketch or outline of some sort. As writers we would love for you to
believe that we sit down at our MacBook (I mean all writers use Apple products,
right? Right?!) and extemporaneously come up with immediate and unplanned
genius for our readers (I get some cool points for using extemporaneously in a
sentence, right? Right?!). But this is a myth, a legend, don’t believe the
hype. Every great writer you know sat down at the MacBook, notebook, typewriter
with a plan. A book proposal will force you to have one.
5.
If you decide to go with a publisher, many
publishers are not looking for your finished non-fiction manuscript. They want
a proposal because they want a sample of your writing and they want to know how
you plan to access readers and succeed in the current market.
6.
For me, writing my book proposal was a microcosm
of the book writing process. It required discipline, it wrung me out of
creative energy and ideas, it brought out all of my worst procrastination
tendencies, but it was so worth finishing. How you complete your book proposal
is a fraction of the experience you will have actually writing a book.
Michael Hyatt posted an e-book on How to Write a Winning
Book Proposal. It really helped me with the first draft of my proposal.
So with all those tips said, when are you gonna finish that
proposal and stop procrastinating?! Writers don’t procrastinate, right? Right?!
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