"But isn't a proposal just supposed to be just a summary of my book--not the whole thing?"

A guide to what you can and can't summarize in a successful nonfiction book proposal.

Somewhere around the nadir of pre-submission editorial development, almost every first-time nonfiction author I’ve ever worked with — LOVE YOU — has cried the same protest unto the heavens:

“Wasn’t the goal for us to write a book proposal here? Not the entire book?”

By the time most authors ask this, they’ve spent months and months churning out something like 20,000 words of draft material. They’re now desperate to to feel some semblance of payoff, or at least forward progress. Can’t we just submit?!

Nevertheless, I persist in cockblocking. Draft after draft, I return their pages with notes along the lines of “say more here,” “flesh out this argument,” or “insert some specific examples”….or a straight-up “this isn’t ready yet.”

At this point, I suspect most of them long to decapitate me. Not READY yet? That’s what they thought the book deal was for: getting the book “ready” by, well, writing it.

Most nonfiction authors need to complete reporting, research, and interviews in order to finish their book. These require money and time. Most head into the proposal development process assuming that their eventual publisher and book contract will furnish said money and time. So WTF is their stupid agent playing at, telling them this unfinished-by-design document merely PROPOSING a book isn’t “finished” yet?

Here’s the short answer I give them:

Our goal is not to write the entire book. But it is to get the book’s entire value proposition onto the page in granular detail.

Thence do I launch into the following longwinded explanation of what I mean by that—and what still needs to happen before their proposal has a fighting chance on submission.